Chapter 26 #3
Always there now, it seemed, standing close without pretending closeness gave her ownership of whatever I was carrying.
My phone buzzed on Da's desk and the sound dragged the present back into the room.
Cipher.
I answered.
"What?"
His pause told me my tone hadn't escaped notice.
"Got movement at Saint Brigid's."
I stood immediately with Skye right behind me.
"What kind?"
"Black estate car just left. Hawkeye got a partial facial through the windshield before it turned south."
My hand tightened around the phone.
"And?"
Cipher sent the image.
It appeared grainy but clear enough to show a man behind the wheel, dark hair, controlled expression, eyes angled toward the road.
"That's Owen Vale," Cipher said.
I looked at the face.
I was looking at the man Cipher had connected to Alderwick security, Blackridge, Croft House, and Helena Croft's escape route, and now Owen Vale had surfaced at Saint Brigid's as well.
"Where's he going?"
"South for now. Trigger is not following close. Maverick has a second set of eyes farther down the route."
"Good."
"We also have activity at the main building. Two vans moved from an outbuilding to the rear entrance. Could be preparing transfers."
Skye looked at the Saint Brigid's plan spread across Da's desk.
"Because Croft House is compromised."
"That's my guess," Cipher said.
The past and present locked together so cleanly it made my stomach turn.
Fifteen years ago, Harrow's people had tried to silence my father and recover the evidence he gathered.
Now the same network was moving again because another property had been exposed.
The buildings changed, but the Order's habits remained disturbingly consistent.
Skye had said that from the beginning.
I looked at the boxes lining Da's concealed archive.
"Cipher."
"Yeah?"
"We found enough to reopen the murders."
Silence answered me.
Then his voice changed.
"What exactly?"
"A letter from Da naming Harrow, describing surveillance on the house, saying if anything happened it wasn't random violence and they would be coming for the records."
"Photographed?"
"Not yet."
"Do that now. Don't send the originals anywhere. I'll get Toxic and legal involved before we touch local police."
I nodded even though he couldn't see me.
"There are duplicates somewhere else. Finn knew how to retrieve one packet."
Skye looked toward me.
Cipher went quiet again.
"Location?"
"Not in the letter."
"We'll find it."
For the first time, those words didn't sound like a promise meant to make me feel better.
They sounded like a plan.
I looked at my father's handwriting once more.
Then at Skye.
"Trigger needs us?"
Cipher answered before she could.
"Not yet. Stay put until we know whether Saint Brigid's is evacuating or rotating vehicles. Hawkeye has eyes. Nobody goes near Vale."
Every instinct I possessed wanted to tell him I didn't need the warning.
The fact that he gave it told me he knew better.
"Understood."
I ended the call.
Skye began photographing the letter.
I helped her, not because I was calm or because fifteen years of guilt had somehow disappeared in ten minutes, but because Da had done something I was only beginning to understand: he had left evidence because he expected someone else to continue if he couldn't.
He had left evidence and had expected someone to find it. Maybe not me because I knew that he’d hoped none of us ever needed to.
Still, he'd built a hidden room inside the house and filled it with enough truth to survive the men who came searching for it.
I looked around the archive again.
"What?" Skye asked.
"Da didn't carry it alone."
She followed my gaze.
"No."
"He made copies."
"Yes."
"He hid them."
"Yes."
I let out a slow breath. The lesson came too late for him. But it didn’t for me and I knew what I had to do.
I reached for my phone again and opened Toxic's message from earlier.
Don't disappear into it.
This time I answered.
Found proof. Harrow was watching my family before the murders. Da hid an archive. Need the brothers.
The reply came quickly.
You have them.
I stared at the words.
Then I looked toward Skye, who was carefully placing my father's letter inside a protective sleeve as though it mattered not only as evidence but because a dead man had written it with his family in mind.
For fifteen years, I had believed surviving meant I had failed the people in this house.
The evidence said something different.
The men who came here had planned violence before I ever left. They had watched me, watched Da, and likely watched every member of our family long before I rode away that night.
And if I had been home when they arrived, there was every reason to believe five bodies would have been found inside this farmhouse instead of four.
The truth didn't make me grateful or make the grief seem any smaller. But for the first time since I was twenty-three years old, I could look at the night my family died and see something other than my own absence at the center of it.
Instead of seeing myself at the center of that night, I finally saw Harrow, the Order, and the men who had chosen murder because Declan O'Brien refused to stop asking questions. That changed everything.