Chapter 40 #2
My jaw aches from the pressure I’m putting on it. I want to destroy something. I want to go find Lucy immediately and never let her leave my sight again.
Kian’s voice softens into something almost tender. “She only started really talking again after her friends coaxed her to read aloud to them. It was hard work, but she did it. It was her therapy.”
My heart clenches at that. What was once her therapy is now something she still just loves to do.
Oh, my sweet Lucy.
“She’s had to save herself her whole life,” I say quietly, more to myself than to him.
“Yeah,” Kian answers. “You can see why we’re so protective.”
“I see how you failed, if I’m honest.” The words come out harder than I intend, but I don’t take them back, because I’m angry at myself too.
“She wanted us to find her, Kian. All this time. Those playing cards she left behind? They weren’t just to tell us she was safe.
They were clues. She was begging someone to come get her.
” My voice roughens. “She didn’t want to have to save herself again. ”
The heaviness on the other end of the line is almost physical. “You failed too then, didn’t you? Or else my daughter wouldn’t have been in that room of mirrors.”
“Yeah, I did,” I answer, I think catching him off guard. “That’s why I told you what I know. I killed one threat, but I don’t know the motives behind the other.”
“If Castle sent me that video…” Kian says slowly, the rage in his voice cooling into something harder, more calculated and much more frightening, “Men like him don’t share information—especially not information that could fuck them over too—unless the sharing itself is part of the game.
” He seems to muse over that before finally elaborating, “He wants me angry at you. He wants me to send someone there. He’s either drawing me in or driving us apart, and either way, he’s already placed his bet on what I’ll do next. ”
He groans. “Which means the son of a bitch is probably right.”
“See, that’s the thing, McKennon,” I say. “You just said it yourself—he’s betting on what you’ll do. The second you send somebody down here to put a bullet in me, Castle wins.” I let the words sit. “And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather die than let that smug bastard collect.”
Kian doesn’t respond to that directly. Instead I continue, “He told me he worked for the Wildes. Back then, when he took her. They were trying to draw the Troisgarde out, and you ‘refused to play ball.’” I huff. “Now I know what that meant.”
There’s a long pause. “He suffered?”
“Yup. Still not enough. The body’s at my place. I’ll send you a picture when I get back.”
“When you get back? Where the fuck are you?”
I hesitate.
“Are you with my daughter?” His voice sharpens. “Let me speak to her.”
“You can’t.”
“Listen here, you little shite, you failed my daughter. Tell me where she is right now—”
“I’m not with her,” I growl. And even though I’m not supposed to look—she told me not to watch—I pull up the surveillance app and start cycling through the camera feeds. The satellite angles Dash set up before he went dark, the dock cameras I installed, the street views. “She’s on a walk.”
“I hate when you’re this fecking cryptic.”
“A bet’s a bet, McKennon. I can be as cryptic as I want.” The words taste wrong. After everything Lucy and I have shared, calling any of this a bet feels cheap and small.
“You already failed her once, Hatton. Don’t forget the rest of that bet.”
“Trust me,” I mutter, pressing a hand against the ache in my chest. “I can’t.”
My fingers keep swiping through feeds while Kian mutters something to Merek on the other end. Nothing on the dock cameras. Nothing at the bakery. The Rabbit Hole is dark and empty, the stage swept clean, the private hallway still.
“I know, Merek. I don’t know what I’ll tell Lacey,” Kian says, his voice muffled like he’s turned away from the phone.
My ears perk. “Mrs. McKennon doesn’t know?”
A loaded pause.
“Oh, dude.” I almost laugh, but there’s nothing funny about it. “You are going to be so far in the doghouse.”
“You better be glad she doesn’t know. She’s a sadistic one, my Lacey.”
“You’re the one lying to her. Not me.”
“You little—”
But I’ve stopped listening, because the feeds aren’t showing me what I need to see.
My fingers slide faster across the screen, searching for the glimmer of her hair, the loose white fall of her nightgown, the way she carries herself when she thinks she’s invisible.
I back up the feeds minute by minute, and my heartbeat ratchets up with every empty frame.
Sick uncertainty crawls into my stomach like ice water.
Maybe she’s already gone. Maybe I’m already too late.
I cycle back to the beach cameras. The peninsula between Harry’s bungalow and the mouth of the marsh, the stretch of sand she’d have to cross if she went toward the water instead of the road.
And then I see her.
“Fury,” Kian growls. “Are you listening to me?”
“No,” I whisper at the image on the screen.
Because I’ve found Lucy, and the image on the screen empties my lungs.
She’s sitting at the water’s edge, arms wrapped around herself, knees drawn to her chest, her nightgown whipping around her legs in the wind.
She looks so small against the dark churn of the ocean behind her, so breakable, and even through the cold pixel grain of the feed I can see the way her shoulders shake with something she won’t let out.
“I have to go, McKennon.” My voice sounds far away even to myself.
“Don’t you dare hang up on me ag—”
“Seriously, Kian. I’ll call you later. Something came up.”
I end the call, and the houseboat goes quiet, but it feels less like silence and more like pressure against my chest.
I set the phone on the counter and press both hands over my eyes, grinding the heels into my sockets until I see sparks.
Everything Kian just told me still plays through my mind like a horror movie.
A scared seven-year-old barefoot in her nightgown after having to walk home from her nightmare all alone.
And layered over it is visions of what Lucy confessed to me last night, memories of what’s happened on Wander Isle that I failed to act on fast enough, and finally the image right in front of me on my screen right now.
Lucy barefoot. In her nightgown. On her own. Heartbroken.
My chest feels hollowed out, as if someone reached in and carved out whatever was keeping me together.
Chessy yowls from somewhere near my feet.
I drop my hands and find him winding between my ankles, pressing his considerable weight against my calf, purring loud enough to vibrate the floorboards.
My nose twitches at a phantom itch, but I crouch and use my knuckles to massage across his scarred ear, letting the rough warmth of him ground me. Three breaths. Four. Five.
He yowls again, blinks at me, then turns to face the door Lucy walked through. Like he’s waiting too.
“Yeah, buddy,” I mutter. “I know. I fucked up.”
I pick the phone back up and look at her again.
She sits there for a long time. Long enough that I start to wonder if sitting is all she’s going to do. Long enough for me to sink onto the edge of the bed again, clutching the phone in both hands.
“Fuck, baby. I’m so sorry.”
Then she stands.
Something’s in her hands, two pale shapes against the dark sand as she walks. She stops at the edge of a slow outgoing wave, and stares at them for a moment. She looks out at the water.
An uneasy feeling thrums in my veins.
Then she turns and presses them into the wet sand. I squint at the screen until I can make out what they are, and my heart stops.
The Queen of Hearts. And the Joker.
Her last card, and mine. Sinking into the sand for the tide to take.
“No.” The word starts slow and quiet, then quickly rushes out of me. “No, no, no, no.”
Lucy only leaves a card behind when she’s done with a place. If she has no cards left, she either doesn’t want anyone to find her again, or… or she doesn’t expect anyone to. She’s leaving, and as her Joker, she’s leaving me behind too.
But then… then she turns to face the ocean and… walks.
“Lucy, no.”
The water laps at her feet, then her ankles. The water’s got to be bracingly cold, but it’s like she doesn’t feel a thing. She’s numb to it.
Or she’s trying to be.
My throat goes dry as she floats with an outgoing wave, never slowing. Not even when her nightgown catches the current, dragging behind her. Instead, she fights the wet fabric’s insistence that she return to the shore and wades deeper.
“Stop it, baby. No.”
I’m off the bed before the next wave hits her. My throat closes as the water climbs her shins, her knees, her thighs. I see the moment she stumbles, the pale flash of her hands breaking the surface. I see her keep going anyway.
And I’m fucking moving.
I tear through the houseboat door, jump off it’s deck and onto the dock at a dead sprint, vault the security gate, and jump from the dock to the shore as soon as I can, landing hard on the cobblestones.
When I hit the beach, the air bites into my bare chest, and the sand shifts beneath my feet.
I’m cursing myself the entire way, cursing everything I’ve done to her, every way I failed to keep her safe, every lie I told, every second I told myself I should stay away from her, that my obsession was merely for her protection.
That she was better off without me. That she’d be better off alone.
How fucking wrong I was when I thought she was happy.
But she isn’t alone. Not this time.
She’s had to save herself her whole life, but not anymore. Not ever again. Not while I’m still breathing.
“I’m coming, baby,” I vow between strides, the words swallowed by the wind and the crash of waves.
Then, in the distance, I finally see a pale, white ghost of a woman sink beneath the surf. My hope sinks with her.
“Lucy!”