Chapter 30
Cold settled low in Rowan’s stomach when she saw Wes’s room.
“Whoever came in knew what they were doing,” Micah said from near the door. “There are no signs of forced entry downstairs. Whoever did this probably used the window.”
Wes crossed to the desk.
Something in his expression changed. It wasn’t surprise.
It was recognition.
His gaze sharpened on something lying partially beneath a shifted stack of papers.
“What is it?” Rowan asked.
Wes lifted the papers.
A photograph sat underneath them.
Rowan frowned at first, not understanding what she was seeing.
Then her stomach dropped.
It was her.
The photo had been taken yesterday in the woods.
Close enough to see the tension in her face as she stood near the burned stretch of grass behind Refuge Cove.
Rowan couldn’t seem to pull air fully into her lungs.
She remembered the exact moment now—the cold wind moving through the trees, the smell of smoke still lingering in the air, the strange feeling she’d had that someone was watching from deeper in the woods.
In the photograph, she was turned partially toward the tree line.
Toward the camera.
Not looking directly into it.
But close enough that the image carried something deeply unsettling beneath it. Awareness. Instinct. The sense that some part of her had known.
“Someone was there,” she murmured.
No one answered because they all knew she was right.
Wes turned the photograph over.
Words were written across the back in thick black marker.
YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE COME HERE.
The room went silent.
Something cold shot through Rowan’s chest.
It wasn’t exactly fear. It was something heavier.
The message didn’t feel random.
It felt personal.
As if whoever had taken the photograph knew exactly who she was. Exactly where she’d come from. Exactly what she’d brought back with her.
Micah stepped farther into the room, his expression hardening as he looked at the photograph again. “That wasn’t taken from far away.”
Wes’s attention stayed fixed on the image.
He was very good at noticing danger.
And someone had gotten this close to Refuge Cove without him ever seeing them.
By the time they stepped back onto Main Street thirty minutes later, Rowan’s nerves felt scraped raw.
She tugged the brim of the baseball cap lower as they headed toward her Tesla.
“Hey . . . is that?” someone said in the distance.
Rowan looked up and saw a woman standing outside the coffee shop next door staring openly now, her phone halfway out of her purse. She was maybe in her mid-twenties.
Recognition spread across her face. “You’ve got to be kidding me . . .”
Rowan instantly felt the shift.
“Aren’t you Rowan King?” the woman said.
Wes moved closer beside her. “We need to go.”
But the woman had already pulled out her phone.
“I love your movies!” Excitement rushed into her voice now. “Wait—is it true you disappeared after that guy died? Did you have something to do with his death?”
Every head on the sidewalk seemed to turn at once.
Heat flooded Rowan’s face.
Wes stepped between her and the phone camera. “No pictures.”
The woman blinked, startled enough to hesitate.
That second was all Wes needed.
He opened the passenger door and guided Rowan inside before the situation could spread any further.
By the time he rounded the hood and slid behind the wheel, two more people on the sidewalk were already looking toward the car.
Rowan stared straight ahead. Her pulse still hammered.
Wes started the engine.
They remained silent for half a block.
Then Rowan looked down at her hands and murmured, “It’s just as I feared. Trouble followed me here.”
Wes tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
Neither of them pretended anymore that hiding at Refuge Cove was going to solve this.