Chapter 18
ISLA
“My mom was murdered?” The words scrape past my teeth.
“Yes.” Gabe’s voice has no sugar coating.
Grief doesn’t come as tears this time. It comes as a free fall, like somebody just opened a trapdoor under my ribs. The floor tilts. I lock my knees until the room stops its slow carousel.
“What did he find?”
“He found MDMA metabolites,” Gabe says, “and a heavy dose of a beta blocker.”
“MDMA?” Luke rasps from the bed.
“Ecstasy,” I say automatically. “Together with a beta blocker? With her heart? It could’ve stopped it.”
I scan the mental catalog of her medicine cabinet. No beta blockers that I remember. And ecstasy? It doesn’t fit. Even when she was drinking heavily, she never did hard drugs.
Gabe continues. “By the time the lab reruns her samples, any traces will have vanished. The death will be ruled ‘natural causes’. Whoever killed her was counting on that.”
Luke’s eyes snap wide, pupils nearly swallowing the iris. He props himself up against the bedrail, wincing. “Isla, are you okay?”
My throat tightens. If I let the panic loose, I’ll crack in half. I press my palms to my thighs, forcing myself steady. “Who would do this to her? She was a nobody.”
The word tastes wrong as soon as it leaves my mouth. Nobody. She was my nobody.
Luke gently tugs on my fingertips, forcing me to look at him. “It doesn’t make sense. Yet. But there’s a reason. It may or may not have to do with you directly, Isla. But we’re going to find out.”
He says it like a vow, and I feel it in my bones. Luke has always been a man who keeps his word, even when it breaks him.
He shifts, drawing in a ragged breath, then falls back with a pained grunt.
I snap into work mode, putting all else aside. I slide the IV pole aside, and my fingers trace his shoulder lightly. “Do you remember when you took your last pain med?”
He quirks a grin. “Not long ago, Nurse Isla.”
My hand slips into his, and the crease between his brows eases, offering me relief.
Gabe steps closer. “How long until the doctors let you out of this place?”
Luke closes his eyes for a moment. “No idea. The sooner, the better.”
“We need to work these cases at your house. I don’t trust anybody in this town right now.”
Luke’s mouth lifts. “Forest HQ. I can live with that.”
The door swings open, and Nathaniel Wild enters on measured footsteps, polished shoes glinting, right sleeve hitched to show a pink compression band around his elbow. The color looks ridiculous on him—like a silk ribbon pinned to a bear.
He stops at the foot of the bed. He acknowledges Gabe with a nod, then heads straight for me and pulls me into a hug that smells like cedar and pepper. I stand stiff, arms trapped at my sides. Over his shoulder, Gabe chokes on a laugh and converts it to a cough.
Nathaniel releases me and sets his hands on my shoulders, his voice lower than I’ve ever heard it. “Isla. It’s good to see you, though I wish the circumstances were different.”
Luke coughs. “Dad, did you pick up happy pills on your way here?”
Nathaniel’s jaw tightens. “I’m relieved my son is alive. Is that unacceptable?”
Luke lifts his good hand in surrender, surprised into silence.
“Your mother will be here any moment. But before she arrives, I want to go over every detail of what happened.”
Gabe’s fingertips tap a patient rhythm against the vinyl armrest of the chair. I glance at him. He gives a bare shake of his head: not here.
“I’ll call Tim to make a formal statement,” Luke says, voice even. “We’ll start the investigation today.”
“Tim?” Nathaniel’s brows draw together. “This department doesn’t have the manpower to chase a shooter who ambushed their captain. You need professionals.”
“I don’t want private contractors,” Luke says, steel beneath the courteous tone. “My department will handle it. End of story.”
Nathaniel opens his mouth to argue, but then the door clicks. Elizabeth Wild slips in, pale under fluorescent lights, one arm in a pink bandage matching her husband’s.
Her eyes are rimmed red, but her spine is straight. She hugs Gabe, then turns to me and folds me into her arms the way she used to after Sunday dinners. Warmth, vanilla, the faintest trace of gardenia.
For the smallest moment, I’m eighteen again, tucked between her and Eden on the couch after Sunday dinner, pretending I belong here as much as the family photos on the wall.
“Hello, Mrs. Wild.” My throat is suddenly dry, and the words stick there.
She tips my chin. “Elizabeth,” she corrects softly. “We were too close once for ‘Mrs. Wild.’”
She moves to Luke’s bedside and gently sweeps hair from his brow. The simple gesture is so tender and so motherly. It’s so easy to remember what it felt like to be folded into this family. I push the thought away as my stomach knots.
“We should go,” Gabe murmurs.
Elizabeth gives me a smile that reaches the corners of her eyes. “Come back soon. He rests better when you’re near.”
A chord tightens in my chest. I glance at Luke, and his lashes lower, as if it costs him something to hold my gaze.
“Stay close to her,” he tells Gabe without looking away from me. “I’ll be out soon.”
Gabe nods and follows out.
As we step into the afternoon sun, he shivers before leading me to the car.
“What is that about?” I ask as he unlocks the doors.
“I hate hospitals. They smell like suffering.”
I shrug and slide into the passenger seat. “This one’s my least favorite, for obvious reasons. But I don’t mind hospitals in general. Good things happen in hospitals, too. Babies are born. Sick children are healed.”
Gabe starts the engine. “So much has hit you in forty-eight hours. Are you holding it together?”
“I’m sad.” My reflection in the window blurs as we pull onto the street. “But mostly I’m furious.”
Sadness feels too soft for this. Fury, at least, has teeth.
“Use that.” He gives the wheel a firm tap. “Anger moves things. Sadness waits.”
A small, grim smile. “Then I’m ready to move.”
“Good. First stop: my place. We need gear.”
By late afternoon, Luke’s dining table looks like a tech store that exploded—monitors, towers, coils of cable, a spill of notebooks, and Gabe’s sleek leather kit.
Each trip from the car makes my thighs chime with their complaints, and my lower back reminds me of recent close encounters with gravel and sidewalks.
Gabe studies my face. “What’s on your mind?”
“It just feels wrong being here without him.”
He shrugs, a crooked grin on his lips. “Nothing about the last few days makes sense. Wildhaven was quiet for decades—then suddenly people are getting run down and killed. I barely recognize this place.”
We crowd around the Villain Board—because let’s face it, it’s a murder board. Gabe uncaps a marker, and for the next half hour, we map a timeline:
ARSON – JUNE 2015
KIDNAPPING/ERASURE – JUNE 2015
THREATS – 2015, 2025
MOM’S DEATH – APRIL 2025
LUKE SHOT – MAY 2025
We add “black sedan/SUV,” “white van,” “injection site—behind the ear,” “MDMA + beta blocker,” and “strange red stone.” Arrows ladder between events like rungs of a crooked spine.
’Inside help?’ hovers near the words ’hospital transfer,’ because none of that night makes sense without a hand at the switch.
“There’s a pattern,” Gabe says, spinning a beer cap so it wobbles and hums. “It’s not clean, but something’s syncing these dates.”
I do my best to focus on the maps and timelines Gabe laid out, but part of me itches to drive back to the hospital, just to see Luke’s chest rise and fall. To reassure myself, he’s still breathing, still here.
My stomach growls like a caged animal. “Sorry,” I mutter.
“Don’t be. I’m hungry, too,” Gabe says. “I’ll run to the diner for burgers and hit the apartment to feed Hannibal. You stay. Door bolted. No answering knocks.”
I salute, and he frowns like I’ve insulted basic training. “Worst soldier ever.”
When the door closes behind him, the house goes quiet in a way that makes my skin itch. Wind sifts through the deck boards; pine hushes the eaves. The Villain Board stares back at me with its white eyes.
The open window breathes cool air across my skin and tempts me toward the deck chair with the view, but if Gabe catches me out there, he’ll revoke my outdoor privileges.
Instead, I call Erin. She answers on the second ring, voice warm and bright.
“I miss you,” I blurt.
“I miss you, too!” She rustles pages. “Before Connor went home, he left me a line in my notes app—hold on.”
Keys tap. She returns, reading in a mock-solemn tone, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea. My love is deep.”
A laugh spills out of me; some tightness uncoils. “Classic him. He’s happy.”
“I’d commit minor crimes for that kind of devotion,” she deadpans. Then softer, “Tell me everything.”
So, I do. For thirty minutes, I pour the week into her ear—threats and squealing tires, the way Luke’s kitchen looks in late light, how it felt to cook there, how it feels to breathe there. How my mother left me love, even now, in a letter I’m not yet brave enough to re-read.
Erin gasps in the right places, swears in others, threatens to drive up immediately, then lets me convince her to wait.
“Okay,” she concedes at last. “But what about Luke?”
“What about him?” I say, weakly pretending I don’t know what she means.
She snorts. “I know that tone. Be careful. But also…maybe don’t be careful.”
“I’m trying,” I say. A pause. “I love you.”
“Love you more,” she says, and hangs up.
The house feels emptier without her voice. I stand, stretch until my spine pops, and wander down the hall, trailing fingertips along the walls.
The claw-foot tub gleams under the vanity light, porcelain smooth and inviting. I shed my clothes in a crumpled heap, slipping between the hot, lavender-scented water.
The tub hugs every curve like it’s trying to convince my body it’s safe to soften for a minute, just one. I sink lower into the water, closing my eyes. The heat seeps into my shoulders, my neck, like fingers pressing gently against my skin. Luke’s fingers.
I can almost smell his cedar cologne, feel the scratch of his stubble against my temple. My chest tightens, lungs forgetting how to expand.
The phone buzzes against the tile, and bathwater sloshes over the edge as I jolt upright. I lift a towel to dry my fingers and reach for the device.
Before I can press unlock, the screen lights up with a new message. The words flash once, then I drop the phone as my stomach drops and the world spins in slow motion.
The phone buzzes again against the tile, and I snatch it up before I can overthink. My pulse stutters when I see it’s from an unknown number.
I swipe the screen open with damp fingers, half-expecting something horrible to be smearing at me on the other end.
Instead, this message stares back at me.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: How’s my tub?
The words are simple. Harmless. But heat crawls up my neck like wildfire. My eyes dart to the window, to the crack in the bathroom door, to every darkened corner as if he might be lurking, watching me soak like some tragic mermaid.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Hello? The silence is making me think you’ve drifted off.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Please don’t die in there. I don’t need a waterlogged ghost haunting my cabin.
Does he know? Did Gabe say something? Did Luke somehow guess that after all the chaos I’d retreated here, stripped bare and desperate for quiet?
I sink lower into the water until it laps at my chin, as though that could hide me from a man who isn’t even in the house. I take the opportunity to save the number under ‘Luke’—my phone wobbles in my slippery grip.
A dozen replies flash through my mind—flirty, defensive, angry, casual—but none feel safe. Every one of them admits too much.
Finally, I type the only thing I can manage:
Me: How do you know I’m in the tub?
I stare at the screen, mortified at how needy the words look in gray bubbles. My heart pounds like it’s trying to punch its way out of my chest.
The dots appear. Then disappear. Then appear again.
I squeeze my eyes shut, praying the floor will open up and swallow me whole before his answer lands.