14. Roman Osprey
Roman Osprey
Astorm breaks as we pull into Scarlet’s drive.
Rain hits the swamp hard and fast, drumming against the SUV’s roof while Wes carries evidence boxes inside like he personally intends to arrest the weather.
Inside, Scarlet disappears down the hallway to change before either of us can stop her from tracking marsh water through the house.
A minute later, old blues crackles from the record player. Vinyl static threads beneath the singer’s voice while rain pounds the windows.
I set the camera case on the kitchen table and glance toward Wes.
He drops a stack of folders on the counter with more force than necessary.
“She’s becoming comfortable with us,” I say.
“You say that like it’s reassuring.”
“I say it like we need to be careful what we do with it.”
In the bond, I feel the war waging between the alpha and the man.
The house smells different tonight. Scarlet’s sage, rain, and honey still live in the wood and soft furniture, but now cedar, cinnamon, and cardamom move through the rooms with it.
Our scents have remained since last night, caught in the quilt on the couch and the jacket she left hanging across a kitchen chair.
My beta recognizes the mixture as pack. Home is too large a word. It still comes close.
Wes unpacks the evidence without looking at me: sample bags, photographs from the gathering path, the white ribbon, images of the muddy residue inside the museum display.
“What is bothering you?”
“The case.”
“Only the case?”
His attention moves toward the hallway Scarlet disappeared down. Wes has spent his adult life building walls between instinct and decision. Usually, that discipline makes him good at his job. Right now, it has him trying to file wanting Scarlet under operational risk.
“What happened last night doesn’t make her ours.”
His jaw works once. “I’m aware.”
“But?”
He exhales through his nose. “But I want it to.”
“That isn’t the dangerous part.”
His eyes narrow.
“The dangerous part is deciding distance is the only way to prove you’re still objective.”
“I’m not withdrawing.”
“You’re unpacking evidence like it insulted your family.”
“It’s poorly labeled.”
I glance at the neat black printing on every file we copied at the sheriff’s office in town. “Obviously.”
The corner of his mouth almost moves. Then his expression settles. “If I stop questioning her because I want her, I’m useless to her.”
“Yes.”
“If I let Tom argue that attraction compromised the investigation, anything we find that clears her becomes easier to dismiss.”
“Yes.”
“And every instinct I have is telling me to put her in the truck, take her somewhere safe, and keep the town away from her.”
“That one sounds less procedural.”
“It is.”
I step closer and rest a hand at the back of his neck. His muscles remain tense beneath my palm. “You can want all of that and still let her choose to get close,” I tell him. “You can follow the evidence without making her pay for the fact that you care.”
His gaze returns to mine. “And you?” he asks.
“I’m not pretending I don’t want her.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“No.” I rub my thumb once beneath his hairline. “I want to keep touching her. I want to know what she looks like when she stops waiting for care to disappear. I also know Scarlet is never going to let her pack manage her.”
Wes makes an amused sound. “She would stab us.”
“With impressive accuracy.”
That earns me a smile. It’s small but real.
I lean in and kiss him. His hand closes around my hip, pulling me close enough that the tension in his body has somewhere to go.
The kiss stays brief because Scarlet’s footsteps sound in the hallway, but affection moves warm and settled through our bond. Wes releases me without stepping away.
Scarlet enters, wearing an oversized coffee colored sweater and soft black shorts. Her auburn hair hangs loose around her shoulders. She has wiped the mud from her legs but missed a streak along one knee.
Her gaze moves between us. “What were you discussing?”
“Evidence labels,” Wes says.
She looks at my hand still resting near his waist. “Intensely?”
“We care about administrative standards,” I tell her.
“That’s the least convincing thing either of you has said.”
She crosses the kitchen and stops beside the evidence wall. Photographs and notes cover only part of it. Scarlet studies the arrangement. “You made my dining room look like a crime show.”
“Your pushpins are aggressively cheerful,” I say.
“They came in a floral stationery set.”
Wes pins the photograph of the white ribbon beneath the image of the gathering path.
I open one of the museum restoration folders. “Myrtle sent these. Most of it is renovation records and old exhibit photography.”
Scarlet moves beside me. Her shoulder presses against mine while she leans over the table. The contact is casual for perhaps three seconds. Then she stays there. With her close, my instincts settle.
Wes stops moving for half a second. The room gets warmer, and the investigation suddenly feels complicated.
Thunder rattles the old windows.
Scarlet moves toward the kitchen cabinets. “Coffee?”
“Yes,” Wes and I answer together.
She snorts softly without turning around.
I watch her move through the kitchen while Wes unpacks evidence beside me. There’s an ease to her here that doesn’t fully surface in town. The swamp softens her edges, her posture loosening inside these walls like the crooked floors recognize her in a way the square never has.
My gaze drifts toward the tarot deck sitting near the far bookshelf. The top card has shifted halfway out of the pile. The Lovers.
Scarlet notices me looking and narrows her eyes. “Don’t start.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a face.”
“Focus,” Wes says.
The word carries enough alpha command behind it that Scarlet’s breath catches. It’s a small involuntary thing, her pulse jumping once at the base of her throat before she turns back toward the coffee pot. The room gets warmer still.
We comb through the new information for a few minutes. When we’ve got our bearings, Wes spreads photographs across the table while I organize archive pages beside them.
Scarlet sets three mugs down and watches me reorganize the photographs chronologically. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Adding to the murder wall.”
“Don’t you have a hotel room for this?”
“Your place is better.”
Wes pins the museum blueprints near the center of the wall. “Start simple. What do we know?”
Scarlet folds her arms beside me while Wes lays out the theft timeline.
The archive records were accessed two weeks before the stone disappeared, which means whoever took it already knew the Heritage Hall layout before the cameras went down.
This wasn’t a crime of opportunity but a planned extraction.
And whoever planned it knew enough about the old rituals to seek out specific materials.
Scarlet steps closer, the sleeve of her sweater brushing my forearm as she studies the photographs. I look at the images.
Then Wes pulls a second folder from the evidence box and spreads another set of photographs across the table: crime scene stills, lab reports, and satellite images, all from the GatorX case.
Scarlet’s expression sharpens as she studies the files. “Those are from your original investigation.”
“Known distribution sites,” Wes says.
I pin the images beside the marsh maps: an abandoned fish processing facility outside Baton Rouge, a coastal site in Georgia, a derelict marina in south Alabama. Every location sits near water.
Scarlet sees the connection quickly. “These are all wetlands.”
“Wetlands that have hidden transport channels. All are areas difficult to monitor from standard road surveillance,” Wes says.
I put the marina image next to the old springs map. The similarities become obvious side by side. They all have remote water access, limited visibility, dock structures, and ritual markings near shoreline approach points.
Scarlet tenses. “You’ve seen those marks by the dock before. You think they’ve been using the old rituals before Sweetheart Haven?”
“No,” Wes says. “I think whoever built the Southern distribution pattern may have borrowed from something they learned here.”
Rain rattles hard against the windows.
Scarlet turns toward the bookshelf near the hallway. “Wait.”
She disappears briefly and returns carrying one of her grandmother’s older journals and several folded papers yellowed with age. “My grandmother tracked instability episodes long before the town acknowledged them publicly.”
She spreads hand-drawn marsh maps and papers with dates, names, and documented bond incidents beside the GatorX files.
Then she pins one near the center. It’s a faded diagram circling the old springs in red ink.
Beside it, a list of bond fractures dating back decades, several names carrying small white ribbon symbols beside them.
Beneath the list, in her grandmother’s handwriting, reads Patterns strongest following release gatherings.
“That symbol,” I say.
Scarlet nods. “I thought it was shorthand for failed bonds.”
“It matches the ribbon placement at the springs,” Wes says.
She crosses toward another stack of notebooks near the couch and returns with several loose pages that were tucked between them. “I forgot these were in here.” She smooths them flat. “She tracked emotional distortion too.”
Wes looks up sharply. “Distortion?”
The handwriting on these pages is tighter, more hurried.
They detail heightened abandonment responses, aggression spikes during vulnerability, and bond confusion in people already suffering severe bond deterioration around the time release gatherings were held.
Near the bottom margin, a date is circled heavily.
“Those aren’t random emotional reactions,” I say.
“No,” Scarlet murmurs. “They’re a symptom pattern.”
Wes circles part of the marsh map with a red marker. “Here’s what your grandmother’s maps miss.”
Scarlet blinks at him. “Excuse you.”
“Look at the access routes.”