Chapter Twenty-Four
Sara
The past few weeks had been a descent into a world of shadows and whispers, a place where O’Dooley and I were the only fixed points.
My apartment had been abandoned in favor of her spare room, a war room wallpapered with maps, financial charts, and the hauntingly anonymous faces of Jane Does.
We were so far off the grid we couldn’t see it in the distance anymore.
The work was consuming, but it was a clean burn.
It was better than the helpless, hollowed-out feeling that had threatened to swallow me whole.
O’Dooley was right, doing something was infinitely better than doing nothing.
The PI who’d been dinging my burner phone was a low-level bottom-feeder named Vick Schmidt, and it took us less than a day to find the shell corporation that paid his invoices.
It took another two days to trace that shell corporation back to a holding company owned by the Gravestones.
They were watching me, but they were sloppy about it.
That was the easy part. The hard part was the other money trail, the one Max must have been following.
The Gravestones had funneled millions over the decades into a labyrinth of unsavory accounts—some linked to known mafia associates, others to independent criminals who specialized in making people disappear.
But the discovery that made my blood run cold, the one that felt like a physical blow to the chest, was finding Ashen’s name.
They’d used him. His signature, clear and oblivious, was on a dozen transactions from his trust account, payments made to men who had no legitimate business with a twenty-something living in a cottage.
He’d been their pawn, their unwitting bagman, and the thought of it made a sick, protective rage build in my throat.
I was packing my bag, preparing to leave the office for the day. My plan was to go to my mom’s, to step out of the shadows for a few hours and pretend to be a normal daughter helping with a normal project. My hand was on my coat when my supervisor, Cleft, appeared at the edge of my cubicle.
“Linde,” he said, his mustache twitching. “Just the agent I was looking for.”
I forced a neutral smile, my body tensing. “Sir. What can I do for you?”
“Just wanted to check on the Miller embezzlement case. See if there were any loose ends from the plea deal.” His eyes scanned my desk, which was deliberately sparse. All the real work lived at O’Dooley’s.
“No, sir. It’s a clean wrap. The DA was happy with it.”
“Good. Good work.” He lingered for a moment, his gaze unreadable.
“You look tired, Linde. Don’t get distracted.
It’s easy to do in this line of work. You start pulling on one thread, you find another, and pretty soon you’re a long way from the case you were assigned.
” His voice was calm, almost paternal, but a chill snaked its way down my spine.
“We’ve lost good agents because they couldn’t stay focused on what was in front of them. Make sure you stay focused.”
The words themselves were standard supervisor talk. But the tone—flat, cold, and heavy with unspoken meaning—was a clear and direct threat. He knew. Or he suspected. And he was warning me off.
I kept my expression placid, my heart hammering against my ribs. “I understand, sir. I’m focused.”
He nodded once, then walked away. I stood there for a long minute, my breath held tight in my chest. I thought about walking over to O’Dooley’s desk, telling her what just happened.
But I stopped myself. The situation was already a tangled, dangerous mess.
Bringing a potential threat from inside the Bureau into it right now would only add another layer of paranoia.
O’Dooley was my partner, my only ally. Part of my job was protecting her too.
I’d keep this to myself, for now. One more secret in a life that was becoming nothing but.
My mother’s house smelled of chemical stripper and sawdust, a scent that was somehow more comforting than any perfume. She was in the garage, hunched over a beautiful old wooden dresser she’d found at a thrift store, scraping away layers of hideous green paint.
“Hey,” I said, picking up a piece of sandpaper. “Need a hand?”
She looked up, her face smudged with dirt, and smiled. “Always.”
We worked in comfortable silence for a while, the rhythmic scrape of our tools the only sound. It was simple, physical work. A tangible problem with a clear solution. Strip away the ugly layers, find the good wood underneath. If only life were that easy.
“So,” she said, not looking at me, “how’s the project you’re not telling me about?”
I kept my eyes on the piece of wood in my hands. “It’s . . . progressing.”
“And how’s the man who was and wasn’t a relationship?”
My hands stilled. I thought of Ashen. His pained, furious eyes in my apartment. The quiet dignity of his back as he’d walked away from me at the sugar shack. “I haven’t spoken to him.”
“Do you want to?”
“It’s not that simple, Mom.” I sighed, putting the sandpaper down. “I didn’t show him my best side. I made mistakes.”
“Then you learn from it, and you move on,” she said, her advice practical and, to anyone else, perfectly reasonable.
But that was the challenge, wasn’t it? The one I couldn’t quite do yet.
Move on. My obsession with finding justice for Max had been the driving force of my life for years.
But now, thoughts of Ashen haunted me in a different way.
He wasn’t just a piece of the puzzle; his safety had become the entire point of solving it.
I’d made O’Dooley swear an oath with me: nothing would go public, no moves would be made, unless we could guarantee the absolute safety of Ashen and the other twins.
Justice for Max couldn’t come at their expense. It was a line I would not cross.
My mother stopped her work and turned to face me, her eyes soft with a knowing look that had always unnerved me. “No one here is going to judge you, Sara. Here, with me, you can admit you cared for that man.”
Tears pricked my eyes, hot and sudden. I looked down at my hands, at the fine layer of dust covering them. “It’s worse than that, Mom,” I whispered, the confession feeling like it was being ripped from my soul. “I still love him. I love him enough that keeping him safe is all that matters to me.”
Her expression shifted from sympathy to sharp concern. “Keeping him safe? From what? Sara, what aren’t you telling me?”
The dam broke. The weight of the secrets, the lies, the threat from Cleft, the fear for Ashen—it was all too much to carry alone. I looked at my mother, the one person on earth who had seen every version of me.
“Do you want to know?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Do you really want to? It’s not a pretty story, and it doesn’t show me in the best light.”
She didn’t hesitate. She dropped her scraper, closed the distance between us, and wrapped her arms around me in a fierce, protective hug.
“You’ve always been smarter than me, Sara,” she murmured into my hair.
“But one thing you don’t yet understand, because you haven’t experienced it, is the love a mother has for her child.
There is nothing you could admit to me that would make me see you as anything less than my miracle. ”
And in the safety of her arms, surrounded by the smell of old wood and the promise of a fresh start, the walls I had so carefully constructed around my heart finally came down.
So, I told her everything. And although she didn’t have advice on how to fix the situation, she did give me a long, healing hug.