CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #3
She coasted to a stop a little way down the street, the car idling quietly.
For several seconds—long, stretched, humming—she didn’t move.
The house looked… wrong.
Not physically. Not in any obvious way. But wrong in the way a still pond felt wrong just before a thunderstorm. A pressure in the air. A subtle tilt in the atmosphere. A sense of anticipation so fine it barely existed and yet she felt it like a prickle on the inside of her skin.
As if the house were watching her.
As if it had been waiting.
She gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles whitened.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told herself.
But she did.
Because ever since this morning—no, ever since Cox’s eyes had fixed on hers through the glass partition—some part of her had known, with that cold, quiet, intuitive certainty she hated, that she would end up here.
Here, at the intersection of past and threat.
Here, where she least wanted to be.
She put the car in park. Sat back. Closed her eyes.
In her mind, her phone buzzed again. Even silently, the guilt was deafening.
Her mother would be sick with worry.
Marcus would probably be halfway through the stages of grief.
Winters would be writing her termination report in bullet points.
But the pull was stronger than all of that.
Kate opened her eyes.
The house waited. Sunlight caught the porch railings, the windows, the brass doorknob. Everything gleamed, surface-level serene.
A lie.
Because she felt it now—not dread exactly, but recognition.
Something had happened here. Something recent.
Something connected to her.
She knew that without knowing why.
Her heart thudded hard enough to painful.
She reached for her phone, flipped it over, and stared at the stack of missed calls stacking like panicked breadcrumbs:
MARCUS (6 MISSED)
WINTERS (4 MISSED)
MOM (3 MISSED)
PORTLAND FIELD OFFICE (2 MISSED)
Her chest tightened.
She should call. She should.
She didn't.
Instead, she switched the phone to silent, placed it screen-down on the passenger seat, and opened the car door.
Heat rushed in, thick and living.
She stepped out onto the asphalt, closed the door softly behind her, and stared at the house that had birthed some of her best memories and some of her worst.
The air smelled of grass. Lilac. And something faint beneath it—something metallic, almost imperceptible.
Her pulse quickened.
Her feet carried her forward.
Toward Mulberries.
Toward what waited.
Toward the danger she had chosen.
She walked up the path, every sense on alert. Each step brought a new layer of certainty.
What she was doing was reckless. Foolish. Career-ending.
But she couldn’t shake the realization settling, cold and sure, in her marrow:
She was meant to be here.
Safe or not.
Wise or not.
And whatever waited behind that door—whatever threat had knotted itself around her past—it had already begun.
Kate mounted the porch.
Placed her hand on the doorknob.
And turned it.
Kate pushed the front door inward with the kind of caution that felt instinctive rather than tactical—like muscle memory from childhood. The hinges gave a polite little sigh, nothing more. The entryway looked untouched. Dust motes floated like drifting pollen in the warm, honey-colored light.
“Hello?” she called out, though she didn’t expect—didn’t want—an answer.
No response.
Just the creak of the old house adjusting its bones.
She took two steps in. The air held the faint scent of lavender polish, hydrangeas, the ghost of a place loved by someone else’s hands. The Kingsleys, presumably. Whoever they were.
She might have stood there longer, absorbing the strangeness of returning to a place both intimately familiar and utterly alien—until a sound snapped her back.
Voices. The static squelch of a radio.
Outside.
To the right of the house.
Kate’s pulse jolted. She spun, stepped back onto the porch, down the steps, boots crunching on the gravel path as she followed the sound around the corner.
And then they came into view.
A small cluster of people emerging alongside the garden shed, half in sunlight, half in shadow.
First: a tall man in his early forties, handsome in a diffident, exhausted-professor kind of way, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows. He had a little girl’s hand clasped tightly in his own—protective, urgent.
The little girl, seven at most, with solemn dark eyes and a serious mouth, regarded Kate with the precise, measuring look of a child who has seen too much for her age.
Beside them: a woman, early thirties, striking, with auburn hair pinned up haphazardly, one hand pressed instinctively to the small swell of her pregnant belly. Sweat beaded along her temples. Fear clung to her, not loud but real.
A Lake Forest police officer—broad, uniformed, mid-forties—hovered near them, watchful.
And beside him—
Kate’s breath hitched.
A glamorous, sharp-featured young woman in a sleek navy suit.
Black sunglasses pushed up into glossy dark hair.
The cut of her jaw so precise it could have been engineered.
She carried herself with the unmistakable confidence of federal training—and a kind of polished ferocity.
She seemed familiar, for some reason. Kate had an idea that she’d seen her on the TV news.
And something in her gaze suggested that she knew Kate, too. Knew of her, at least.
"Special Agent Valentine?" the FBI agent called out. Her voice was smooth, rich, and professional. "I thought that might be you. I'm Simone Hirschfeld."
Kate approached slowly. “I’m Kate Valentine,” she confirmed. “I’m the one who called in the tip earlier today. This was my home.”
Laurence Kingsley—Kate assumed this had to be him, the registered homeowner—let out a strangled exhale, squeezing his daughter's hand. His wife leaned subtly against him, relief flickering across her face.
Hirschfeld stepped forward, offering a firm, warm handshake. “Then let me thank you personally,” she said. “Because thanks to your call, we got him.”
Kate blinked. “You… caught the guy?”
“Sure did.” Hirschfeld pulled her phone from her pocket with a dexterous flick, tapping the screen. “He was hiding out in one of the greenhouses on the property. Right under their noses.”
She held out the phone.
On screen: a bulky man in a black hoodie, baseball cap pulled low, face half-shadowed—being eased onto a stretcher beside a shattered greenhouse door. Blood soaked one thigh of his jeans. EMTs hovered over him.
“Who shot him?” Kate asked, eyebrows rising.
“He did,” Hirschfeld said. “When confronted. Tried to pull a weapon he clearly wasn’t trained to use. Bullet went straight through his thigh and missed the femoral artery by about half an inch. He’s in surgery now. Might be tomorrow before you can talk to him.”
“Whoever ‘he’ is,” interjected the cop, whose shirt label read O’HARE. “I know the face of just about every burglar, peeping tom and rough sleeper in the county, and he doesn’t ring any bells. No ID on him. Refused to give a name.”
Kate stared at the image.
Something felt off.
“His only weapon was a gun?” she asked quietly.
“Yes,” Hirschfeld replied, clearly surprised by the question. “Why?”
“No knife?”
“No.”
“No artwork?”
Hirschfeld frowned. “Artwork?”
Kate said nothing.
The Kingsleys exchanged glances.
O’Hare shifted, clearing his throat. “Ma’am, if you’re worried he left something in the house, we’ve swept it. Nothing suspicious.”
Kate forced herself to nod. “Just… making sure.”