37. Felicity
FELICITY
The letters were everywhere.
Across the floor.
The bed.
Floating through the rain blowing in from the shattered window.
Sixteen years of love scattered across my childhood bedroom like ghosts finally ripped free.
My chest hurt so badly I could barely stand.
“Hersh…”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Because he was staring at the open box on the floor.
Not at the letters.
At the empty space inside it.
Wolf crouched beside the box carefully.
“Something was here.”
Trigger appeared in the doorway breathing hard. “Please tell me we shot somebody.”
“Nope,” Wolf answered.
“Disappointing.”
Normally that would’ve made me smile.
Tonight nobody reacted.
Because Hersh had gone terrifyingly still.
Rain lashed through broken glass behind him while lightning illuminated his face for half a second at a time.
Cold.
Focused.
Dangerous.
“What’s missing?” Wolf asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
My voice sounded tiny in the room.
Helpless.
I hated that.
Hersh finally knelt beside the box slowly.
One rough hand moved through the soaked letters with unbelievable care.
Like they mattered.
Like they were precious.
God.
My throat tightened painfully.
Because those letters were pieces of him.
And my father kept them hidden all those years.
Trigger bent to pick one up.
His expression shifted instantly.
“Oh man.”
Wolf glanced at him. “What?”
Trigger slowly turned the letter around.
The envelope was opened.
Every single one. I knew because I'd read every one of them.
Fifteen years of love written for me alone.
Hersh closed his eyes briefly.
And that hurt worse than if he’d yelled.
“You never even saw them, until after your dad died,” he whispered.
The grief in his voice nearly shattered me where I stood.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered instantly.
His head snapped up hard.
“Don’t.”
The word came sharp.
Immediate.
Protective even now.
“This isn’t on you.”
Tears blurred my vision completely.
But before I could answer?—
Wolf suddenly froze.
“Hold on.”
His flashlight angled deeper into the box.
Toward the bottom.
“There’s something else here.”
My pulse jumped.
Hersh looked down immediately.
Wolf carefully lifted a false cardboard panel hidden beneath the letters.
And underneath?—
my stomach dropped.
Photographs.
Dozens of them.
Old surveillance photos.
My breath caught violently.
“Oh my God…”
Wolf spread them across the floor carefully.
Pictures of:
my father outside the house,
me leaving work,
the grocery store,
the church parking lot,
the mailbox,
the diner in town.
Some were taken not long before my father died.
But others?—
My knees nearly gave out.
Others were years old.
Trigger looked sick now.
“How long were they watching her?”
No one answered.
Because suddenly the timeline became horrifying.
This wasn’t about witnessing a murder.
This started long before that.
Hersh slowly picked up one photograph.
His jaw tightened instantly.
I stepped closer carefully.
And my blood ran cold.
It was a picture of him.
Young.
Maybe twenty-two.
Standing outside a military airport with a duffel bag over his shoulder.
Watching my house from across the street.
“Oh God…”
Hersh stared at the photo like he’d been punched.
“I remember this.”
Wolf looked up sharply.
“What?”
“I came home on leave.”
His voice sounded distant now.
Haunted.
“Her father saw me parked outside.”
My chest tightened painfully.
“He came out with a shotgun.”
Silence slammed through the room.
Trigger blinked.
“A shotgun?”
Hersh nodded once.
“He told me if I loved her, I’d stay away.”
Pain twisted through me so hard I physically flinched.
And suddenly…
everything clicked into place.
The fear.
The letters.
The hiding.
The paranoia.
Dad wasn’t protecting me from Hersh anymore.
He was protecting Hersh and me from someone else.
Because if these people had been watching us for years…
then my father realized something horrifying before he died:
The danger attached to Hersh never went away.
And then Wolf found the last photograph.
The room went silent instantly.
Because this one wasn’t old.
It had been taken three days before my father died.
The photo showed:
my father is standing beside his truck?—
talking to a man in a dark suit.
A man whose face was partially turned toward the camera.
But not enough to hide who he was.
Ava’s voice echoed in my head instantly:
“The senator has people everywhere.”
Hersh stared at the photograph.
Then quietly said:
“That’s Senator Mercer’s chief of security.”