Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
DOMINIC
I'm sleeping on the floor outside her door.
Not officially. Officially I'm sitting in the hallway of the Summit Inn with my back against the wall and a paperback I'm not reading, keeping an ear on the stairs and the back entrance and the window at the end of the corridor that doesn't lock properly because June hasn't gotten around to fixing it.
It's been four days since the text. Four days since Harper showed me her phone with steady hands and terrified eyes and said, "Someone is sending me threatening letters. This text means they know I'm not in LA anymore. I don't know if they know where I am specifically."
She told me everything. The letters. The tour cancellation. The FBI investigation. The private security team running parallel. The manager who chose Summit Falls because it was small enough to disappear in.
She told me because I asked, and because I think she was tired of carrying it alone.
I called my former colleague at the Bureau that night.
Ran Harper's situation past him without using her name.
His assessment matched mine. The stalker has resources.
Access to her inner circle or someone adjacent to it.
The text to an unknown number means either her phone is compromised or someone in her camp leaked her status.
Neither option is good.
I told Harper I'd keep watch until her security team could get someone up here. That was four days ago. Her security team is spread thin running the investigation in LA. Her manager keeps saying someone is coming. Nobody has come.
So I sit in the hallway.
June brings me coffee at ten every night without comment. She also had Carl Jenkins come fix the window latch, which tells me she knows more than she's letting on and has decided to help in the way she knows how.
Harper opens her door at eleven fifteen. She's wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt and no makeup, and her blonde hair is loose around her shoulders, and she looks more like herself than she has since I first saw her in that terrible wig.
"You can't keep sleeping on the floor."
"I'm not sleeping. I'm reading."
She looks at the paperback in my hands. "You've been on the same page for two hours."
"It's a complex paragraph."
Her mouth twitches. Not a full smile. The architecture of one. "Come inside. I'll make you coffee. The real kind, not June's."
I stand up because she's right. The floor is killing my back, and whatever threat exists tonight isn't coming through the front door of an inn run by a woman who could stop a bear with a look.
Her room is small and warm. She's made it hers in the way people do when they're trying to convince themselves a place is temporary. A scarf draped over the lamp. A candle on the windowsill. A notebook on the nightstand with handwriting I can't read from this distance.
She makes coffee with a French press she must have bought at the general store, and the process is practiced and precise. She measures the grounds. Heats the water to just below boiling. Pours in a slow circle.
"You know your way around a press."
"I spent two years in Paris when I was twenty. Learned coffee before I learned the language." She pushes down the plunger with both hands. "My tour manager used to say my coffee habit was the most expensive item on the rider."
"What else was on the rider?"
"Throat coat tea, local honey, and a request for no flowers in the dressing room." She pours two cups. "I'm allergic to lilies. A fan sent two hundred of them to a show in Houston once. I sang the encore with hives on my neck."
She hands me a cup. Our fingers brush on the exchange, and the contact is so small it shouldn't register. It registers. The warmth of her hand against mine in the half second before she lets go.
I take a step back because proximity is a variable I need to control right now.
"Tell me about the letters again. The last three before the text."
Her eyes dim, but she sits on the edge of the bed and walks me through them. The details she remembers. The handwriting analysis her team ran. The paper stock. The postmarks from different cities, which means either the sender is mobile or using a mail forwarding service.
I listen the way I was trained to listen. For patterns. For the detail that doesn't fit. For the thing she doesn't realize she knows.
"The photograph of your bedroom window. What time stamp?"
"Two seventeen a.m. My security team pulled it from the metadata."
"And your bedroom faces which direction?"
"West. Toward the neighbor's property."
"Which means the photographer was standing on or near the neighbor's land. Did your team canvas?"
"They said they did."
I file that. "The shampoo reference. Was it a brand you use at home or on tour?"
"Home only. It's a small company. I order it online."
"So whoever wrote that letter has been inside your house or has access to your delivery records."
She wraps both hands around her coffee mug. "My team said the same thing. They changed all my passwords and rerouted deliveries to a PO box."
"After how many letters?"
"After the eighth."
Too slow. I don't say it. She already knows.
"Your security team. How many people have your current phone number?"
"Three. Leah, my manager. Carlos, head of security. And my assistant Brianna."
"Do you trust all three?"
The question lands harder than I intend. Her jaw tightens, and I watch her run through the mental calculus of examining the people closest to her for betrayal.
"I trust Leah with my life. Carlos has been with me seven years. Brianna is new. Six months."
"Six months. When did the letters start?"
"February." She meets my eyes. "Five months ago."
"And Brianna started when?"
"March." Her face goes pale. "A month after the first letter."
"I'm not saying it's her. I'm saying it's a coincidence worth examining."
She sets down the coffee and pulls her knees to her chest on the bed, making herself small the way she does when the fear gets louder than the logic.
I've catalogued this about her over four days.
The way she shrinks and then catches herself and straightens.
The fight between the woman she was and the woman the stalker is trying to make her.
I move to the window and check the street. Empty. One streetlight. June's cat crossing toward the diner.
"Dominic."
I turn.
She's looking at me from the bed with an expression I'm not equipped to process professionally. Open. Unguarded. The face of a woman who is seeing me without the filter of what I do or what I represent.
"Why are you doing this? You're on vacation."
"I was on vacation."
"You don't know me. You have no obligation."
"No."
"Then why?"
Because you flinch at screen doors and check behind shower curtains and your hands shake when your phone buzzes, and I've spent my entire adult life standing between people and the things that scare them, and you scare me because this isn't professional and I know it.
"Because I can."
She studies me for a long beat. Then she stands, crosses the two feet between us, and puts her hand on my chest.
My whole body goes still. Not frozen. Controlled. The way you hold steady when a situation escalates and the wrong move costs everything.
Her palm is flat against my sternum. I can feel the heat of it through my shirt, and her face is tilted up toward mine, and her mouth is close enough that the math on this is getting very simple.
"This is a bad idea," I tell her.
"I know." She doesn't move her hand.
"I'm supposed to be protecting you."
"You are." Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt. "You've been protecting me since the diner. Since before I asked. Since before you knew why."
She's right. That's the problem.
I bring my hand up to her jaw. Slow. Giving her every chance to step back. My thumb traces the line of her cheekbone, and her breath catches, and I'm close enough to see the exact shade of blue her eyes turn when she's not performing for anyone.
I kiss her.
It's not careful. I meant it to be. I had a whole plan for careful, for measured, for a kiss that respected the circumstances and maintained the boundaries and kept this thing between us in a box I could manage.
That plan dies the second her mouth opens under mine.
She tastes like coffee and something sweet underneath it, and she kisses me back with her fist still clenched in my shirt, pulling me closer, and I'm cupping her face in both hands now, tilting her head so I can kiss her deeper, and the sound she makes against my mouth rewires every circuit I have.
I pull back. Forehead against hers. Both of us breathing harder than the situation warrants.
"That can't happen again," I say. "Not while you're in danger and I'm the one at your door."
"Okay." Her voice is rough. Her hand is still on my chest.
"I mean it."
"I know you do." She lets go of my shirt and smooths the fabric where her fist wrinkled it. "That's why I believe you."
She steps back. Picks up her coffee. Takes a sip like the last sixty seconds didn't happen.
I go back to the hallway. Sit down against the wall. Open the paperback to the same page I've been staring at for two hours.
My mouth tastes like her coffee.
I don't turn the page once.