EPILOGUE
HIM
I should have her.
By any reasonable metric, by any story worth telling, Tallulah Gentry ought to be mine already—trussed up in some quiet room that only I know, sleeping in the dark with my fingerprints fading from her skin.
Instead, I’m lying on a lumpy motel mattress three counties over, staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looks vaguely like a rabbit, and listening to ice rattle in the busted AC unit.
She’s alive.
Again.
I roll that fact around in my head like a chipped tooth, prodding at it, tasting the bruise.
She was right there. Warm and soft and perfect under my arm, her little body going boneless as the sedative took hold. I could feel her pulse against my ribs. I could feel the way she fought, right up until she couldn’t. That spark. That fire.
And then that brick of an Irishman came barreling down the alley like a freight train with a god complex, and Brady—fucking Jack Brady—decided to actually do his job for once and put a bullet where it mattered.
I flex my injured arm, feeling the dull throb where his shot grazed me. Sloppy work. He could’ve taken my head off if he’d been braver or angrier.
I’m almost offended he didn’t.
“Should’ve been clean,” I murmur to the ceiling. “In and out. Lesson learned. Curtain call.”
It’s not the first time a curtain call’s gone sideways.
Once, a lifetime and several names ago, Jason and I thought bigger. We were boys then, though we didn’t feel like it. Angry and invisible. The kind of boys pretty girls laughed at in hallways and on bleachers, in dressing rooms they thought were private.
Pretty girls in glitter eye shadow and matching outfits, who sang sugar songs into microphones and thought the world would always love them.
We wanted them to know us.
So did he—the third one. The friend who liked to talk big, who said he knew a guy who knew a guy, who thought a blast of attention would finally make us real.
We thought we were writing a sharp little story. A scare. A scar.
The device was too strong. The timing was off. The crowd pushed closer than they were supposed to. One wrong wire, one wrong guess, and half the field turned into smoke and screaming and pieces.
The girl band never even finished the set.
Neither did our friend.
Afterward, Jason vomited behind a patrol car while the sirens screamed and the whole sky tasted like copper. I remember the way his shoulders shook. I remember the way my hands didn’t.
Too messy, we decided. Too noisy. Too many variables when you try to make the whole world look.
Better to do the work up close, one person at a time. No collateral. No surprises.
No witnesses who weren’t chosen.
That was the night we stopped trying to speak to crowds.
But some stories…some stories want a bigger stage.
I drag my attention back to the present, to the motel’s peeling wallpaper and the cheap television humming static in the corner. The room smells like old smoke and lemon cleaner, the kind that never quite hides the ghosts.
The local news has already run the clip twice in the last hour—“Incident at Local Toy Store,” “Woman Abducted, Rescued in Alley Behind Floyd’s.” Grainy footage of the front of the shop, the festive window display, the line of children bundled in coats and scarves.
No footage of the back hall. No footage of my hand over her mouth, her body thrashing once, twice, then going slack.
But I remember it.
I close my eyes and replay the feeling of her weight shifting as I lifted her higher, adjusting my grip, calculating distance and angle and time—how far to the car, how long before anyone noticed the elf was gone, how many heartbeats I could steal.
And then: the crack of a shot, the hot bite along my arm, that moment of choice.
Drop her and run.
Or hold on and die.
I've never been particularly sentimental. So I dropped her.
Let the Irishman catch her. Let him slam into the wall instead of her skull. Let him bleed on the concrete while she breathed against his chest like a little broken bird.
I watch them on the screen now, in my mind if not on the TV—him bending over her, his big hands shaking, his mouth forming her name like a prayer.
It was almost sweet.
Almost.
“Enjoy it while you can,” I tell his ghost calmly. “You’re just the man who caught what I threw.”
Tallulah Gentry was always going to belong to someone. The difference is, I wanted to be the one to make her.
The one who took her apart and put her back together again, the way we did with the others. The way we learned how to after we swore never to light up a whole field all at once again. There was no poetry in that.
That’s the part Brady doesn’t understand. He thinks he’s protecting her. He thinks if he circles the wagons tight enough—Irish muscle, county cops, family with guns—he can keep the story small.
But he’s the reason I had to drop her. The reason the alley filled with lights and sound before I was done.
He’s the one who shot me.
He’s the one who made me choose.
On the TV, they cut to Brady giving some bland statement to the press—“No comment on an ongoing investigation,” and “We’re following several promising leads.”
He looks tired. Driven. Righteous.
I smile, slow and sharp.
Maybe it’s time someone gave him a bigger audience.
Tallulah can have her Irish Hulk, for now. Let him play bodyguard and boyfriend and whatever else he thinks he’s earned. Let him put up trees and string lights and pretend he’s won.
He hasn’t seen the whole board.
Neither has she.
There are other kinds of messages. Other kinds of stages. We learned that the hard way, once, with smoke in our lungs and sirens in our ears and a friend who never walked away from the blast zone.
We promised ourselves we’d never go that big again.
Promises are funny things.
I reach over and turn the volume up, just to hear Brady’s voice break on one particular word—“safety”—and then down again.
I don’t need to know the details yet. Dates. Locations. Casualty estimates.
All I need to know is that I’m not finished.
Not with her. Not with them.
Not with him.
I lace my fingers behind my head and stare at the cracked ceiling, listening to the AC rattle and the ice machine groan down the hall.
When the time comes, I want Brady to understand exactly why.
Pretty girls. Pretty crowds. Pretty stories with happy endings.
They never did know when to be afraid.
Next time, I’ll make sure they hear the music before the world blows apart.
If Henry Thurston thinks Jack Brady’s the problem now, he hasn’t seen what happens when a man who’s already lived through one bomb realizes the monster he missed the first time is coming back for more.
Jack’s ghosts aren’t buried in Lucy Falls.
They’re burned into twisted metal, shattered concrete, and the memory of a teenage girl he carried out of the fire more than fifteen years ago.
This time, the threat isn’t hiding in the hills—it’s wired into the crowd.
And the woman Jack couldn’t entirely save back then?
She’s the one standing between him and the next explosion…and the one woman he cannot afford to want.
Be sure to grab Jack’s book, KEEP ME SAFE—where Henry’s “swan song” begins, Jack’s past blows wide open, and the only thing more dangerous than the next bomb… is the way he looks at her.