Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
brAN
The message sits in the middle of her screen like a blinking neon sign.
you really are still watching
Out of everything in this apartment—the cheap locks, the hummingbird ornament, the crime-scene files spread around like confetti—that one line is what puts a knot in my gut.
Not because of the words, but because of what they do to her.
Tally goes very, very still. For someone who usually vibrates like a live wire, the stillness is worse.
Her shoulders lock. Her fingers hover over the keys, not touching. From where I’m standing, I can see the tiny pulse in her throat jumping like it’s trying to escape.
“Step back,” I tell her.
“It’s just a text,” she whispers back. “Words on a screen.”
“He used text messages last time,” Cotton reminds her.
“I can block it,” I say. “Right now. Kill the connection, change your handles, walk you away from all of it.”
“And then he finds another way in,” Tallulah shoots back. “Maybe one we don’t see coming. Or another girl. At least here, I know the terrain.”
“Tally—”
“You said help or hinder.” She looks up at me, her eyes wide and accusing. “This is the moment. You going to stand in front of the screen or behind it?”
I grind my teeth. “Back. Up.”
I step in close enough to reach, and she must hear something in my voice, because she finally pushes her chair a few inches away from the desk. Not much, but enough that the glow of the screen isn’t all over her face anymore.
It’s over mine instead.
I hate that I can feel the weight of his attention in this room. In her room.
“Okay.” Her voice is too bright. “So we knew this was a possibility. We stir the waters, sometimes the shark rolls belly up and says hello, right? No biggie.”
“Stop it,” I say.
She blinks up at me. “Stop what?”
“Making jokes when you’re shaking.”
“I am not—”
“Look at your hands, Tally” I cut in.
She looks down. Her fingers are tapping a wild rhythm against her thighs, the rest of her body so controlled she hadn’t noticed. When she does, she shoves her hands under her legs like she’s trapping them.
Cotton watches from the couch, mug cradled against her chest. Her face says the same thing I’m thinking.
We don’t like this.
“You don’t answer him,” I say. “Not yet. Maybe not at all.”
Her eyes flash, that spark I’m starting to recognize—danger, impact in three, two—
“Okay, but hear me out,” she says. “I am not a lamp you unplug when a storm rolls in. He’s already here. He already knows I’m watching. Ignoring him doesn’t make that less true.”
“My job is not to make things less true,” I say. “My job is to keep you breathing.”
“Yeah, I noticed the whole ‘breathing’ thing,” she says. “I’m a fan. But my job—”
“You don’t have a job in this,” I cut in. “You are the person we’re protecting.”
She stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Cotton chokes quietly on her coffee.
I drag a hand over my face. “Of course it is.”
“I have two jobs,” Tallulah says, ticking them off on her fingers. “One, use my ridiculous squirrel brain to connect dots other people don’t see. Two, not die. You’re here to help with the second, but you don’t get to veto the first.”
She’s five feet nothing, wearing a hoodie with a coffee stain and socks with tiny pixel cats, and I have the unnerving realization that I’m more afraid of losing this argument than I have been walking into actual gunfire.
“You can collect your data without talking to him,” I say. “We let him monologue, we don’t have to feed it. You don’t have to step right into the center of his crosshairs just because he whistled.”
“He tapped on my window last night,” she snaps. “We passed ‘center of the crosshairs’ hours ago. The only control I have now is whether I stand here and stare back, or sit in the dark and wait.”
Her eyes are huge and dark and furious. There’s fear under there, sure, but it’s woven through every other thing she feels—anger, stubbornness, that relentless drive to do something.
I know exactly how it feels. I’ve just spent a decade learning to chain it.
“Compromise,” Cotton says gently. “Before you two end up killing each other.”
We both look at her. I’d forgotten she was there for a minute.
“At least wait until Jack gets here,” she says. “Let the grown-ups be in the room together when we decide how far this goes.”
“I am a grown-up,” Tallulah mutters.
“Sure, baby,” Cotton says. “Just the very small, very determined baby raccoon kind of adult with a few master’s degrees.”
Tallulah snorts, her shoulders easing a fraction.
“Fine,” she says. “We wait for Brady.”
It’s a win. Not the one I want, but enough to buy time.
I text him fast—HANDLE CONTACTED HER. SMARTLITTLEBIRD. GET HERE—then plant myself between her and the screen.
She tips her head back, scowling up at me. “You are blocking my light.”
“You’ve had enough computer time for one day.”
“You are so dramatic,” she mutters.
I have a mental image of what Henry would do if she were alone, if there weren’t a six-four wall between his words and her body, and decide she can call me dramatic for the rest of my life if it keeps that from being a reality.
Fifteen minutes later, there’s a knock at the door—three sharp, two slow.
“That’ll be Jack,” Tallulah says.
I move before she does, checking the peephole even though I know the rhythm. Sheriff Jack Brady glowers back at me through the fish-eye, hat down low against the cold.
I open up.
He steps inside, bringing wind and snow-scent with him, and gives the room a quick once-over. His gaze lands on Tallulah. Lingers.
“You okay, Gentry?” he asks.
Something in my chest doesn’t like how personal that sounds, how familiar. I shut that down fast; he’s known her longer than you have, idiot.
Tally rolls her eyes. “Define ‘okay.’”
“Conscious, upright, not texting back serial killers,” he says.
“Two out of three,” she says.
His stare cuts to the laptop. “You answer him?”
“No,” I say.
“Not yet,” Tallulah corrects.
Brady pins her with a look that probably works on half the town. “Not at all.”
Cotton appears at his elbow with a mug. “Coffee before you two start playing Who Can Glare Harder.”
He takes it, grunts something like thanks, then nods at me. “Walk me through it.”
We crowd around the table, all four of us. I set the laptop down and angle it so everyone can see. Tally ends up standing between my knees because there’s nowhere else for her to go in the cramped space.
She doesn’t seem to notice.
My body does.
I focus on the screen.
“Handle spun up about an hour ago,” I say. “SmartLittleBird. Brand new. No avatar. Opened with this.”
Brady reads the line. His mouth tightens. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s him.”
“It could be anybody,” Tallulah says automatically.
“Sure,” he says dryly. “Could be Santa. But until I see proof otherwise, I’m assuming the man you watched at your window last night is the same one dropping cutesy nicknames in your inbox.”
The base of her spine thrusts against my thigh when she bristles. I rest my hands on the edge of the table instead of where they want to go—on her shoulders, anchoring.
“So what’s the call?” she asks. “We mute him? Let him keep talking? Say nothing? Say something?”
“We close the laptop,” Brady says immediately. “We let state tech boys poke at the logs. You go to Cotton’s and watch Hallmark movies.”
Tallulah makes a noise like he just suggested she eat her own computer.
“I am not going to Cotton’s to mainline meet-cutes while Henry monologues without me,” she says. “You called me, Jack. You asked for Nightjar. You don’t get to put that genie back just because you’re uncomfortable with how dirty the bottle is.”
Brady scrubs a hand over his face and mutters something about smart women being hell on his blood pressure.
“Look,” he says finally. “You’re right. I asked. You helped. But that was years ago. The situation changed when he showed up in person. You’re not just the girl with the sharp brain anymore, Twig. You’re also a target. That changes what I can live with.”
Her voice softens, just a fraction. “I became a target when I agreed to help Shiloh years ago. I was a target when we found the cabin. I was a target when I put my name on that affidavit. This is nothing new.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “It is. Before, you were just a line on a list. Now he’s knocking on your glass, calling you special. It looks like he came back specifically for you, Twig.”
She goes quiet. Her weight shifts just enough that she leans more against my leg than away from it.
She probably doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.
I do, though. Her heat sears through my jeans, burning my thigh and causing an uncomfortable pressure inches north of her rounded ass. I’m hard as a fucking steel pipe right now, with nothing I can do to help my situation out.
My fingers twitch with the need to curl them around her hips and pull her back into the vee formed by my legs, tug her tight against me and alleviate some of that pressure, but she’d probably run screaming straight into Henry Thurston’s arms when she got an inkling the effect she has on me—
“If you tell me I’m benched,” Tallulah says, “I’ll do it anyway. Only difference is you’ll know less when I’m done. That doesn’t make either of us safer.”
I groan, closing my eyes against Tally’s curious look.
Cotton nods, already on her side. “She’s not wrong.” Her lips twitch as she looks beyond Tallulah, at me, and I narrow my eyes.
I should argue. I should back Brady, draw a hard line, make them both mad at me and walk out with Twiggy’s laptop under my arm.
What comes out of my mouth instead is, “Then we stop pretending she’s not part of this and start figuring out how to keep her alive as part of it.”
Tallulah shifts, her ass brushing against me, and freezes. I wait for her to bolt.
Brady levels a look at me. “You were supposed to be my ally in this conversation.”
She doesn’t bolt. I struggle to focus.