Chapter 2 #2
The woman nodded and stepped inside when Sutton let her. She was younger than Sutton had first guessed—maybe twenty-one, twenty-two. Pretty in an effortless way that suggested good genes and better nutrition.
Nervous, though. Her eyes darted around the parlor before landing on Sutton. “I’m Ginger,” the woman said. “Ginger Galbraith.”
The floor tilted again, harder this time.
Virginia “Ginger” Galbraith, sixteen years old at the time, daughter of Vice President Harold Galbraith. The girl Penn had tried to kill.
The girl Sebastian Whitaker had saved.
She’d been all over the news for months after the shooting—a pretty teenager with red hair and a famous father, the perfect sympathetic victim for a twenty-four-hour news cycle that feasted on such horrors.
And now she was standing in Sutton’s tattoo parlor. On the anniversary, only hours after the man who’d saved her life had stood in the same spot.
The universe isn’t subtle today.
“Ninety seconds,” Sutton said.
Ginger reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. Her fingers were trembling as she swiped to a photo and held it out. “Do you recognize this?”
It was a photograph of someone’s inner left bicep, taken at close range. A tattoo—abstract at first glance, flowing lines and shapes that looked like decorative body art.
But Sutton saw linework the way a musician heard pitch—automatically, granularly, with an instinct for the hand behind the instrument. She knew this hand.
The weight distribution in the curves. The way the shapes locked together like puzzle pieces, creating negative space that wasn’t negative at all.
The particular flourish at the terminal points—a tiny hook, almost a signature, that Penn used to put on everything he drew from the time he was fifteen.
“Where did you get this?” Sutton’s voice came out sharp and too fast.
“I saw it on someone,” Ginger said. “A man in Washington.” She swallowed hard, her composure cracking at the edges. “I’ve been looking into it. I think your brother was connected to an organization—a bad one. I think the assassination attempt wasn’t what everyone believes. I think Penn was—”
Sutton held up a hand. “Stop.”
The parlor felt too small, the air too thin.
In the span of a few hours, two people had walked into her shop and tried to rewrite the story she’d spent six years surviving.
Sebastian Whitaker with his steady voice and his guilt-soaked eyes, and now this girl—this woman—with her Washington connections, a photograph of her dead brother’s linework on a stranger’s arm, and a wild theory.
It was too much. All of it, on today of all days, was too much.
“You need to leave.” Her voice was flat and final.
“Whatever you think you’ve found, whatever theory you’re building—my brother tried to kill you.
That’s not a conspiracy. That’s what happened.
I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry you’re still looking for a reason that makes it make sense, but there isn’t one.
Like the news reported, he was obsessed with you. ”
They’d said her brother had mental problems. That he’d fixated on Ginger, and when something had set him off, he’d tried to kill her because he couldn’t be with her any other way.
Sutton hadn’t believed a word of it. The world had.
For a moment, Ginger looked like she was going to argue.
But Sutton’s expression must have landed, because she exhaled hard through her nose and pocketed her phone.
“I’m staying in town tonight,” she said.
“If you change your mind, I’m at the Ridgeline Motor Inn off Route 12.
Room 7.” She walked toward the door. “I’m not making this up, Sutton.
And I think they got it wrong about Penn—about his obsession with me. I don’t think it was that at all.”
Sutton nearly shoved her out the door, then locked it behind her and leaned her forehead against the cool glass. Through the window, she watched Ginger walk to the end of the block, stop under the streetlight, and tap her phone.
She didn’t leave. She stood there on the sidewalk in her expensive jacket, lit up like a model under the sodium glow, and started pacing.
Go home, Sutton thought. Back to D.C.
She turned away from the window and went back to finish closing.
She was reaching for the light switch when she heard the car. Sutton flipped the lights off and went to the window.
It was a dark sedan, headlights off, rolling east on the block at maybe five miles an hour. Ginger was still under the streetlight, phone to her ear, her back to the street. She didn’t notice it.
The sedan stopped.
Later, Sutton would try to reconstruct the sequence and find that her memory had broken it into frames—still images with gaps between them, like a graphic novel drawn by someone who’d left out panels.
Frame: the driver’s window sliding down, smooth and mechanical. Frame: the shape of something long and angular extending from the dark interior. Frame: Ginger turning, phone still at her ear, her face caught in the streetlight—young, open, alive.
Frame: a flash.
The sound came after—a flat, suppressed crack that didn’t echo the way gunshots did in movies. Two shots. Three. Ginger dropped straight down, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The phone skittered across the sidewalk.
Sutton couldn’t move. Her hand was still on the light switch, her body locked in paralysis. Some distant, screaming part of her brain told her to move move move, but her legs had turned to concrete.
Frame: the car door opened. A figure stepped out—dark clothes, economical movement. The figure walked to Ginger’s body. Crouched. Checked. Stood.
Frame: He looked over. Straight at the parlor window.
Straight at Sutton.
The overhead lights were off. She was standing in the dark behind glass. But the neon sign—the IRON ROS sign with the burnt-out “e” that Dom kept meaning to fix—threw enough red-and-blue glow into the front of the parlor to catch her face.
He saw her. The man took one step toward the parlor. Then another.
Sutton ran.
She didn’t grab her phone from the counter. She didn’t grab her jacket or her bag. She hit the back door at a dead sprint, slammed through it into the alley, and ran in the direction her body chose because her brain had stopped being in charge.
The alley was dark and narrow. Her Doc Martens slapped the pavement, too loud, a beacon in the silence. She cut left at the dumpster, squeezed through the gap between the check-cashing place and the fence, and came out on the next block.
She stopped, panting, until she heard a car cruising down the block. Heart racing, she passed the closed auto body shop. Her breath was coming fast as she made it to the vacant lot with the chain-link fence. Next came the intersection where the streetlight was out, and the dark smothered her.
She didn’t look back. Looking back was how people in horror movies died, and this wasn’t a movie; this was real. The woman on the sidewalk was real. She was dead and he saw my face he saw my face he saw my face—
She ran until her lungs caught fire, sure she kept hearing the sedan on the road.
The Hadley farmhouse sat at the end of Miller Road. It was run-down and lonely-looking, a single dim light on upstairs. Yet never had anything looked so good to her when she’d covered the distance from town to the farm.
Please be here, she whispered.
Since moving to the area, Sutton had never been out this way. Now she was standing on the porch in the dark, chest heaving, legs shaking. All she could see was Ginger Galbraith’s blood, her vacant stare.
She’d run two miles, most of it on back roads, staying off the main drag, cutting through yards and fields. At one point, she’d crossed a horse pasture where something large and dark had snorted at her, and she’d almost screamed.
By the time she found Miller Road, the adrenaline had burned through the panic and left her hollowed out. She was running on fumes and the stubbornness of a body that refused to stop moving.
She should go to the police. But the image of the figure stepping out of that sedan and the calm, efficient way he’d checked the body like it was a line item on a task list—made her shake.
He was a professional killer—she was sure of it—and she was only a tattoo artist on the bad side of town. The police might not understand.
This wasn’t a drive-by. This wasn’t random violence. And she was dead sure Ginger’s killer was now after her.
She needed someone who wouldn’t look at her like she was hysterical, and she only knew one person in Blackridge who fit that description—she’d told him to get out of her shop.
You don’t have to like him. You just have to survive the night.
She knocked.
Silence.
No, no, no! He had to be here.
A car drove down the road, and Sutton plastered herself against the left side of the door, panic making her nearly take off running again.
But the car drove on without slowing.
Bang, bang, bang. Her knuckles stung from hitting the door so hard. She heard footsteps—quick, deliberate. A light came on behind the door, and she heard the distinctive sound of a firearm being cocked.
She stumbled back as the door opened.
Sebastian stood in the doorway in a white T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, a handgun held low along his right side. His eyes swept her face, dropped to her shaking hands, her muddy shoes, and returned to her face. Confusion made his brows furrow. “Ms. Crenshaw?”
“Ginger Galbraith is dead.” Sutton’s voice came out raw and wrecked, scraped clean of everything but the truth.
Her gasps were too loud in her ears. “She was gunned down outside the parlor. And whoever killed her saw me. I think…” A glance over her shoulder confirmed no one was there, but the sensation of being followed lingered. “I think they’re after me.”
Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He reached out, took her arm, and pulled her inside.
The door closed behind her, the deadbolt turned, and for the second time that day, she was standing in a room with the man who’d killed her brother.
This time, the space between them wasn’t filled with anger and the sharp edges of shared grief. This time, it was filled with something worse.
Sutton needed him.