Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Finn
I’d been a light sleeper since the academy.
So many years of being the person a town called when things went wrong had turned my nervous system into a hair-trigger alarm system. Creaking floorboard. Dog barking two streets over. Wind finding the gap under the back door. All of it registered, sorted, filed.
But for three hours, none of it had touched me.
I lay still in the gray pre-dawn and let myself understand that.
River was asleep on her side, facing away, one hand curled under her jaw. Her breathing was slow. Steady. The kind you only got when the body had finally given up arguing with the brain and decided to rest whether the brain liked it or not.
I watched the ceiling.
There was a water stain up there in the corner I’d been meaning to fix for two years.
Some cracked trim above the window frame that moved every time the temperature dropped.
The kind of house maintenance that kept getting swallowed by smaller fires—by calls at 3:00 a.m., by Linton forgetting to file his incident reports, by Eleanor Jenkins missing for fourteen years.
By River coming back.
After our time together, relearning each other, she’d said, “I don’t want the guest room” like it was a simple thing.
Like nine years plus of space hadn’t happened between us.
Like she hadn’t driven herself out of Maple Ridge with nothing but a handful of duffel bags and a reason to hate the place she grew up.
Like I hadn’t stood by and watched her go and told myself it was the right call.
None of it was simple.
But she was here.
Asleep in my house, breathing slowly, her hair a dark tangle across my pillow.
I thought about the back wall of her house. WE KNOW WHAT SHE FOUND. If it was about her mother, the Watchers had used her ghost like a weapon. Had walked into the one place she should have been safe and left their handprints on it.
My jaw tightened.
I shifted carefully, enough to glance at my phone on the nightstand. 4:38 a.m. The tripwire file had been live in the restricted system for three hours. If Jordyn was going to bite—
River stirred.
Not awake. Just restless, a small sound that could have been a dream or a chill, and then she settled again, shoulders dropping.
Something in my chest pulled taut.
For a long time, I didn’t move.
My phone went off at 4:41 a.m.
Not with a call. It was one sharp vibration—the custom alert I’d set for the tripwire log. I was upright before the second pulse.
River woke the same way she did everything else, quickly and without drama. Her eyes were open and focused before I’d even reached the nightstand.
I checked the screen.
One restricted file. Accessed at 4:40 a.m. Opened, closed, reopened. Screenshots taken. Forwarded. Internally, to a county government address I didn’t recognize offhand, but which the system had already flagged as being routed through a private server.
“What?” River asked, her voice low.
I held up the phone.
She leaned in, read it, and went still in that specific River way. She wasn’t frozen, just processing, all the pieces moving behind her eyes at once.
“Jordyn?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“And she blatantly forwarded it.”
“Panic makes people sloppy.” I was already moving, finding my shirt on the floor, shoving my arm back into the sling.
“Four forty in the morning means she must have gotten a call first. Someone activated her. Someone who probably heard what Graham wanted for Grant and told her to verify the specifics.”
River pushed herself upright. “So, Grant already has what we planted.”
“Grant’s had it for however long it took her to forward it.”
“Which means he knows about the fake name.”
“Which means,” I said, “he thinks he knows what we have.”
I looked at her across the dim room—hair loose, jaw set, already three steps into the problem.
“Get dressed,” I said. “We need to be there before Jordyn decides what her next move is.”
She didn’t argue. That, more than anything, told me how serious she understood it to be.
The roads were empty. That particular pre-sunrise emptiness that made Maple Ridge feel less like a town and more like a stage set, everything in place with nobody in it yet. The mountains were just shapes against a sky that hadn’t decided what color it wanted to be.
River had her hands folded in her lap and looked adorable in one of my sweatshirts and some leggings she’d had in her car. The tension in her shoulders was the working kind, not the scared kind. She was thinking.
“She’ll play it one of two ways,” River said. “Either she comes in and acts normal, puts on a performance, pretends she hasn’t seen the file. Or she comes in eager. Offers to help. Makes herself relevant to whatever she thinks we’re chasing.”
“The eager one’s worse,” I said.
“The eager one is worse,” she agreed. “Because it means she thinks she has something to gain by staying close.”
“She does. She still thinks we’re running blind.”
River turned to look at me. In the dark of the cab, her eyes were unreadable but steady. “Finn. If this goes sideways, if she gets to someone before we can contain the leak—”
“It won’t.”
“That’s not what I was saying.”
I exhaled. “If it goes sideways, we adapt. We have the log. We have the forward trail. We have enough for an IA referral regardless of what she does this morning.” I glanced at her. “But it won’t go sideways.”
“You say that with a lot of confidence for a man who’s been stabbed in the last forty-eight hours.”
“I’ve been stabbed before.”
“That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
I almost smiled.
Almost.
The station came into view, the parking lot half-full already as the overnight shift wrapped and the day shift trickled in. I scanned the cars automatically. Atlas’s truck was at the far end. I looked some more. Good. Jordyn’s sedan wasn’t there yet.
She must have noticed my relief. “We beat her?” River said.
“Barely, I think.”
I pulled into my spot and sat for a second with the engine idling, hands on the wheel.
River didn’t ask what I was thinking. She never did, which had always been one of the things about her. She understood the difference between a silence that needed filling and one that needed leaving alone.
“Hey,” I said finally.
She turned.
I didn’t have a good way to say what I meant to say, that the morning I’d just woken up to was the first in years that hadn’t felt like something I was surviving, so I didn’t try to say it right.
“Thank you,” I said. “For not running.”
She studied my face for a moment. The early light was starting, just barely, to separate the sky from the mountains.
“I’m working on it,” she said quietly.
Not I won’t. Not I’m done running—even though she’d already said that.
Just I’m working on it.
Honest. Careful. Hers.
I nodded. “That’s enough.”
We got out of the truck.
Atlas was at the front desk with a coffee so dark it was basically a threat when we walked in. He clocked us coming through the door and tilted his head toward the bullpen.
“You saw it,” he said.
“Forty minutes after four.” I took the coffee he offered. Didn’t taste it. “She forwarded it to a county address routed through a private server.”
Atlas went quiet in the particular way he had when the math was doing something he didn’t like. “Grant.”
“Grant.” I nodded.
“So, he’s been running her?” Atlas said.
“Or someone above him is.” I set the coffee down. “She should be here in the next twenty minutes or so. I want everyone to act normal. Nobody looks at her sideways. Nobody gives her anything to read.”
“You want her to feel safe,” River said.
“I want her to feel like she’s the only one in the room who knows what’s in that file.
” I glanced at the bullpen, at the morning shift slowly filtering in and settling at desks, at Linton already vibrating.
I’d briefed him last night. He was twenty-six, ambitious, and terrible at keeping secrets, which made him both a liability and an asset, depending on the day.
“Tell Linton to breathe,” I said to Atlas.
Atlas looked over, looked back at me. “I’ll tell him. I can’t promise he will.”
Jordyn Vale walked through the door eleven minutes later, coffee in hand, uniform pressed, hair back.
Eyes too bright.
Too aware.
She scanned the room in a way that would have looked casual to anyone who wasn’t watching for it—but I was watching for it. River was watching for it. We’d both spent the last however many years watching for tells in people who were very good at not having them, and Jordyn Vale was not that good.
Her gaze landed on me for half a second.
“Morning, Sheriff,” she said. Bright. Easy.
“Morning,” I said.
She logged into her computer, and I watched her shoulders pull in a millimeter.
River was beside me, close enough to speak under her breath. “She’s checking her sent folder.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“She wants to know if the forward registered anywhere.”
“She’s going to find out it registered everywhere,” I said. “Just not yet.”
Jordyn stood and moved toward us with the bright, helpful energy of someone performing competence.
“Sheriff?” she called. “Do you have a minute?”
River’s hand brushed my wrist. Easy. Grounding.
“Sure,” I said. “My office.”
She followed me in and closed the door. Her smile held, but something behind it had gone careful.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Absolutely. Should it not be? Did I miss something?”
A small laugh. “I saw a restricted file come through this morning. Looked urgent. I wasn’t sure if you meant to tag it that way.”
Not “I accessed it.” Not “I checked it.” Saw it come through. As if it had floated across her screen on its own.
“It’s restricted because it’s sensitive,” I said. “New lead. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“Right.” Her eyes moved to the whiteboard, then to the files on my desk. “It’s just…the name looked familiar. I thought I might’ve seen it in one of the old community fund summaries.”
Testing. Tossing the line out to see if I’d bite.
“Good catch,” I said.
She flinched. It was almost nothing, but it was there.
“If you need help on it,” she offered, “I’m happy to take point.”
“I’ll let you know.”
She moved for the door, paused, then turned back with the expression of someone who’d done some calculations and decided to spend what she had.
“Sheriff,” she said quietly, “you should be careful who you trust with sensitive information.”
There it was.
Thin. Transparent. Sloppy.
“So should you,” I said.
Her eyes flickered, something moving behind them that she got control of fast.
Then she left.
River slipped in before the door finished closing, and I could see from the set of her mouth that she’d heard every word.
“She’s rattled,” River said.
“She is.”
“She’ll reach out to Grant or whoever’s handling her the second she thinks she’s clear.”
“I’m counting on it.” I turned to the window, watching Jordyn settle back at her desk—too straight-spined, too deliberate with every motion. “Let her.”
River folded her arms, her head tilting slightly. It was the motion of someone organizing pieces she didn’t quite like the shape of yet.
“What?” I asked.
“I was reading her lips through the window. She didn’t blink when you said ‘good catch,’” River said. “She flinched. There’s a difference. Blinking is surprise. Flinching is—”
“Fear,” I said.
She met my eyes. “She’s not sure how much you know.”
“Which means,” I said slowly, “someone told her to come in this morning. Someone told her to make contact and feel out the situation. She’s not acting on her own.”
“No. She’s following instructions.”
“Which means whoever gave those instructions knows about the tripwire file—or thinks they do—and they want to know if we reacted.”
River went still.
“If they’re already watching for our reaction,” she said carefully, “then they’ve been watching for longer than just today.”
The truth of that settled over the room.
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
I answered on the second ring, putting it on speaker.
A voice came through. Male, deliberate, and run through something that flattened its edges into nothing recognizable. Not distorted. Just empty.
“Sheriff Callahan,” it said. “Busy morning.”
River’s eyes went sharp. I held the phone so she could hear.
“You’ve been digging,” the voice continued. “Digging has a way of collapsing the hole on the person doing it. We’d hate for that to happen. Especially now that you’ve got more to lose.”
My pulse sat in my throat. I kept my voice flat. “Who is this?”
“Someone who’s been watching a good deal longer than you’ve been looking.” A pause. Just long enough. “Tell her hello.”
The line went dead.
The silence after it was the worst kind—the kind that meant they’d already said everything they needed to.
River stood very still across from me. When I looked at her, I saw that her face had lost some of its color.
“They know about the tripwire,” she said.
I shook my head slowly. “No,” I said, then looked at her. “They know about us.”