Chapter 13
She just needed clothes.
That was it. Twenty minutes in and out of her apartment—grab jeans, shirts, underwear, the boots she'd left in the closet because they didn't fit in a guitar case.
Two weeks of wearing the same rotation of three outfits had pushed past endurance into absurdity.
She'd washed the same pair of jeans so many times the compound's industrial machine was starting to wear through the knees.
Static drove. Jessica rode shotgun with a duffel bag in her lap and her phone charged to full, watching the Fayetteville streets slide past like a life she'd stepped out of and couldn't quite step back into.
Her apartment was fifteen minutes from the compound—a second-floor one-bedroom in a complex off Skibo Road that catered to base personnel and the civilians who served them.
Seven hundred dollars a month she hadn't paid in two weeks.
"Five minutes to scope the lot," Static said, pulling into the complex. "Then we go in together."
"It's my apartment."
"And I'm your escort. Those are Raven's terms."
"Raven's not here."
"Which is why he made sure I am." Static parked the truck where he could see the building entrance and the stairwell simultaneously. "Five minutes."
She let him have his five minutes. He walked the lot, checked the stairwell, examined her apartment door from the outside. When he came back, his expression was the same flat neutral he always wore—the rear-guard face that gave nothing away.
"Door's intact. No signs of forced entry. But the curtain on your bedroom window is open."
"I always leave it closed."
"I know."
The words settled in her stomach like ice water.
They took the stairs together—Static in front, Jessica behind, duffel bag over her shoulder. The complex was quiet at midday. A neighbor's TV murmured through a wall. Somewhere below, a dog barked twice and stopped.
Her door was locked. Deadbolt engaged, chain in place—she had to use both keys, which meant whoever had been inside had locked up after themselves. Considerate. The thought made her skin crawl.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Everything was wrong.
Not destroyed. Not ransacked. Arranged.
Her dresser drawers were open—all four of them, pulled out to exactly the same distance, contents undisturbed. Whoever had done this hadn't been searching for anything. They'd wanted her to see the drawers and know that hands she hadn't invited had touched everything inside them.
The kitchen was untouched. Living room the same. But the mail she'd left scattered on the counter—bills, junk flyers, a postcard from a student's family vacation—was stacked in a neat pile on the kitchen table. Sorted by size, edges aligned.
Someone had sat at her table and organized her mail.
"Don't touch anything," Static said from the doorway.
"I know."
She walked through the apartment on legs that felt borrowed, cataloging each violation.
The bathroom was clean—nothing moved, nothing taken.
The closet door was open six inches, which could have been her own carelessness except she never left closet doors open because her mother had believed open closets invited bad luck, and some superstitions survived longer than the people who taught them.
She saved the bedroom wall for last.
The photograph was eight-by-ten, printed on glossy paper, sharp enough that she could see the sweat on her forehead and the calluses on her fretting hand. Her, onstage at The Rusty Spur, eyes closed, mouth near the mic, caught in the middle of a note she could almost hear from the image alone.
Last month's Saturday night set. Someone had been close enough to photograph her without a telephoto lens.
The photo was pinned to the wall above her bed with a box cutter driven through the center of her face.
Jessica stared at it.
The box cutter had a yellow handle. Retractable blade, extended to full length, buried two inches into the drywall. The brand name was stamped on the side in black letters she recognized because she'd bought a three-pack of them at the hardware store on Yadkin Road eight months ago.
One lived in her studio toolkit. One in her van. One in the junk drawer of this kitchen, which she checked without touching and found empty.
He hadn't brought his own weapon. He'd used hers.
Her hands weren't shaking. That surprised her.
Two weeks ago, she'd have been frozen—the same paralysis that had locked her in the studio chair for two hours while voices discussed body disposal through a vent.
But two weeks of compound life, of watching men with road names move through violence like it was weather, had recalibrated something inside her.
She wasn't frozen. She was furious.
Jessica pulled out her phone and photographed everything.
The drawers, measured and even. The mail, stacked and sorted.
The closet door, open exactly six inches.
The photograph on the wall, her own face split by her own box cutter, the blade catching light from the window whose curtain had been opened so the room would be bright enough to appreciate the display.
Twelve photos. Every angle. Every detail.
"We're done here," Static said. His voice was quiet, controlled, but she could hear the edge underneath—the Airborne sergeant who didn't leave people behind processing the fact that someone had been inside this apartment, touching this woman's things, staging a message meant to terrify.
"Not yet." Jessica walked to the dresser and started pulling clothes.
Jeans, shirts, two sports bras, underwear she grabbed by the handful without sorting.
The boots from the closet—her good ones, broken in from years of bar gigs, the only pair she owned that didn't hurt after four hours on her feet.
Everything went into the duffel without folding, without care, because the clothes didn't matter and the boots didn't matter and the only thing that mattered was the box cutter in the wall and what it meant.
She zipped the duffel and slung it over her shoulder.
"Now we're done."
Static drove. Jessica called Raven.
He picked up on the first ring. "Talk to me."
"Pruitt's been inside my apartment." Her voice was steady.
She'd make it stay steady. "Dresser drawers open, all four pulled to the same width.
Mail sorted and stacked on the kitchen table.
Bedroom curtain opened. And a photograph of me onstage pinned to the wall above my bed with a box cutter through my face. "
Silence on the line. Not empty silence—the loaded kind, the kind that pressed against the phone like a hand tightening on a weapon.
"Describe the photograph."
"Eight-by-ten, glossy, shot from the floor near the stage. Me at The Rusty Spur, last month's Saturday set. Close range—ten feet, maybe less. He was in the audience, Raven. He was standing in the crowd watching me play and I never saw him."
"The box cutter."
"Yellow handle. Retractable blade, fully extended. Driven into the drywall hard enough to hold the photo and the weight of the handle." She swallowed. "It's my brand. I buy them in three-packs from the hardware store on Yadkin. One in my studio kit, one in my van, one in my kitchen junk drawer."
"Which one is it?"
"I don't know yet. The kitchen drawer is empty—I checked. But the studio kit—" She stopped. The realization landed like a fist. "He went to my studio. The box cutter in my toolkit, the one I used for cutting gaff tape and trimming cable ties. He went to my studio and took it."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"He went to both locations," Raven said. His voice was flat, cold—the operator's voice, stripped of everything except function. "Studio first to collect the weapon, apartment second to stage the scene. He wanted you to recognize the box cutter. Wanted you to know he's been in every space you own."
"It's not about the box cutter."
"No."
"It's about access. He's telling me he can reach me anywhere.
My studio, my apartment, my gigs." Her jaw tightened.
"He sat at my kitchen table and sorted my mail, Raven.
He went through my dresser drawers. He stood in my bedroom and pinned a photograph to the wall and left the curtain open so I'd see it in the best possible light. "
"Pruitt considers loose ends a personal failing. This is him telling you he knows you're still loose."
"This is him telling me he's patient."
"Yes."
"How long until he's not?"
"Not long. Slade's lost his enforcer and his logistics. He's bleeding, paranoid, watching his operation fall apart from the inside. Pruitt is the only functional asset he has left, and Pruitt's been tasked with the one loose end Slade can't tolerate."
"Me."
"You." A beat. "Did you touch anything?"
"Nothing except my clothes. I photographed everything—twelve shots, every angle."
"Send them to me. I'll have Recon analyze the entry method and timeline."
She pulled the phone from her ear and forwarded the photos. Twelve images of her private life violated with surgical patience—drawers opened to identical widths, mail sorted by a stranger's hands, her own face destroyed by her own blade on the wall above the bed where she slept.
The phone went back to her ear.
"Raven."
"Yeah."
"The box cutter was from my studio. My toolkit, the one I've had for six years.
He went into the space where I teach children and he took a blade off my workbench.
" The fury was building now, pushing past the shock and the violated feeling and the ice water in her stomach.
"Matty sits in that room every Tuesday morning.
Destiny practices there on Thursdays. He was in a room where kids learn guitar, going through my tools. "
"I hear you."
"Do you? Because I need you to hear what I'm about to say." She gripped the phone hard enough to make the cracked screen creak. "I want him gone. Not arrested, not scared off, not run out of town. Gone. The way Lunsford is gone. The way Overby is gone."
"That was already the plan."
"Now it's my plan too."
Static glanced at her from the driver's seat but said nothing. The truck ate up the miles back to the compound, headlights cutting through the evening dark, the duffel bag of rescued clothes sitting in the back seat like salvage from a life she was never going back to.
The compound gates opened. Chrome caught the security lights. Jessica climbed out of the truck and walked toward the main building with her phone still in her hand and twelve photographs of everything Garrett Pruitt wanted her to know about his patience, his access, and his plans.
The box cutter was her brand.
From her studio.
Where she taught kids to play guitar.
She was going to watch that man die, and she wasn't going to look away.