Chapter 19
The bright lights in the Waffle House cast everything in a warm, welcoming glow. Tori stared at the slice of triple chocolate pie in front of her, the fork suspended halfway to her mouth.
“I can’t believe you ordered dessert.” Blade shook his head, amusement flickering in his blue eyes. “You were practically comatose for the entire flight. I had to check your pulse twice.”
“I was not comatose.” She took a bite of the pie, savoring the rich chocolate. “I was digesting. There’s a difference.”
“You snored.”
“For the last time, I do not snore.”
“The pilot asked if we needed to make an emergency landing.”
Her smile broke loose anyway. Blade kept needling, and for a breath, the worries of the day lifted. She let out a laugh, fork scraping ceramic, then her gaze slipped down. Two phones rested on the scarred Formica, screens black, waiting.
No calls. No texts.
“I’ve never seen a Mexican food coma up close before,” Blade continued, stirring sugar into his coffee. “All that salsa verde and those baskets of chips. Plus the ceviche. And the rice. And the—”
“Okay, okay. I get it.” She waved her fork at him. “But I needed something sweet. And caffeine.” She gestured to her steaming mug. “This is strategic fuel.”
The coffee was terrible. Bitter and thin. But it was hot, and it was keeping her hands busy. Otherwise, she’d be drumming her fingers on the table or biting her nails or doing any of the dozen nervous habits that betrayed how wound up she really was.
Had they given Janice enough questions? The list felt comprehensive when they’d created it, but now, sitting here rolling it through her head, every gap seemed glaring.
What if Damien decided to play word games the way he had with them?
Or launched into another lecture about fractals and mathematical patterns instead of answering direct questions about the night her parents died?
What if the warden refused to let Janice see him at all?
“She’s probably in there right now,” Blade said, as if reading her thoughts.
Tori nodded, not trusting her voice. Janice had texted forty minutes ago: “Cleared security. Going in.” Nothing since.
She forced herself to look away from her phone to the counter, where a waitress topped off sugar shakers.
A trucker perched on a red vinyl stool chuckled at something she’d said.
The cook behind the grill took a swig from his soda, then pressed a mound of shredded potatoes flat with his spatula.
At a corner booth, a family with two kids debated whether to share waffles or pancakes.
“What if he doesn’t talk to her?” The words tumbled out before she could stop them. “What if he just sits there and talks about God’s fingerprint the way he did with us for the first ten minutes?”
“He’ll talk.” Blade’s voice carried quiet confidence. “He reached out to you, remember? Through Corbin. He wants something. And Janice knows how to work people.”
She took another bite of pie, but it tasted like cardboard now. The sugar rush she’d been hoping for felt more like a crash waiting to happen. “What if we’re wrong about everything? What if there is no second murder book? What if Damien is just—”
“Playing games?” Blade finished. “Then we’ll figure that out too.”
But what if they were chasing shadows? What if she were putting everyone she cared about at risk? Blade had already lost Kiara.
Her phone buzzed.
Tori lunged for it, but it was just a spam text about how much money she owed to the toll authorities. Tori’s heart hammered against her ribs as she set the phone back down.
“She said she’d call as soon as she was out,” Blade said.
“Or she might just show up here.” Tori pushed the pie around on her plate. “Janice doesn’t strike me as the type to waste time with phone calls when she could just drive over.”
“True.”
The bell above the door chimed as someone entered. Tori’s head popped up, but it was just another trucker.
Twenty-six years of questions. Twenty-six years of wondering what really happened that night. And now, somewhere behind the concrete walls and razor wire of Union Correctional, a woman in a cheetah-print dress was getting the answers Tori had been searching for her entire life.
Or walking into another dead end.
The silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft clink of silverware against plates and the distant hum of the grill. Tori pushed the chocolate pie around her plate again, her mind spinning in circles she couldn’t escape.
“Is gator wrestling a real thing?” The question popped out before she could stop it. “Like, do people actually make money doing that?”
Blade paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips. “Random question.”
“I need a distraction.” She gestured at her phone. “And I was thinking about your whole swamp childhood thing. So, is it real or just some tourist-trap nonsense?”
A slow grin spread across his face. “Oh, it’s real. My uncle Ricky used to make decent money at it during tourist season. Couple hundred bucks a show if he was lucky.”
“Are you serious?” She set down her fork. “People pay to watch someone wrestle an actual alligator?”
“Tourists eat it up. Uncle Ricky had this whole routine. He’d start with the smaller ones, maybe six or seven feet, work his way up to the big boys.
Twelve, thirteen feet.” Blade reached over and stole a bite of her pie.
“The trick is knowing where to grab them. Get behind the front legs, clamp down on the snout, and don’t let go. ”
“That’s insane.” But she found herself picturing it. Blade in the mud, all that controlled strength focused on something that could kill him with one snap of its jaws. “Although I have to admit, seeing you tackle a twelve-foot gator might be amusing.”
“Amusing?”
“Educational. I could study your technique. For science.”
“Uh-huh.” He took another bite of her pie. “You’d probably be taking notes. ‘Subject demonstrates poor decision-making skills. Recommend psychological evaluation.’”
Despite everything, she laughed. “I would not.”
“You absolutely would. You’d have your little notebook out, documenting my risk-taking behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms.”
“Okay, maybe I would.” She reclaimed her fork before he could steal more pie. “But only because wrestling prehistoric death machines would definitely qualify as abnormal behavior.”
She leaned into the banter and felt a real smile curling at the corners of her mouth. They were just two friends sharing terrible diner food instead of two people whose worlds had been turned upside down by murder and conspiracy and family trauma that had shaped their entire lives.
“Do you still see them? Your brothers and sisters?”
The easy smile faded from Blade’s face. He stared down at his coffee cup. “No.”
“Not at all?”
“Not since I was fourteen.” His tone carried professional distance. “They made their choice. I made mine.”
She waited, recognizing the pain behind those simple words.
“After everything went down, my parents decided I was too much trouble.” Blade stole her fork again and raked lines in the chocolate with the tines. “They had seven other kids to worry about, and I was the least of their worries.”
“Blade—”
“It’s fine.” But the tightness around his eyes said otherwise. “Better this way. Clean break.”
She understood that logic. The brutal mathematics of survival that foster kids learned early. Sometimes cutting ties was the only way to move forward. But understanding it didn’t make it hurt less.
“You want to know the funny thing?” Blade’s laugh held no humor. “I was the good kid before that night. Quiet, stayed out of trouble, helped with the younger ones. I was fishing off that pier, waiting for my parents to finish some business deal, when I heard you scream.”
They’d never talked about the details of what that night had cost him. All these years, she’d carried the guilt of the reckless choices that put her at that pier. The violence that followed.
“I was such a mess back then,” she said. “Angry at the world. Running with this crew that made me feel tough, shoplifting, staying out all night. I thought I was so smart, so independent.”
“You were a kid.”
“I was an idiot.” She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug, seeking warmth. “The guy who attacked me was connected to the gang I’d been running with. I was tired of it. Tried to walk away, and they decided to teach me a lesson about loyalty. If you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t acted . . .”
“But I was there.”
“And it destroyed your life. Your family, your future, everything you’d planned—”
“Tori, look at me.”
She did and found those steady blue eyes that had anchored her through more storms than she could count.
“That night didn’t destroy my life. It changed it. There’s a difference.”
“How can you say that? You lost everything.”
“I lost a family that was willing to throw me away the second things got complicated. I lost a future that probably would have involved running bait lines and patching airboat engines until I was too old to work. But Stryker found me. And I found the program. I found a purpose.”
“You found me,” she said quietly.
“Yeah. I found you.”
His hand crossed the table, big and warm, closing over hers. He pried her fingers from the mug and kept them locked inside his grip. Two broken kids who’d somehow managed to piece each other back together, one shared moment at a time.
“Stryker saw something in both of us,” Blade said. “Two sides of the same coin, he used to say. You were running toward danger, I was running toward justice. Both of us were running from pain.”
“And he convinced a judge to give us both a chance.”
“Best thing that ever happened to us.”
The booth felt smaller than it had five minutes ago. She studied his hand over hers. Years of history in that grip. The connection wasn’t just friendship. It was deeper and more essential than oxygen. Blade was the other half of her story, the missing piece that completed her.
The bell over the door chimed, and she pulled her hand back. Some observations were better left unexamined.