Chapter 4

THE PRICE OF SILENCE

 Kirrily "Rindy" Cross POV

​Rain poured over the southern coast  and dragged the sky down with it, turning the blue horizon into a  darkened,sad looking.

​I stood in the narrow doorway of my cottage, watching Toby splash in a slight   shallow pool near the garden fence. He had his little red raincoat zipped up to his chin, his yellow rubber boots  trampling into the muddy water with pure, unbothered joy. Every splash was loud, innocent, and bright against the oppressive silence of the  crags.​I gripped the wooden doorframe,  the damp wood digging into my palm.​Inside my coat pocket, the burned phone felt heavy, like a heavy weight pressed against my chest. Tahlia's warning echoed through my ear.  “if you don't come, you will never know what  happened  to your sister”.

​I had a large piece of heavy metal down my chest. closed my eyes and leaned my head against the door.

​Stay, my instinct screamed at me. Stay in this quiet corner of Byron Bay. Lock the iron deadbolts. Ignore the algorithm. Eat soup with Toby on the porch and let the rest of the world burn itself to the ground.​It was a tempting dream. A safe, beautiful lie.​But lies were expensive, and I was running out of money to pay for mine.​I opened my eyes and looked back into the dark interior of the cottage. On my strong wood desk, right beside my restoration tools, sat three unopened white envelopes with red urgent stamps resting on top of my utility bills.​The offshore proxy server I used to scramble my IP address had raised its monthly retainers. My quantitative trading algorithm, the ghost script that had fed us for three years, was crippled, locked down by Lawson Maritime’s automated firewalls after last night’s digital breach. The four hundred dollars I usually drew every Tuesday wasn't coming.​My bank account had six hundred and twelve dollars left in it.

​Six hundred and twelve dollars to pay for rent on a fortified cliffside house, for Toby’s milk, for his asthma inhalers, for the diesel fuel in my rusted station wagon. In less than three weeks, the financial floor beneath my feet would cave in, and I would be forced to apply for public assistance under my real legal name Kirrily Cross.​The moment my name entered an official government database, the shadows that swallowed Evie would find me.​I walked back into the kitchen, my bare feet cold against the wooden boards. On the small kitchen table lay worn animal skin photos and a book of memories I hadn't opened in two years.​My fingers trembled as I lifted the cover.​Inside was a single newspaper clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald, dated four years ago.​UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN MISSING AFTER DARLING HARBOUR STORMPOLICE SUSPECT FOUL PLAY IN DOCKLAND DISAPPEARANCE​No photograph. Nobody. Just two brief paragraphs describing how an auditor’s umbrella and handbag had been found abandoned near the water’s edge on a rain-drowned Tuesday night.

​I traced the faded ink with my thumb. My eyes stung with hot, bitter tears that I refused to let fall.​Evie hadn't just been my sister; she had been my anchor. When our parents died in a highway crash when I was sixteen, Evie dropped out of her post graduate studies to work two jobs so I could finish school. She had sacrificed her youth, her freedom, and her dreams to build a shield around me.​And when she vanished into the darkness of Darling Harbour, I had run away. I had packed a single bag, grabbed her encrypted journals, and fled north like a wounded animal, leaving her memory buried beneath the waves.Am I going to keep running forever?​"Mummy?"Toby’s small voice broke through the fog in my mind. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding his wet rubber boots in one hand and his wooden kangaroo in the other. His blue-green eyes were wide and curious, searching my face with that extremely scary intuition children possessed.

​"Hey, sweet boy," I said, my voice cracking slightly. I quickly closed the scrapbook and wiped my face with the back of my sleeve. "Are you cold?"​"No," he said, stepping into the room and leaning his head against my knee. "Why are you sad?"​I stooped down, pulling him into my lap, wrapping my arms around his small frame until I could feel his steady, warm heartbeat against my collarbone. He smelled of rain, grass, and baby shampoo.​"I'm not sad, Toby," I lied, pressing a long kiss into his soft blonde curls. "Mummy is just... thinking."​"About Auntie Evie?" he asked softly.​My heart stopped. "Who told you about Auntie Evie?"​"The big man in the leather coat last night," Toby mumbled, yawning against my shoulder. "He said Auntie Evie used to draw birds in books, just like you."

​A sudden shake ran down my spine. Sergeant MacIntyre hadn't just come to warn me; he had stood over my sleeping son and talked to him about my dead sister. The reach of Banjo Lawson wasn't a threat waiting on the Melbourne horizon; it was already inside my sanctuary. It was breathing down my neck.​I held Toby tighter, my mind racing through the options like an algorithm evaluating risk.

​If I stayed here, I would be a sitting duck. The money would run out, the protection would fail, and whoever murdered Evie would eventually realize the ghost in Byron Bay was her little sister.​If I went to Melbourne, I was stepping directly into a war zone. But I would have Tahlia’s protection in the archives. I would have twenty-four hours to examine Evie’s cipher on that 1890 manifest, decode whatever final message she left behind, and use that leverage to force Banjo Lawson to leave us alone forever.​It wasn't a choice. It was a trade. My safety for the truth.​"Toby," I murmured, pulling back to look him in the eye, forcing a small, reassuring smile to my lips. "We're going to take a short trip. We're going to ride on a train to a big city with tall buildings and ships."

​His eyes lit up with excitement. "A train? Today?"​"Today," I said.​Three hours later, the old timber cottage was dark and silent once more.​I had packed two small duffel bags, one filled with Toby’s clothes and coloring books, the other packed with my specialized restoration kit,bone folders, iron gall testing reagents lens glass, and the encrypted burn phone.​I stood on the front porch, pulling the heavy brass key from the lock, turning it twice until the deadbolt clicked into place with a hollow sound.​The coastal fog had rolled in thick, swallowing the Eucalyptus trees and hiding the road below.​I took Toby’s hand, guiding him toward my station wagon parked in the gravel driveway. Every step away from the cottage felt like tearing a piece of my own skin away.

​As I unlocked the car door, the soft, distinct ringing sound of an incoming text message echoed from my coat pocket.​I pulled out the burn phone.​It wasn't from Tahlia.​The message was an automated notification from my home security network, the local motion sensor grid I had installed along the cliff fence behind the cottage.​SECURITY ALERT: BACK PERIMETER BREACHTIME: 11:42 AMCAMERA FEED: CORRUPTED / OFFLINE​My hand went rigid on the door handle.​I slowly turned my head, looking back through the moving fog toward the quiet cottage.​Standing on the edge of the dark cliff, barely ten yards from my bedroom window, were two tall figures in black raincoats. They weren't moving. They weren't calling out. They were just standing in the misty rain, staring directly at my house with night vision binoculars raised to their eyes.

​And on the shoulder of the taller man’s coat, as wet in the gloom, was a silver badge shaped like a viper snake,the emblem of the Southern Cross Cartel.​The men who killed my sister weren't on their way to Byron Bay.

​They were already here.