42. Scarlett
Scarlett
T he porch smelled like last night.
Smoke and silence and something I couldn’t name. My coffee had gone cold. The sweatshirt clung to me like armor I hadn’t earned. The lake stretched out in front of me, calm and unbothered, like it hadn’t watched me fall apart.
Alden’s footsteps were soft behind me.
He was quiet at first. Just sat next to me, letting the wood shift under his weight.
“Want me to make you something?”
I shook my head. “Don’t think I can keep anything down.”
He nodded, eyes on the water.
I could feel him watching me. Not in the way Trace did. Not like fire. More like a spotlight I wanted to crawl under.
“You always do that,” he said after a while.
“Do what?”
“Pretend you’re not breaking.”
He leaned back on his elbows. Exhaling slowly. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re allowed to be a mess right now.”
“I don’t want to be.”
“Doesn’t change that you are.”
That got a laugh out of me. Barely.
His knee brushed mine. Deliberate. “I won’t let anyone touch you, you know.”
I looked at him, eyes wide. Breath caught. Heart slamming into bone.
His voice was low. Steady. Dead serious.
“I don’t care if it’s Trace or someone else or the fucking wind. If it hurts you, it answers to me.”
Something in my chest cracked.
Before I could respond, we heard tires. Gravel crunching.
A black car rolled slowly up the drive. Sleek. Expensive-looking. Windows tinted so dark it felt like a threat.
Alden stood immediately. I followed, heart already pounding.
The engine cut.
The door opened.
And out stepped a tall man. Broad shoulders.
Brown skin that caught the light, warm and smooth like polished mahogany.
His hair was short and neat, sharp around the edges, the kind that said he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought.
Tattoos climbed out from under the collar of his shirt, curling around his forearms like smoke.
He looked... familiar.
But not in a comforting way.
His eyes landed on me. Dark. Curious. Too amused.
“Well,” he said, voice smooth, slow. “That’s her.”
Alden stepped in front of me. “You need to leave.”
The man tilted his head. “Didn’t come to start trouble.”
“Then you picked the wrong house.”
The man’s smile widened. “You always this fun, Rivers?”
I blinked. “Wait—how do you—”
“Scarlett,” Alden said quietly. “Go inside.”
I didn’t move.
The man was still looking at me. Not grossly. Not even in a flirtatious way. But in a knowing way. Like he’d read a file with my name on it. Like he’d been waiting.
And then—
“Move.”
Trace’s voice.
I hadn’t heard him come up behind us, but he was there now—shirt clinging faintly from the heat. Storm in his brown eyes.
The man turned, smile flickering. “Didn’t think you’d still be here, Maddox.”
“I am.”
They stared at each other, just a silent standoff, thick with something that cracked at the edges.
Thicker. Tighter. Older than it should’ve been.
And for the first time, I realized—we weren’t just caught in something dangerous.
We were already buried in it.
The man didn’t leave.
He just stood there on the porch as if he belonged. Like he hadn’t just cracked something open in the air between us. Chin tipped up, every breath held tight beneath skin stretched too thin.
No one told him.
Kane came out first, his expression unreadable. Rhett followed, unusually quiet. Alden stayed beside me, still as stone, but I could feel it—the way his whole body went tense.
And then Trace stepped forward.
The man’s gaze moved across the group like he was assessing the damage, his eyes landing on me.
He didn’t smile.
“So this is her?” he said, tone low and flat.
It wasn’t a question that needed answering. It was more like confirmation. Like he already knew.
My stomach twisted.
“Who the fuck is that?” Sloane muttered behind me, voice hushed but sharp, Lena standing beside her. “And why is he looking at you like that?”
I didn’t respond.
Because I was wondering the same damn thing.
The man didn’t give anyone a chance to explain. He didn’t wait for introductions. He looked straight at Trace, then at Alden, like we weren’t even there.
“Can we talk?” he said. “Just us.”
Trace didn’t even glance my way. Neither did Alden.
They just nodded, turned, and walked inside. Rhett and Kane followed without a single word.
The screen door slammed shut behind them, and that was it.
Silence.
Me, Sloane, and Lena were left standing on the porch like we were extras in a movie we didn’t know we’d been cast in.
Sloane let out a breath. “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but my voice felt thin. Disconnected.
Lena looked at me, wide-eyed. “You’ve never seen him before?”
“No. Never.”
But he’d looked at me like he had. Like he knew me. Like he’d been expecting something entirely different.
My skin crawled.
Sloane was still pacing. “Seriously, what the fuck? That guy gives me mob vibes. Did you see the tattoos?”
I blinked. “Yeah.”
And the eyes.
And the way Alden stepped in front of me the second he looked at me like that.
The way Trace had gone so still it was like he’d turned to stone.
None of this was normal.
None of it felt like coincidence.
We sat there in the quiet, pretending not to hear the muffled voices coming from the other side of that door. No words, just tones. Serious. Low. The kind of voices people used when something big was happening.
And for the first time since we got to the lake house, I felt like I wasn’t just in the dark—I was being kept there.
Like whatever they were talking about… was me.