26. Sean
SEAN
The smell of Huck’s blood still hangs in the house.
No amount of bleach or candles covers it.
Wesley scrubbed until his knuckles went red, Bailey lit every overpriced candle she had, and still I smell it when I breathe too deep.
Copper and smoke and the memory of what could have happened if Huck hadn’t caught the man in the hedges.
I don’t like depending on luck.
By dawn I’m already on the phone, pulling in favors.
I don’t waste time explaining. The men I call don’t need explanations.
They trust me, and I trust them, and I pay them very well.
They’ve followed me into places most men wouldn’t survive and walked out again.
They know how to watch, how to wait, how to act without panic.
By mid-morning, the grounds are no longer bare.
Six of my people spread out across the property like they’ve been here all their lives.
Two at the gates, rifles slung. One sweeping the outer fence line, one pacing the long drive, two on the rear grounds.
They move like they’re part of the land, blending into the hedges and shadows.
A stranger won’t spot them until it’s too late. That’s the way I like it.
Chief arrives without being asked. Of course she does.
She looks at me once, no questions, no greetings, and I point toward the perimeter.
That’s all it takes. She nods and heads for the tree line.
Chief doesn’t need orders. She is the order.
With her walking the edges of this place, and a team of six at her back, no one is slipping in alive.
Inside, it’s down to the three of us—me, Wesley, Huck.
Huck’s arm is wrapped tight, the bandage bright against his skin.
He moves like it doesn’t matter, like he hasn’t been stabbed, like the dizziness that hits him in waves is just another inconvenience.
He even insists on walking the halls with a rifle in hand.
Wesley tells him he’s an idiot at least five times before noon. I tell him six. He ignores us both.
Bailey tries to act like she’s fine, like the attack last night didn’t rattle her.
But I see her. The way her hands won’t stop fidgeting, the way she paces the length of the kitchen when she thinks no one notices.
She startles at sounds that wouldn’t have made her blink a week ago.
She wears her calm like a mask, but her eyes give her away.
I don’t blame her. Someone planted explosives under her stairs. That’s not a threat you shrug off.
The house feels different with the guards outside. Heavier. More alive. Every creak and shift in the walls carries down to us in the ops room, where Wesley is hunched over monitors and Huck pretends not to sway in his chair.
I keep walking the halls. I can’t sit still. Every window is a reminder of the blind spots I’ve already filled with cameras. Every shadow against the glass makes my hand twitch toward the knife I keep tucked at my side.
I want to take the fight to whoever’s out there. But Bailey’s here, and the kids will be soon, and that means I stay inside. I make myself the wall instead of the blade.
That mission doesn’t leave my mind. Not when I glance at the stairs where the device was hidden. Not when I catch Bailey staring out the window like she’s searching for ghosts. Not when I hear Eli’s laugh in my head and wonder what it would sound like cut short.
We fall into a rhythm for the next week. My perimeter team remains invisible until I call for them. We stay in the house. There’s no chatter, no attack.
Nothing.
“I don’t know if we need a whole team of soldiers out there,” Bailey says, her teeth on edge.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Huck asks over the breakfast table.
She’s tense again. It’s been a few days since the four of us hooked up again, and our girl needs that, but she hasn’t sought us out, and we don’t push. She’s on the edge—pushing might break her. No matter how much the four of us need it.
She pins a loose strand behind her ear. “The kids—if they see them, I’m worried it’ll upset them.”
“Then let me do my job,” Huck quietly begs.
Her eyes narrow. “You’re not killing David, Huck.”
He merely sighs and sips his coffee. An attack dog, leashed.
“Besides, he didn’t have anything to do with the explosives guy.”
My head whips around before I can stop myself. “You’re still defending him?”
“David’s psycho, but he’s not explosives psycho?—”
“Who then?” Wesley asks. “Who has the money to hire someone like the guy who fended off Huck, who was setting bombs around your place? Who else would bother to hire a professional to kill you, aside from the man who, let me check my notes here…has threatened to kill you?”
She huffs under her breath. “It wasn’t him.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“I just do.”
“Then who?”
She glances away. “I don’t know. But actresses get stalkers all the time?—”
Wesley laughs derisively. “Bailey, I adore you, so please understand I am not trying to upset you when I say this. You give him too much credit, and you are smarter than this.”
She scoots back in her chair and stands. “I’m not having this conversation again.”
“We haven’t had it in the first place! You keep taking off!”
She glares at me. “Can you talk to him?”
“I could.” I shrug. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
She grunts in frustration and stomps away. It’s been like this all week. If we’re not fucking, we’re fighting. None of us like it. None of us know how to stop.
The house settles around noon the way a body settles after a hit—quiet on the surface, everything underneath braced and tender.
Wesley rigs a new alert pattern on the monitors so anything that moves in a way we don’t expect pings our phones, not just the room speakers.
Huck grunts approval and sips coffee he doesn’t need, right hand steady on the mug, left arm flexing under the fresh wrap every time the pain tries to climb.
Bailey tries to feed us. That’s what she does when she can’t make anything else better. She stands at the island and stares down a cutting board like it insulted her. When I tell her to sit, she ignores me. When Wesley tells her, she glares and keeps chopping.
Huck solves it by leaning his hip against the counter until she has to sidestep him, and while she’s cursing him for taking up the entire kitchen, I slide the knife out of her hand and put a glass of water in it instead.
She drinks because I ask her to, not because she wants to.
She doesn’t notice her hand is shaking until I steady it with mine.
She nods like we made a contract and then pretends not to remember it ten minutes later when the tremor starts up again.
We re-sweep the house. We reset the trip wires we set last night because repetition is a sedative. Windows. Latches. Hinges. Alarm magnets lined up clean. All of it invisible and impossible to trigger accidentally for the kids’ sake.
Outside, the sky starts to go the color it goes before it decides to be dark.
My men count themselves off. The gate camera picks up a jogger who has a dog that hates our hedges.
Diaz radios that he can smell smoke from someone’s grill two properties over.
Chief walks the south line and pauses long enough in the camera’s slice of view for me to see the set of her shoulders.
I know that posture. It’s not boredom. It’s calculation—how many angles, how many steps, how many beats between now and the moment the problem surfaces.
Huck appears in the doorway with a fresh bandage he put on himself. “Don’t start,” he says before I open my mouth. He holds up a hand. “It’s clean. I’m clean. I’m fine.”
“You’re vertical,” I say. “That’s not the same thing.”
He grins, a slash of teeth. “She likes when I’m horizontal more.”
“Not tonight.” I don’t make it a joke.
He loses the grin. “I know.” He leans on the jamb like it did something to him first. “You think he’ll try anything when the kids are here?”
“Unsure.”
“I’d like him to try something with me.”
“I’d like to see that.”
Wesley chimes in, “Same.”
Bailey comes into the den with two sweatshirts draped over her arm. “Your men outside…will they be cold tonight? It’s supposed to hit the sixties.”
“Maybe.”
She nods, then sets the sweatshirts on the back of the couch like that’s the answer the universe requires. She meets my eyes, holds them for a beat, and then looks away before her throat can tighten. She’s not fragile. She’s exhausted. When she leaves, I hear her yawn.
The gate cameras catch David’s SUV. Chief appears like magic out of the dark to check him in.
Her voice comes through the radio in a flat monotone.
“Vehicle’s clear. Two minors in the back.
One adult driver. No special equipment.” Her way of saying no extra passengers, no surprises we haven’t accounted for. The gates open, allowing him in.
We all go outside, awaiting the children’s arrival and David’s annoying presence. David appears confused—a line has formed down his brow. There’s a reason I put Chief on gate duty for this. To make David submit to a woman.
Petty? Maybe.
Satisfying? Definitely.
The rear door opens first. Eli climbs out, his backpack bumping against the doorframe.
His little hand clutches the strap tight, his face pinched.
It takes me half a second to notice the cast. White plaster from wrist to elbow, thick and heavy on his small arm.
My pulse spikes, angry heat slamming into my chest. Maeve slips out after him, hair braided, expression cautious like she already senses something is wrong.
She glances at her brother’s arm, then at me, and then looks away quickly.
The driver’s door opens last. David unfolds himself with a kind of practiced ease, like he’s stepping onto a red carpet.
He straightens his cuff links, a casual flourish, before turning to us.
The bastard thinks this is theater. That’s how he always plays it—pose first, truth last. He scans the grounds and the locked gate behind him, then lets his smile widen, like we’re all performing in his play.
I step forward, my voice low when I speak to Eli. “What happened, kiddo?”
David waves a dismissive hand. “He fell.” The words are smooth, lazy. “Kids do that. Clumsy things.”
Liar.
Eli doesn’t meet my eyes. His shoulders hunch as if the cast weighs more than it should. “Yeah. I fell.”
Bailey rushes past me then, straight to Eli.
She drops to her knees, her hands trembling as they hover around his cast. “Baby, are you—does it hurt? Who—how—” She cuts herself off, her voice fraying.
She smooths his hair back, kisses his forehead, tries to hide the way her throat tightens, but I see it. We all see it.
David doesn’t look at her. He’s watching me, still smiling, but there’s something behind his eyes now. Calculation. Enjoyment. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Why the extra security?” he asks smoothly, gesturing at Chief’s silhouette pacing the fence. Pretending not to know why she’s there. “Looks a little extreme for a quiet weekend with the kids.”
I don’t say the real reason. If I say he hired someone to blow up Bailey’s house, then he can take that to a judge and say her house is too dangerous, thanks to some nutjob stalker. So, I go with the other truth. “Because you sent someone to spy on your ex-wife.”
His smile freezes. Just for a second. Then he shakes his head, tsking like a teacher correcting a child. “That’s a serious accusation.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“No, I suppose not.” His voice sharpens, coated in mock offense.
“To your point, I didn’t send anyone. I categorically deny your accusation, you overgrown guard dog.
” He says the words like he’s rehearsed them, like he’s saving the sound bite for later.
His lawyer would be proud. “Be careful who you say that to, because it sounds an awful lot like libel.”
“You’re an idiot,” Huck mutters.
Bailey motions toward the kids. “Huck, don’t.”
But his gaze is on David. “Libel is printed. Slander is spoken, Davy.”
The man’s nostrils flare, but his smile remains. “Thank you for that valuable lesson. Did they teach you that at guard dog school?”
Bailey stands firm, glaring at him. “You’re done here. Leave. Or they’ll make you leave.”
He turns then, crouching to Maeve’s level, ruffling her hair like he hasn’t just set the air on fire. “You be good for your mom, alright?” He straightens and looks at Eli, his smile flattening. “And you—watch your step. Don’t want to end up in another cast, do we?”
The words are casual, almost playful. Almost. But Eli flinches. That’s all I need. The proof is in the boy’s body, the way fear is baked into his bones.
I warned him. I told him if he touched them, if he hurt them, I’d end it. And now he stands here smirking, lying through his teeth, turning their pain into props for his show.
I step forward and pray he flinches. Reacts. Anything to give me a justification to take him out.
Instead, he hums a jaunty tune on his way back to his SUV. The car rolls back down the drive, taillights winking as the gate shuts behind him. My fists stay clenched at my sides long after the engine fades.
Eli’s cast. David’s smirk. The lie in his voice when he said he fell. The way he bent down and told his son to “watch your step” like it was a joke. Like it wasn’t a threat.
I warned him. I gave him the line. Told him not to cross it. He crossed it anyway. And now there’s only one answer left.
Not the courts. Not the endless motions and hearings and delays. The law doesn’t save kids like Eli and Maeve from men like their father.
But I will.