Chapter 27
Sadie
I don’t fully understand what just happened between Ben and Cade. But I can’t seem to stop staring at Clayton.
He lies flat on his back, his head turned to the side, his eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on the unvarnished pine baseboards he used to make me scrub every Saturday morning. The midnight blue of his uniform shirt is soaking in the blood on the floor.
He looks smaller now. For years, he was a giant who took up all the oxygen in this house, a shadow that could choke the breath out of my lungs just by standing in a doorway. Now, he’s just two hundred pounds of deadweight.
And that’s quite freeing.
My right hand is shaking, a low, uncontrollable tremor that has nothing to do with fear.
My knuckles are white, the skin split across the middle where I drove the iron fence pliers straight into the bridge of his nose.
The iron handles are still gripped tightly in my fist, the metal slick with his blood and warm from the heat of my own palms.
Across the room, Cade is leaning his broad shoulders against the shattered wood of the dresser.
His chest rises and falls, his black T-shirt torn open at the collar where Clayton had ripped the fabric during the struggle.
His face is smeared with soot and a spray of crimson that isn't his, his pale, unblinking blue eyes locked onto the man standing in the doorway.
But Ben Knight doesn’t look like he belongs in a crime scene.
He stands perfectly framed in the shattered doorframe, his hair immaculate despite the storm raging outside, his dark shirt clinging to his frame from the rain but entirely neat.
Ben lowers his ghost eyes down to the floorboards, tracking the dark ribbon of blood spreading toward the toes of his polished tactical boots.
He lets out a short, quiet sigh. “This is a remarkable amount of administrative clutter for a Tuesday night, Cade,” Ben says, his voice smooth.
“The narrative is clean, Ben,” Cade replies, his jaw popping as he speaks, his voice flat and devoid of the manic edge that usually clouds his throat.
“You said it yourself. An unstable fugitive broke into the Sheriff’s home and executed him during a county blackout.
You can file it and go home. You always have strings to pull. ”
“The narrative is only clean if the loose ends are burned down to the clay,” Ben says, his light eyes shifting from Cade’s forehead down to my face.
He doesn’t look at the fence pliers in my hand with amusement or caution; he looks at them like they are an inefficient tool for the job.
“And right now, I’m looking at two very vocal variables who have a habit of stepping outside their assigned grids. ”
I step forward, my bare feet cold against the vinyl floorboards, my heels clicking soft against a shard of the broken wedding frame. I don’t get behind Cade. I stand right beside him, my shoulder level with his ribs.
“They’ll pin me for it,” I say, my voice coming out quiet, but entirely steady. “The file can be left with the body.”
Ben’s mouth quirks into a smile, a cold, colorless expression that doesn’t reach his eyes. “You have a surprising amount of steel for a woman who spent half a decade saying ‘Yes, sir’ to a Podunk cop, Mrs. Briggs.”
“Shit happens,” I shrug.
“Yes, it does.” Ben extends his hand to me, gesturing to the fence pliers. “I’ll need those. I’ve already altered the geography for you,” Ben mutters.
He steps into the room, his boots making a wet, sticky squelch as he walks past Clayton’s shoulder, dropping down onto one knee directly in front of me. The proximity is claustrophobic. He smells of hot gun oil, rain, and something horrifyingly clean.
Cade hitches his weight, his fingers twitching against the pine of the dresser, his broad shoulders squaring as if to lunge, but I don’t move.
I keep my leg straight as Ben reaches down, his gloved fingers cold and firm as they slide beneath the plastic housing of the monitor strapped above my left ankle.
The plastic is embedded deep into my skin, a thick, pink ring of chafed flesh where the county’s wire has been eating into my leg all summer. Ben slides the thick, blunt lower blade between the housing and my skin, the cold steel pressing hard against my bone.
Snap.
The monitor splits open like a broken shell, the tiny orange LED strip blinking once, twice, a frantic burst of light that throws a final red halo against the baseboard before the current dies completely.
The heavy plastic housing drops to the floorboards with a dull, hollow clatter, rolling an inch into Clayton’s muddy boot tracks.
An instant wave of weightlessness hits my leg, a strange, dizzying sensation that makes my knee feel loose.
I’m fucking free. I’m free.
Ben Knight stands up, his knees cracking in the quiet room. He tosses the fence pliers on top of Clayton’s dead body.
“The signal will still log a tamper alert at the state data terminal in exactly eighty-four minutes,” Ben says, his tone completely flat.
“The storm has knocked out the primary landlines, which means the alert will have to route through the regional relay in Abilene. That buys you a window, Mrs. Briggs. But it doesn’t buy you a life. ”
“I’ll get her out,” Cade says quickly, his tone flat.
But Ben is still glaring at me.
“Do you think this is a rescue?” Ben asks, his lips loosening into that dry, terrifyingly level sneer. “You think because the Sheriff is cooling on the rug, you get to pack a suitcase, climb into a truck, and drive out of this county into some clean, quiet sunset?”
I don’t answer him, my shoulders barely able to shrug.
“Look at him,” Ben says, gesturing with a tilt of his chin toward Cade.
“Really look at him, Sadie. You are choosing to erase your name from the grid. If you walk out that door with Sergeant Kellan, you are spending the rest of your days guarding a blind shell with a cracked fuse. There are no bank accounts where you’re going.
There are no grocery store trips where people look you in the eyes and call you by your father’s name.
There is no safety. You’re choosing a man with a history that no woman would ever choose. ”
Cade doesn’t defend himself. He stays pinned against the wall, his face expressionless as he listens to his former captain list his deficiencies. He knows what he is.
“He handles murder like taking out the trash, Sadie,” Ben continues, his voice dropping an octave, becoming a quiet sermon.
“He has a locked room in his head that opens every time the wind gusts funny or a door slams too hard down the hall. Every single night at three in the morning, when you hear the floorboards creak, you won’t be wondering if the law found you.
You’ll be looking at the man sleeping next to you, wondering if he still sees your face or the ghosts of the people he’s strangled to death. ”
I look down at Clayton’s body. I look at his midnight-blue uniform shirt, the gold star pinned to his breast, and the clean, starched collar that smelled of lye soap and menthol aftershave every single morning while he stood at my sink and told me I was nothing without him.
He was the law. He was the clean, pristine face of this county.
He was a normal man with a normal house and a normal name.
And he ran me and my five-year-old daughter off a blacktop road, bashed my head into a steering wheel, and watched his own daughter burn alive just to keep me from walking away from him.
I look back up at Ben Knight.
“I’m prepared,” I say, confidently. “I had a husband who wore a badge and went to church on Sundays while he kept my daughter’s blood dried into the floorboards of my kitchen.
I had a town that smiled at me at the post office while they kept me chained to a dead girl’s grave because it made the county records look tidy. ”
Ben doesn’t move a muscle. He just watches me, his light eyes absorbing the hit. “You’ll never be normal again,” he reiterates. “You’ll be in the dark forever.”
“You think I’m afraid of the dark?” I ask him, a sardonically soft laugh filling the room.
“I’ve been living in a tomb for five years, Ben.
Clayton built the walls, and the state welded the bars to my ankle.
If a normal life means staying in the light with the liars and the murderers who wear a uniform... then fuck your normal life.”
I turn my head and look at Cade. His eyes are watching me through the gloom, completely steady. He looks like a monster, yes, but he’s a monster who held my hand in the dark and told me my coffee wasn’t shitty because it came from me.
He’s my monster.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’re both completely unhinged.” Ben shakes his head, a light laugh slipping from his lips. “But from an operational standpoint, I respect a clean line. You’ve chosen your fate, Sadie. Now let’s see if you can survive it.”
“We’ll manage,” Cade mumbles.
Ben pulls out a phone. “Well, the morning shift dispatcher at the station checks the residential telemetry logs at exactly 0600,” Ben says, looking up at Cade.
“That gives you exactly two hours and twelve minutes before the regional marshals initiate a hard block on the highway exits out of the county.”
“The farm truck is in the barn,” Cade says, his voice low. “It’s got a full tank of diesel and a flatbed setup.”
“Take the back dirt roads through the Rigley pasture,” Ben says, his eyes narrowing slightly as he maps the county in his head.
“The low water crossing on the state line is flooded, but the old cattle bridge near the creek route has three inches of concrete above the water line if you don’t stall the transmission.
Keep your lights off until you hit the blacktop.
I have to do other shit. I’ll make sure you get out and across. ”
He turns to leave, his dark shadow cutting through the hall light, but stops with his hand on the pine frame. He looks back over his shoulder at me, a final, chilling tip of his head that feels like a contract being signed in the dark.
“I hope you have a tight grip, Sadie,” Ben says, his light eyes gleaming one last time through the fog. “Make sure you don’t let go of him. If he slips again, I won’t be there.”
“He won’t slip,” I say, my hand finding Cade’s split, bloody knuckles in the dark, our fingers locking together before Ben can even blink.
Ben Knight pivots, his boots silent against the corridor as he slides down the narrow hall like a phantom, the front door deadbolt throwing back with a quiet, oiled click before the screen door whines on its spring.
He disappears into the roaring West Texas rain, leaving the ranch exactly the way he found it—broken, lawless, and entirely ours.
I look at Cade. His face is wild, his hair damp, his hand smeared with my husband’s blood, but his eyes are entirely on me.
“Two hours,” Cade mumbles, his fingers tightening around mine until the bones in our palms grind together. “We have to move.”
“Then let’s get the dog,” I say, sighing. “We have a long drive into the dark.”