Chapter 2
Cold air pressed against Annie’s skin the moment she stepped into the Fairview police station.
The place looked exactly as she remembered.
Gray walls, scuffed floors, the faint smell of disinfectant and burnt coffee.
Why had she expected it to be different?
As if it bloomed into a high-tech crime lab the second she stopped being a cold case consultant four years ago.
The interview room hadn’t changed either. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, throwing harsh shadows across the scarred wooden table. Her hand cramped as she finished signing the last page of her statement. She flexed her fingers, wincing.
She’d insisted on writing it out herself instead of letting someone type it. Some things carried too much weight to risk being misunderstood.
Jack studied the pages. “Is that everything you can remember?”
Even after four years, he still noticed details like her handwriting. How carefully she formed each letter. How deliberately she crossed every t and dotted every i.
“Everything.” She rotated her wrist. Pain tugged at the bruises circling her skin. “He knew what he was after. No hesitation. No random searching. He went straight for the locket.”
“And you’re sure you’d never seen him before? Nothing familiar about his voice or the way he moved?”
She shook her head, though something stirred at the edge of her memory. The efficiency of his grip. The way he’d controlled her balance. But fear blurred the details, and adrenaline scattered them further.
“I need to get back to the shop.” She pushed up from the metal chair.
“Annie.”
His voice stopped her at the door.
She turned.
For a split second, she saw something in his eyes she remembered too well. Concern layered over restraint. The look he used to wear when they worked side by side and she believed she could trust him with anything.
“Be careful,” he said. “Lock your doors. And if anything else happens—anything at all—you call me.”
“I will.”
The words came out softer than she intended. The space between them thinned, fragile and dangerous. She squared her shoulders and left before he could say more.
The drive back to Main Street took only minutes, but she checked her mirrors the entire way. Every car that turned behind her sent a spike through her pulse.
Calm down.
She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. This wasn’t a movie. Not a thriller novel. Whoever broke into her shop knew the police stood between them now. They wouldn’t be reckless enough to try again so soon.
Yet her nerves refused to stand down.
The shop looked different in daylight. What had felt charming yesterday now felt exposed. Too many windows. Too many angles. Too many places for someone to watch.
She parked in the alley, keys already threaded between her fingers. The lock turned smoothly. She stepped inside and slid the deadbolt closed.
The shop still looked exactly as she had left it when the police finally cleared the scene in the early hours of morning.
Nothing had been touched. Nothing restored.
The intruder’s presence clung to every corner like a stain that refused to lift.
Overturned boxes lay where they had been dropped.
Papers were scattered across the floor in careless drifts.
Drawers gaped open. Furniture stood crooked and displaced, pulled away from walls as if the space itself had been searched and violated.
Insurance could replace broken objects. It could not repair the feeling that someone had walked through her life without permission. Someone had entered her space. Her future. Her fresh start—and torn through it with deliberate hands.
Her grand opening was three days away. Three days to put everything back where it belonged.
Three days to erase the visible damage before customers ever crossed the threshold.
They wouldn’t care about fear or sleeplessness or the bruises still blooming beneath her sleeves.
They would come looking for beauty. For history.
For stories polished smooth by time. And somehow, no matter what it cost her, she intended to give them exactly that.
She climbed the narrow stairs toward her apartment, planning each step of the morning. Change clothes. Coffee. Start reclaiming control.
The apartment door stood open, and cold flooded her veins at the sight. She definitely remembered locking it. Her hand drifted instinctively toward her phone as a sound met her from inside—a low, broken groan that didn’t belong in an empty room.
“Uncle Eric?” she whispered, pushing the door open wider.
He was the only other person who had a key.
The apartment lay in ruins just like the shop downstairs.
Cushions were split open, their stuffing scattered across the floor like snow.
Books had been torn from shelves and flung aside.
Cabinets gaped, and shattered dishes littered the linoleum.
The violence of it stole the air from her lungs as she stepped inside, knowing before she fully understood what she was seeing that whatever had happened here had not been about theft.
And in the center of it—
“Uncle Eric!”
He lay face-down, unmoving. Blood matted his gray hair and pooled beneath his head. His shirt tore open across his back, soaked dark.
Annie dropped to her knees beside him.
“No. Please. No.” Her hands hovered, afraid to touch him, afraid not to.
His chest lifted. Fell. Shallow. Uneven.
“Uncle Eric, can you hear me?” She pressed her fingers gently to his shoulder.
His eyes fluttered. Struggled. Focused.
“Annie.”
“I’m here. Don’t move. I’m calling for help.” Her hands shook as she dialed, but her voice stayed steady as she gave the address. Ambulance. Police. Both on the way.
Eric’s fingers closed around hers.
“They know,” he whispered.
“Who knows? Knows about what? Who did this to you?”
“They know about… about the locket.” His breath rattled. “Have to… have to bury it. Too dangerous.”
“You’re not making sense.” Panic tightened her chest. “Just breathe. Please.”
His eyes rolled back and his breathing hitched, a thin, broken sound that sliced straight through her.
Annie dropped beside him, pressing her ear to his chest, listening for the fragile rhythm of a heart that beat too weakly, too slowly, as if it might simply decide to stop.
Panic clawed up her throat. How did he know about the locket?
The question barely formed before her hand moved on instinct, tapping Jacks name in her contacts list.
The screen lit her shaking fingers, and there—like a ghost from a life she’d never truly left—Jack’s name glowed back at her. Over the last four years, she could never bring herself to delete his number. “Calloway.”
“Jack, it’s Annie. Someone attacked Uncle Eric. He’s hurt. Bad. We’re at my apartment. The ambulance is coming, but—”
“I’m on my way.”
The call ended. Four words. Solid. Certain.
Her chest loosened around them, and the fact that it made something warm in her gut.
She hated that his voice could still melt her.
Hated that it still steadied her when everything else was breaking.
Hated that after four years—after the silence, the unanswered why, the way he had walked out of her life and left her to stitch herself back together alone—he was still the first person she reached for when blood and terror shattered her world.
Hate would not hold her walls—not when someone had already crossed them, not when the danger had only begun.
Heavy footsteps thundered up the stairs as paramedics rushed past her, their urgent voices filling the apartment while equipment clattered against the floor.
As they worked over Eric, Annie’s gaze drifted numbly toward the kitchen wall, where something jagged had torn through the paint and caught the light.
Letters. Deep and violent. Carved with enough force to scar plaster.
YOU’RE NEXT.
***
Jack had been in the apartment when the EMTs arrived, their boots thudding through the wreckage as they dropped equipment beside Eric’s broken body and went to work.
Now he took the hospital stairs two at a time, his radio snapping with updates from the crime scene unit still combing through what was left of Annie’s home.
Forced entry through a rear window.
Signs of a violent struggle.
Blood consistent with blunt-force trauma.
But Jack already knew what they would find.
He had seen the apartment before they rushed Eric out on a gurney.
This hadn’t been a burglary. Nothing had been systematically taken.
Drawers hadn’t been emptied—they’d been ripped out.
Furniture hadn’t been searched—it had been overturned.
Whoever had done this hadn’t been looking for property.
They had been looking for answers. The wrecked apartment.
The deliberate brutality against an elderly man.
The warning carved into the wall. Someone was desperate to get their hands on that locket and would do whatever it took to get it.
He should have taken it into evidence immediately. Should have insisted Annie stay somewhere safe. Should have recognized the danger the moment she spoke the Blackwood name.
Eleanor Blackwood.
The case had gathered dust for nearly a century. Annie’s purchase had disturbed it. Whatever secrets lay buried there no longer felt secure.
Jack pushed into the surgical waiting area and found her at once.
Annie sat rigid in a plastic chair, hands stained with drying blood, eyes fixed on nothing. Eric’s blood.
The sight hollowed his chest.
“Any word?” He dropped into the chair beside her.
“Concussion. Possible skull fracture. They’re running tests.” Her voice held steady, but a faint tremor ran through her hands. “He was conscious when I found him. Not for long.”
“Did he say anything?” She turned, and fear slipped through the careful control in her eyes. “He said, ‘They know.’ And something about burying it. He wasn’t making sense.”
Cold slid down Jack’s spine.
They know about the locket.
What did Eric know about the locket that would make someone nearly kill him over it? Were they trying to get some information out of him? If so, how long had he kept this secret?
“Jack.” She studied him. “This isn’t just about the locket, is it? You know more than you’re telling me.”
He didn’t want to frighten her. He didn’t want to burden her with shadows and half-buried histories. But he wouldn’t hide what he knew—not from her, not now.
“I don’t know. But what I do know is the Blackwood's have a long, complicated history here,” he said. “Bootlegging. Organized crime rumors. Loads of money and no one is really sure where it came from.”
Her eyes sharpened. “And Eleanor?”
“Yeah.” He nodded once. “Eleanor Blackwood disappeared back in 1927. All the records say she ran away and started a new life because she was having marriage problems and couldn’t legally get a divorce.
But there are old diaries and journals and stuff in the library archives that say she never would’ve left her children.
The police searched for months but never found her. ”
“You think she was murdered?” Jack held her gaze.
“I have no idea, but it makes more sense than her just up and leaving town.”
“Yeah.” He drew a slow breath. “The locket you found belonged to Eleanor. She supposedly wore it everywhere. How is it still here in Fairview? Wouldn’t she have taken it with her?”
Her breath caught.
Silence stretched as Annie stared at the floor, rubbing her lower lip, her mind already moving. He recognized the signs—the way she sorted fear into questions, emotion into patterns.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why they sold it at all. If they knew it was there, why let it go?”
Her head lifted. “Maybe they didn’t know. Not until it was gone.” Her eyes widened slightly. “What if there are other things? Hidden in what I bought.”
This was how they had always worked. One thought opening another. Truth unfolding in careful steps.
“I want to help,” she said. “With Eleanor’s case.”
Fear tightened his chest—not of her curiosity, but of where it would lead. Of what had already followed her home.
“Annie, someone’s already willing to hurt people,” he said. “If we keep digging—”
“They’ll fight harder. I know.” She met his eyes. “But they hurt Eric because of me. Because I found something I wasn’t supposed to find. I can’t walk away from that.”
He drew a slow breath, then made the decision he’d been circling since the ambulance doors closed.
“If this stays what it is right now, I can’t justify bringing you any further into it,” he said.
“But this isn’t a normal case anymore. Whoever did this targeted a specific historical object, from a specific estate, tied to a disappearance that was never solved.
That makes your expertise relevant—legitimately relevant. ”
She stilled. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m not keeping you on the outside.
” He lowered his voice. “I’m bringing this to my captain and to the task force.
I’ll request you as a civilian consultant.
Officially. Limited scope. Artifact history.
Provenance. Estate dispersal. Anything tied to what came out of that Blackwood sale. ”
Her eyes searched his. “You’d do that?”
“I already called it in from the stairwell.” His mouth curved faintly. “They agreed we’re past the point of pretending this is a routine assault.”
The weight in her shoulders shifted, not gone, but redistributed—fear edged now with something steadier.
“If we do this,” he continued, “we do it carefully. You don’t go anywhere alone. You don’t confront anyone. You document everything. And if I tell you something is too dangerous, you listen.”
“Deal.”
She held out her hand. He took it. Warm. Familiar. Steadying in a way that unsettled him.
Memory pressed close—late nights, quiet prayers, lines he’d tried too hard not to cross.
He released her hand gently. Those days were behind them. This wasn’t about what they had been.
This was about protecting her now. And uncovering whatever someone believed the Blackwoods had hidden well enough to nearly kill for.