Chapter 44
Wes had spent most of his meeting only half present.
The government contractor across the table had been thorough—floor plans, timeline, budget parameters—and Wes had asked the right questions and taken the right notes.
But some part of him had never fully left Refuge Cove. It kept pulling him back.
The detectives’ SUV in the driveway. The way Rowan had looked standing on the porch after they left, holding herself together with both hands.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out.
Calloway.
He excused himself, insisting this call was important, and he stepped into the hallway. “What’ve you got?”
“Something ugly,” Calloway muttered. “I’ve been digging into Vince’s history the way you asked. Pulled on a few threads. One of them led somewhere I wasn’t expecting.”
“Talk to me.”
“There was a camera operator on one of Vince’s productions about three years back.
Young guy who worked his way up from assistant.
Anyway, he started asking questions about equipment that had gone missing from the set—hidden cameras, audio recorders, that kind of thing.
” Calloway paused. “He died three months ago.”
Wes slowed near the window at the end of the hallway. “How?”
“Official ruling was suicide. Pills and alcohol in a hotel room.” Papers shifted on the other end of the line. “But one of the responding officers flagged something afterward that never made it into the report.”
“What kind of something?”
“In the week before his death, this guy’s name started appearing everywhere online. Angry posts on industry forums. Accusations from colleagues about erratic behavior on set. A drinking problem nobody had apparently noticed before suddenly became common knowledge.”
Wes’s pulse kicked faster. “Is that right?”
“It is.” Calloway’s voice dropped. “By the time he turned up dead, the story was already written. Anyone who might’ve asked questions had already been handed a reason not to.”
Wes had seen this before. Not in Hollywood but in the field. Sometimes, a target didn’t get eliminated directly. Sometimes the more effective approach was to discredit a person first. To strip away their credibility, their support, their ability to be believed.
By the time the real damage came, there was no one left on their side to push back.
Vince was constructing a narrative around his enemies before he neutralized them.
And right now, that exact pattern was playing out around Rowan.
Erratic behavior. Emotional episodes. Disappearing without explanation.
Every headline. Every unnamed source. Every careful word from Vince’s interview about hoping she got the support she needed.
It had never been damage control.
It had always been preparation.
“Wes?”
“I hear you.” He was already moving back toward the conference room to collect his things. “Keep pulling. I want to know if there are others.”
“Already looking.” Calloway paused. “Watch your girl.”
Wes ended the call and immediately dialed Rowan.
The phone rang once before going to voicemail.
He frowned and called again.
Again, straight to voicemail.
Unease settled deeper inside him now.
He checked for messages.
There was nothing from Rowan. No missed calls. No updates.
But something was wrong.
He felt certain of it.
Lauren remained near the front window even after Rowan closed the door.
Her shoulders stayed tight beneath the oversized jacket, her attention drifting toward the driveway and the woods beyond it as if she couldn’t quite make herself stop watching.
“You can sit down,” Rowan said.
Lauren startled. “Sorry.” She rubbed her hands together once. “I keep forgetting where I am. I’ve been on edge for so long . . .”
“I understand.” Rowan meant the words.
She’d spent most of a week feeling exactly that way—present in a room but never fully inside it, always halfway somewhere else.
Lauren finally looked at her. Something in her expression shifted, softening just slightly at the edges. “Thayer used to talk about you. Did you know that?”
Rowan blinked. “No.”
“He did.” A faint sad smile touched Lauren’s mouth. “He said you were one of the few people on that set who treated everyone the same whether the cameras were rolling or not.” She looked down at her hands. “That’s why I reached out to you. I didn’t know who else would actually listen.”
The words landed somewhere tender. “I’m glad you did. Come on.”
She led Lauren toward the kitchen and pulled two water bottles from the refrigerator. The ordinariness of the gesture felt strange.
Lauren took the bottle but didn’t open it. Instead, she leaned against the counter, still appearing too wound up to fully settle.
Rowan waited—trying to be patient—for her to start.
“Thayer knew something was wrong for a while,” she started.
“At first, he thought Vince was just difficult. He’s the kind of director people warn you about but you work with anyway because the credits are worth it.
That’s what Thayer said.” She paused. “But then he started noticing things that didn’t add up. ”
Her heart thumped in her ears. “What kind of things?”
“He bought these new cameras—they actually had trackers on them.” Lauren’s jaw tightened. “Some of them went missing, so he traced their location. It turned out, someone had taken them and was using them in trailers. In a hotel suite. In a production office.”
Rowan’s stomach turned even though she already knew part of this. Knowing and hearing it said plainly were different things entirely.
“Thayer realized that someone was recording people,” Lauren continued. “Not just conversations. Private moments. Arguments. Things people would do anything to keep quiet.”
“That’s disturbing, to say the least.”
Lauren set the water bottle on the counter. “Then he overheard a conversation from one of his assistants. He was being blackmailed. Thayer put everything together. He realized it was Vince. That he was keeping files on people.”
“To control them,” Rowan said.
“Yes.” Lauren reached into her bag and set a small external hard drive on the counter between them. “My brother copied what he could find. He told me if anything ever happened to him I needed to take this and disappear.” She looked up. “At first, I thought he was being paranoid.”
“But then he died.”
Tears filled Lauren’s eyes. “He did.”
“I’m so sorry, Lauren.”
She sniffled. “Me too. I have to do something about it. I can’t lose . . .” Her voice trailed.
Rowan looked at the hard drive. “What’s on it exactly?”
“I haven’t opened everything. I was scared to.
” Lauren folded her arms across herself.
“But Thayer told me there were at least two deaths he’d connected to Vince.
A stunt coordinator a few years back—officially an overdose, but Thayer found messages suggesting Vince had been threatening him for weeks before it happened.
And a camera operator more recently. Painted as unstable online before he died.
” She swallowed. “Same pattern both times.”
The chill shivered through Rowan’s chest.
Wes had said something exactly like that. He builds the story before he neutralizes the problem.
She’d become the next story Vince was building.
“How many people know you have this?” Rowan asked.
Lauren’s eyes met hers. “Just you.”
Rowan looked at the hard drive another moment, then back at Lauren. “Are you sure no one followed you here?”
“I was careful.” Lauren hesitated. “I think I was careful.”
The distinction between those two things sat heavily in the kitchen.