Chapter Four
Ethan Kane woke with the taste of iron on his tongue and the image of Amara James’ hips moving behind that bar burning through his skull like shrapnel.
Worst nightmare? Hell no. Worst temptation.
Somewhere in the blur of neon lights and shadows he’d pictured himself sliding up behind her, threading his hand into that dark, wild hair, and taking what he’d been starving for for ten years.
But he wasn’t back in Calhoun County for her.
He reminded himself of that every damn minute.
He was here because a soldier was dead.
Staff Sergeant Kaleb Wooldridge. Ethan had bled with him, cursed with him, watched his back through sandstorms and firefights. And now Kaleb had been found slumped in his truck three blocks from Main Street, pistol in hand, death ruled a suicide by folks too tired—or too scared—to look twice.
Except someone had looked twice.
Patterns didn’t lie. Veterans dropping in clusters, each one tied to the same shady ‘treatment’ clinics pumping pills instead of healing.
And the man who’d spotted it—Assistant District Attorney William Houston—was one of the few Ethan still trusted.
Houston knew the Corps. Knew Calhoun County’s rot.
And he knew Ethan Kane, PI, ex-Corps, New York bloodhound who cracked cold cases when cops hit dead ends.
A month back, between Sergeant James’ death and Wooldridge’s, Houston had called him.
“James wasn’t the first,” Houston had said. “He won’t be the last.”
And the bastard was right.
So when another body dropped, Ethan had come back. Not for roots—he’d cut those clean years ago. Not for redemption—he’d stopped believing in that the day the desert got in his bones.
He’d come back for the only thing that still made sense.
The job.
The funeral was at Belonging Church that morning. He’d go, shake hands, give condolences, keep his ears open. Folks talked more in grief than they did over beers. And Ethan knew how to listen.
He was staying at the old roadside motel on the edge of town, with doors that opened to the parking lot and curtains thin as paper.
Kind of place you pay by the night, cash only, when you arrive.
Room smelled of bleach and mildew. Bed too short for a man his size, shower pressure like a whisper.
Didn’t matter. Ethan had slept in worse.
In the cracked mirror above the sink, his reflection stared back.
Shoulders still carrying the Corps even though he hadn’t worn the uniform in years.
Once a Marine, always one. Ain’t that what they say?
He pulled on a dark henley, worn jeans, scuffed boots.
No shine, no polish. Just a man built out of road miles and bad choices.
And those eyes—green, though sometimes they looked gray depending on the light. Always tired, always sharp. Folks used to tell him he had preacher’s eyes. Now they looked more like a convict’s.
He tugged the hat low, let the shadow hide what the years had done to him.
Ethan Kane, combat vet turned private investigator, something harder now in New York City.
A ghost in his own hometown—but that was by design.
When his old man died, the Bible went into the fire with him, and Ethan swore he’d gone city, and was done with country.
He sold off everything that bound him here—every acre, every scrap of memory. Almost everything.
The one thing he hadn’t been able to cut loose was his granddad’s hunt camp, buried deep in the Smoky Mountain woods.
Some things a man can sell. Others cling like blood under the nails.
The camp had guns on the racks, the smell of oil and woodsmoke in the walls, and a silence he trusted more than people. That part of him had never left.
He drained the motel’s bitter coffee, checked the magazine of the sidearm he never traveled without, and slid it into the holster under his jacket.
Tennessee law didn’t care much if a man carried, and he cared even less about who might notice.
Out here, iron on the hip was as natural as boots in the dirt.
The funeral was waiting.
So was the work.
And whether he wanted it or not, so was a memory with sable hair, wheat-field eyes, and an ass he wished he could forget.
* * * *
Wooldridge. The mourning of the Staff Sergeant’s family carried like a hymn through Calhoun County, one of those families people spoke of with reverence and a little fear.
Evangelical, gun-proud, rooted in the red clay of Tennessee so deep they might as well have grown from it.
Wooldridge had been the golden son—gone off to the Corps, came back with medals, married a preacher’s daughter, had two kids with names like psalms.
And now he was dead. Far, far too young.
The Wooldridges filled Belonging Church like an army.
Brothers in pressed shirts, wives in long skirts, all eyes sharp, all mouths tight as if grief was something you swallowed down and never let spill.
Ethan clocked every detail—the patriarch with a King James under one arm, the mother’s knuckles white around her handkerchief, cousins scattered in pews whispering scripture like they could drown out the truth.
It smelled of lilies and old wood, the air too thick with incense and loss. The preacher thundered about sacrifice, about soldiers dying for God and country, about how Wooldridge had “gone home to glory.”
Ethan sat in the back, hat brim low, coffee still bitter on his tongue, or maybe it was something else. He didn’t bow his head. He didn’t pray. He watched. He worked.
The side door creaked. Sun knifed in, a bright bar laid across the aisle. She slipped through it like a secret.
Amara.
Late, like she’d come off the south fence and scrubbed just enough to pass a pew—hair tamed into a loose braid, a fitted black dress that said respect and a soft blue jacket shrugged over her shoulders that said I was working an hour ago.
Dust still ringed the tops of her boots.
A straw-scratch kissed the inside of her wrist. She smelled, even from here, like soap and hay and heat.
Ethan’s pulse misfired—old injury, new problem.
He set his jaw and lowered the brim another notch, as if shade could make a woman vanish.
It didn’t. The blue on her shoulders looked like a slice of sky smuggled into a room full of lilies and thunder.
She found a spot near the side wall, stood instead of sitting, head bowed, hands clasped around a small bundle of field flowers that hadn’t seen a florist’s cooler.
He felt the floor tilt under him in that quiet way it does when a mine goes off miles away. Not panic. Not peace. Just the knowledge that the day had changed shape.
He told himself to breathe. Told himself to count exits. Told himself job first. None of it kept his eyes from tracking the lift of her throat, the clean line of her collarbone, the way she didn’t look toward him and somehow still found him.
Every Corps man within fifty miles had shown up.
Ethan recognized faces of men he’d served with, men who’d buried their own ghosts.
Some shook his hand, others avoided his eyes.
They all looked older, like him. And like him, they carried suspicion.
Too many funerals. Too many bodies dropping with the same neat bow tied around them: suicide, addiction, accident.
Wooldridge wasn’t the first. Ethan knew he wouldn’t be the last.
He shifted, jaw tightening. The Wooldridge family looked like pillars—church, land, loyalty. But Ethan had seen what lived behind men like that. He’d seen the hypocrisy. He’d seen how easy it was to hide rot under gospel hymns.
And if what he suspected was true, if Wooldridge had been caught in the same trap as the others, fed pills by the so-called clinics that promised healing, then Calhoun County wasn’t just grieving. It was complicit.
The service ended in a hymn that rattled the rafters. Ethan rose with the rest, eyes scanning, measuring. He wasn’t here to mourn. He was here to dig.
And the Wooldridges had plenty of dirt.
So did the town. So did his own damn chest, now that she’d walked in wearing daylight like a dare.
The hymn was still hanging in the rafters when Ethan stepped out into the heat, Tennessee September pressing down like a fist. Sun high, the air thick enough to choke. He tugged his hat low, lit a cigarette he didn’t need, and leaned against the white clapboard siding of Belonging Church.
Bootsteps scraped the gravel walk. Ethan didn’t have to look up to know who it was.
“Didn’t think you’d actually show,” came the voice—steady, clean, the kind of voice juries leaned into.
Ethan exhaled smoke, slow. “Didn’t think I’d see you in a tie, Houston.”
William C. Houston stopped at the bottom of the steps, jacket slung over one shoulder instead of buttoned up—dark suit, shirt rolled at the sleeves.
Fit like a man who still ran the river trail at dawn.
Hair clipped short, more silver than Ethan remembered, eyes sharp as cut glass.
He didn’t look Southern the way Ethan did—no boots, no hat.
Houston was the law here, polished and professional, every inch the prosecutor that worked closely with the sheriff.
But beneath it, Ethan still saw the kid who’d wanted to put things right, even when right didn’t pay.
“Somebody had to take the job,” Ethan said, eyes scanning the churchyard. “Keep this place from sinkin’ further.”
“Ah,” Houston said. “Same thing I said when I became ADA.”
Ethan flicked ash into the dirt. “How’s that workin’ out for you?”
Houston’s gaze cut to the Wooldridge clan spilling out of the church in their Sunday best, grief stiff as starch. His jaw tightened. “You know damn well how it’s workin’ out.”