Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
HIM
I leave Lucy Falls like I always meant to: after midnight, headlights off for the first mile, someone else’s blood drying tacky between my fingers.
Miguel’s.
He whispered his name before I slit his throat. “Please. My name is Miguel. I have a girlfriend, please—”
I didn’t plan on him, not exactly. He wasn’t part of the original script. But stories evolve. The cast changes. Sometimes the wrong character walks into a scene at the wrong time and you have to work with what you’re given.
That damned alarm went off before I was ready.
That shriek—that fucking wailing—went up and the horses started stamping, and there he was in the barn in his stupid ‘hell yeah, brother’ T-shirt, bare feet shoved into boots, squinting into the dark like he was going to “check things out.”
Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong night to be a hero, Miguel.
It wasn’t supposed to be him. It was supposed to be her.
But I’m adaptable.
The knife went in cleanly enough. Right up under the jaw, buried to the hilt before I yanked and slid it to the side.
Fast. Efficient. Professional, if you want to be gauche about it.
He staggered, made a wet little sound I almost didn’t hear over the alarm, and went down in the hay like a felled steer.
We looked at each other for a second, me and Miguel. He with his eyes wide and full of all that surprise—oh, this is happening to me—and me with the sudden, bright irritation of a ruined take.
“You shouldn’t have come out here,” I told him.
He gargled something that might have been a prayer, might have been a name. Didn’t matter. The light left his eyes all the same.
I stepped over him and kept going. I had a house to reach. A window. A girl.
But the alarm was too loud, the system too good, the people inside too fast. Whatever Irish bastard set up that security knew what he was doing.
The lights came on in too many windows; headlights swung around the curve of the drive quicker than I liked.
I caught a glimpse of someone—tall, dark, carrying a gun like he’d slept with it for years—cutting across the yard toward the barn.
And just like that, the scene was over. Cut.
A younger version of me might have forced it. Might have stayed in the shadows, waited for a better angle, taken a second or third body just to prove I could.
But I’ve learned.
You don’t throw yourself at the brick walls a fortress.
So I slid back into the dark, past the line where the cameras stopped sweeping, through the trees, down to where I’d parked off the service road. Boots muddy, hands sticky, breath fogging in the cold air.
I didn’t look back at the house.
I didn’t have to. I could hear it: the shouts, the doors, the wail of sirens converging like wolves finally catching scent.
Somewhere in the middle of that chaos, Tallulah Gentry would be standing in her socks on polished hardwood, staring at the blood on someone else’s shirt and realizing that I could reach into any life she touched.
That I could take things from her that weren’t even mine to take.
So it wasn’t a total loss.
The motel is already ruined by the time I get back to it.
Not physically. Physically, it’s the same sad line of doors and peeling paint, the same humming ice machine and buzzing neon VACANCY sign. My key still works. The chain still slides on.
But the space has changed because I stayed in it too long.
Patterns are important. Not just mine. Theirs.
I saw the way the police moved last time. How fast they were willing to respond for her. The local sheriff, Brady, with his clenched jaw and his stubborn insistence on doing it “by the book.” The Irish cousin in the shadows. That hulking fucking mob guy.
They’re all paying attention now.
Which means I have to let this place go.
I hate that. I put work into this room. Time.
Little anchors. Extra clothes in the drawer, cash taped behind the tank in the bathroom, a razor and toothbrush lined up next to the sink.
A second phone under the mattress, turned off and waiting, a spare handle and login scribbled on the paper backing of the motel Bible’s dust jacket.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a moment and look around, cataloguing what stays and what comes with me, what I can burn and what I have to abandon.
The blood on my hands has gone tacky. I flex my fingers and watch the skin crack.
Miguel was clumsy, but he bled well.
I wash at the sink, methodical, scrubbing until my knuckles go pink.
The water runs dark, then lighter, then clear.
I clean under my nails with the toothbrush, then toss it.
I change shirts, change jeans, pull on the soft flannel I picked up two towns over because the woman at the register told me it brought out my eyes.
She smiled at me when she said it. Tucked her hair behind her ear. Told me her name without me asking.
Some people are so easy it almost isn’t satisfying.
Almost.
I strip the bed, roll the sheets into a tight bundle, and stuff them into a black trash bag with the towel and my old clothes. There’s nothing incriminating on them—nothing obvious—but I don’t like leaving skin cells behind unless I have to.
Jason never understood that.
He thought he was immune to mess because he liked talking about it. As if narrating a crime turned it into fiction. As if saying “we” all the time meant he couldn’t ever be alone in it.
“Outsourcing,” he called it. “Division of labor. You’re my finisher, Henry. You make it pretty.”
He was good at the talking parts, I’ll give him that. Good at the social grease, the smiling, the introductions. Good at making girls feel like they were in on the joke instead of the punchline.
But he never liked the final moments. The cleanup.
That was always my job.
He liked to make it a game. Set them free—or at least, make them believe he was setting them free.
Give them a sixty second head start, and then I’d begin the hunt.
If they’d been good—not inclined to give him any trouble while he kept them—their death would be easy.
He had a syringe prepared that would offer them a quick, painless slide into oblivion when I caught them.
If they’d been a pain in the ass, though…I got to play. Do whatever I wanted to with them. Sometimes it was a bullet, if I was in a hurry. Sometimes a knife to the throat, and other parts of the body.
Of late, without Jason’s presence, I’ve been in an inventive mood.
I take one last look around the room. It’s almost empty now—generic again. The way it was supposed to be. A place anyone could have stayed.
I leave the keycards on the nightstand, slip out the back stairwell instead of walking past the office, and find the dumpster in the alley. The trash bag goes in, buried under fast-food sacks and beer bottles with a few efficient pushes.
By the time the police think to check a place like this, if they think to check it at all, those bags will be long gone. Compacted. Buried. Ash.
I’m halfway to the car when the anger really hits.
Not hot. Not wild. I don’t do wild.
It’s a cold, clean thing that slides under my ribs and settles there, a weight with edges.
I don’t like being pushed out of my spaces. I don’t like having to run.
Tallulah did that.
Her and her screens and her stupid, clever little brain. She turned on a porch light where there should have been shadow. She dragged my brother’s name onto everyone’s lips and then had the audacity to stop there, like she’d done enough.
Like she hadn’t left anything unfinished.
Jason in his orange jumpsuit. Shiloh in her vineyard. The town sighing in relief and going back to its wine and weddings and fall festivals, as if one brother in a cell meant the story was over.
They forgot about me.
She didn’t, though. She knew exactly who was back when Mia Hart was found on that shelf.
I drive.
Back roads, then a state route, then the interstate for a few anonymous miles before I get off again. I swap plates at a truck stop, taking the ones off a minivan whose owner is too busy wrestling three screaming kids into a bathroom to notice.
A few towns over, I park in the lot of a diner that smells like burned coffee and old grease and listen to the chatter.
Locals.
Truckers.
A waitress with tired eyes talking about “that mess at the Gallagher farm” and “poor Miguel” and “that Gentry girl better get herself right with the Lord.”
Nobody says my name.
They never do, until it’s too late.
The little TV over the counter plays the news with the sound off, captions scrolling. A familiar face flashes up—Sheriff Jack Brady. The picture is from some official headshot, but I remember him better with mud on his boots and a gun in his hand, shouting orders into the trees.
He’s closer than I’d like.
They all are.
According to the scroll, there’s a “multi-agency task force” now. State police. Feds. Regional whatever. Lots of men who think acronyms make them big.
All very flattering.
I stir sugar into my coffee and think about Tallulah.
She’s not on the news. Of course she’s not. They never mention by name the girls they failed to protect the first time.
But she’s gone.
That much is clear from the gossip—Cotton’s place “cleared out,” the “little hacker girl” nowhere to be seen, rumors that she’d gone “up north” or “back to that city” or “with her family.”
They don’t know where she is.
Neither do I.
That annoys me more than it should.
I had a nice pattern going. Apartment. Farm. Her online spaces. I liked the rhythm of it—the way she jumped when I tapped the cage, the way her friends circled her like anxious birds.
Now she’s off the board.
For the moment.
But there’s one piece still pinned to the corkboard in my head. One fixed point in the future.
She doesn’t know I saw it. She posted it once, months ago, too proud of the invitation not to share. The date. The place. The way she’d written so fun!!! with three exclamation marks, like it was some kind of coronation.
She tried to scrub it after I came back. Deleted the post. Changed the settings. Locked things down.
But you can’t unring a bell.
You can’t undo something once I’ve seen it.
I watch Sheriff Brady’s mouth move on the TV without sound and imagine what he’d say if he knew what I know. If he understood that all this flailing around in the dark is just noise before the real show starts.
They can move her. Hide her. Wrap her in Kevlar and Irish muscle and cameras.
But she’ll be there, at that place, on that date.
I finish my coffee, leave a decent tip—no one remembers a good tipper as anything other than “nice”—and step back out into the cold.
The sky is clear tonight, the stars sharp and the air thin in my lungs.
She’s out there somewhere, tucked away in some safe little box, thinking this is the part where she catches her breath. Where the worst is over.
It isn’t. The farm was just a reminder. A nudge.
The story doesn’t end when the girl runs away. It ends when it’s supposed to.
When I say it does.