Chapter Seven #3
The Maddoxes complied. No one argued, no one raised a voice.
They answered questions and acknowledged instructions.
On paper, it looked like cooperation. But Thomas and I knew it was containment, a short play to achieve their objective: to see Olive.
No one could be sure what would happen after that.
I watched Falyn as she listened to the briefing.
A sergeant explained the basics: mess hall schedule, Orientation timeline, restricted areas, comms limitations.
Her eyes followed his mouth, but almost nothing registered in her features.
She nodded at the right moments, said yes when prompted, stepped where they guided her.
Her focus lived elsewhere, on the other side of whatever line had been drawn the night Olive disappeared from their lives.
“They’re holding it together,” Thomas said quietly, a tinge of hope just beneath his words.
“For now,” I replied.
Guilt slid in under my ribs like a slow, familiar blade. I kept my shoulders relaxed, my stance open. Inside, my brain did what it always did under pressure: it replayed past choices, stepping through decisions in order, checking them against the outcome.
We let everyone who loved Olive believe she had died.
We let them bury a niece, a daughter, a cousin, because every other path led to circumstances that would have breached security and exposed her to the people hunting her.
By every measure, it was the only viable route.
Extracting Falyn, Taylor, Hollis, and Hadley from Colorado, moving them into a safe house, asking them to put everything on hold, trusting not one of them would crack under the weight of secrecy was not.
Hoping no child would repeat something in the wrong hallway, at the wrong birthday party, to the wrong set of ears.
The logistics alone were a minefield, extended family demanding visits, friends searching social media, someone noticing a bank account going quiet or a school record freezing.
The funding was its own problem, navigating the appropriations and adjustments without naming the cause, as if money could so easily stretch around five ghosts.
It wasn’t that the family would have agreed or even listened—not that we had time to convince them.
Logic was on our side. I told myself that then just as I did now.
That there was no time to invent a better plan, that we made the only choice that kept her alive.
I hoped that if I said it enough, it would sound less like justification and more like the truth.
Logic, though, did not stand in front of you with her eyes swollen and her voice shredded from screaming into a pillow.
Taylor’s gaze swept the guard towers, moved to the Longhouse, and finally settled on Thomas and me.
Even from a distance, I could see recognition in his eyes.
For a heartbeat, he moved as if he might lift a hand to acknowledge us in some small, familiar way.
Then, the memory caught up. Whatever gesture had almost existed died before it reached his shoulder.
He looked at us the way he glowered at the militia—distance, distrust, a line already drawn.
We weren’t allies anymore. We were the reason he was here.
“They see us,” I said.
“I would be concerned if they didn’t,” Thomas replied. “Ready?”
“No. You?”
“I thought I was. But now that I see them? The best I can do is to say I’m prepared.”
That was as close as we came to optimism. It vanished almost instantly, and my throat cinched tight. In seconds, the guards would escort them to the Longhouse, and the most dangerous conversation in Maddox history would be underway.
The sergeant finished the briefing and gestured toward us. One by one, the Maddoxes turned, and Taylor was no longer the only one staring. The brothers’ families clustered tightly around them, a line of familiar faces now set against a backdrop of unfamiliar stone and sand.
I catalogued what I saw, because that was what I knew how to do—and the only control I had.
Trenton’s eyes locked on Thomas first, then on me.
The recognition and then anger came, immediate and sharp.
Travis’s followed, his gaze narrower, seeming to measure the distance between us.
His jaw muscle twitched once, but his expression was otherwise unreadable.
Falyn saw me last.
Her stare hit with the force of contact, a collision I felt in my ribs.
The exhaustion that had hollowed her out made space for something darker to rise.
Rage, betrayal, grief, all without a name.
Falyn’s hand dug into Taylor’s shoulder, not for comfort, but to keep herself contained—feral mother bear energy coiled, deciding if restraint was still the right choice.
“This is the part,” I murmured, “where we try to convince them that being here with Olive matters more than gutting us before being forced out by gunpoint.”
Thomas didn’t blink. “My brothers have never been great at staying out of their own way.”
I drew in a breath that tasted of sand and engine exhaust, straightening as the briefing dissolved and the group began to move. “Here they come.”