Chapter 37 #2
“Leave it with us,” Becket said to me, softer this time. “We’ll run it. Dad wants an update at sixteen hundred. If anything, and I mean anything, feels wrong, you call us right away. Patrol is two minutes out.”
When they were gone, the kitchen felt too bright. Elyna exhaled like she’d been holding her breath through Becket’s entire visit. She pressed her hands to her eyes for a second. When she dropped them, there was a steadiness there that made something in my chest loosen.
“I’m not going to let them scare me,” she said simply, and I watched her in awe.
“Good,” I said, and my voice scraped a little. “Because I’ll die before I let them take anything else.”
Her mouth trembled and then firmed. She stepped into me like the room had tilted that way. I took her in, one hand at her nape, one at her waist. We stood there until the adrenaline eased and the world widened out enough for air.
The afternoon passed with us trying to occupy ourselves with ordinary, mundane tasks.
I repaired a sticky hinge on the mudroom door; Elyna washed Braden’s favorite fox because he managed to throw it in the garbage.
Eric dropped off soup while pretending not to see the way my shoulders relaxed when the porch cam showed his stupid backward baseball cap and not a stranger.
By three, the orchard went the color of pewter again, the light thinning the way it did in October before it got dark early, and the snow arrived. I was pacing and checking the feeds. I was so restless that I texted Becket again for the umpteenth time.
Any hits?
Becket: No, I’m working
“You’re wearing a path in the floor,” Elyna said, not looking up from the lower cupboard where she was trying to convince the Tupperware to respect geometry.
“Floor needed a path anyway,” I said.
She closed the cupboard and pushed up to standing. “Come sit.”
“Can’t,” I said. “If I sit, I’ll think about what could’ve happened if you’d opened that box with. . .”
“Phoenix,” she said my name with reverence that felt too damn good.
She crossed to me and set her palms at my jaw, forcing me to look in her eyes, which wasn’t a bad thing.
I mean they did suck me under today, they were gray with a ring of blue around them.
“I didn’t open it. I called you and you came right away. Braden and I are okay.”
Her words settled the storm inside me. They were okay. I nodded once. “Yeah.”
“Now sit,” she repeated, and the corner of her mouth tilted. “Please.”
I sat. She climbed into my lap like we’d been doing that in this chair for years, a soft, slow weight, tucked under my chin. I wrapped my arms around her and stared at the window and told every shadow it would have to come through me.
We stayed like that until the room blurred at the edges and came back sharp with a buzz. My phone lit with a number I didn’t recognize. I almost let it go to voicemail. Then I didn’t.
“Thorne,” I said.
A whisper came over the line. “Phoenix?”
I shot upright. Elyna felt it in my body and sat up too. “Harmony?”
“Yeah.” The whisper broke on the edges and steadied again like someone in a car trying not to hit a curb.
“You’re on speaker, but I’m alone. I’m driving.
” She sounded terrified. I hadn’t heard from Harmony since high school.
We had never been friends but the short amount of time she was with Eric meant I got to know her a bit.
“Where are you?” I asked, already pulling up the map tool in my head the way Becket did, measuring distance to the nearest exit ramp.
“Halfway between… I don’t know. Signs for Hawkesbury were behind me awhile back. I turned off because a black sedan tailed me for three exits. I think I shook them. I wanted to call Becket but I didn’t have his number.” Her voice was shaky.
Elyna slid her hand into mine and squeezed. “Harmony, it’s Elyna. Are you okay?”
“Define okay.” A small, wet nothing that might’ve been a laugh.
“They were in my building tonight. Two of them. They had the super open a maintenance closet because they said there was a leak. There was no leak. They asked for my apartment number. He didn’t give it.
He called me. I went down the back stairs and got in my car. I’ve been driving since.”
My teeth went tight enough to hurt. “You did good,” I said. “Stay on the phone. I’m looping Becket in.”
I merged the calls. Becket answered with “Yeah,” and Harmony inhaled like a startled bird.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Becket, you remember Harmony.”
“Hi,” she said, voice a thread.
“It’s been a long time,” Becket returned, softer than he was with most. Becket knew she had been in touch with Elyna. He knew the same people who were tailing her were the ones stirring trouble in Val-Du-Lys. I told him she had left Montreal and had men following her.
“Tell me what you’re seeing.” He went straight into police mode.
“Dark. Road. A truck two cars back. No headlights directly behind me,” she rattled. “I’m heading toward you. I thought about going to my dad’s or Nico’s but…”
“Don’t,” I said at the same time Becket did. “Stay on high roads. Stay lit. We’ll have eyes at the service line.”
“Okay.” A small sniff. “Phoenix?”
“I’m here.”
“If I’m overreacting. . .”
“You’re not, Harmony,” I said.
Silence held a second. “My father hasn’t answered my calls.
I mean, we haven’t really been in touch over the years, but I know if I would try to call him he’d answer.
He doesn’t have redeemable qualities. I’m not making excuses, but he hasn’t picked up my calls.
Nico came by the shop I’m working at while I was closing tonight and said, ‘He’s lying low.
’ My father doesn’t lie low. He schedules the weather. ”
If Nico was in Montreal, then things were serious. Marcel probably sent him to keep an eye on his daughter.
Becket’s voice went flatter. “We’ll find him. But your job is to get here without stopping.”
“Right.” She drew a breath, then another. “Tell Eric I . . .” She stopped. “No. Don’t tell Eric anything. Not yet.”
“I won’t,” I said. I felt Elyna’s eyes on me. She knew as well as I did that Eric and Harmony had a complicated past.
“I’ll call when I hit the Val-Du-Lys sign,” Harmony said. “That’s if I make it that far.”
“Stay with us,” Becket said. “I’m sending a patrol to meet you two kilometers before the line. Don’t stop for anything but them.”
“Got it.” The line clicked, but the connection stayed open.
I didn’t realize I’d started pacing again until Elyna’s hand caught mine and made me still. “She’s coming here,” Elyna said, not a question.
“Yeah.” I scrubbed a hand over my jaw. “And if they’re as smart as I think they are, they’ll try to use her to squeeze her father.”
“And us?”
“And us,” I said. “If they think we’re the leverage between Riley and the town’s money.”
Dusk settled and the orchard turned black at the edges. My phone buzzed with a message from Dad.
Dad: Patrol on the far gate. I’m nearby.
I stepped onto the porch to scan the lane.
The cold bit like a clean knife. I could see the service road through the bare-limbed maples one curve, then the next, then the straight shot down to town.
A distant cruiser’s lights cast a red-blue heartbeat across the trunks, then cut out.
Becket liked to keep things dark until he didn’t.
Headlights crested the far bend. One pair, moving too slow. They rolled three car lengths up the lane, then killed the engine. I lifted the radio Dad had shoved into my hand at lunch.
“Becket,” I said, keeping my voice low so it didn’t carry into the house. “We’ve got movement halfway up the lane. Vehicle cut its lights. I can’t see plates.”
“Copy,” he replied. I could hear the cruiser engine through the thin speaker. “Harmony’s ten minutes out. Patrol at the city limits just called. Stay put.”
I didn’t move. I listened.
The night on the Maple Valley property had a familiar ring to it, owls, coyotes, the cold rip of wind through the orchard rows. I’d been listening to it since I was a kid. But tonight, there were new sounds, the crunch of gravel under boots. Slow. Deliberate.
“Phoenix?” Elyna’s voice floated toward me softly.
“Stay with him,” I murmured back, not taking my eyes off the dark. “Don’t move.”
Somewhere down the lane, a second engine turned over and then stilled.
I’d turned off all the lights remembering Dad’s advice about the dark buying you time. I held on to the cold metal of the flashlight, keeping it off, so it was easier to see the shadows lurking in the dark of night. I breathed once, twice, until the sound of my own heart quit drowning the night.
The boots stopped.
The silence expanded thick and heavy, just like the second before thunder roared and lightning struck.
I kept my cool and waited for the thing in the dark to learn the first and last rule of this place, you don’t take one step farther toward my family and keep your name.