LOGINHe didn't go down.That was the first thing. The bullet hit him and he made that sound, low and sharp, and I watched his body absorb it and I watched him stay upright and keep moving and I stood behind the pier support with my heart in my mouth thinking: he should be on the ground, why is he not on the ground.He was not on the ground because he was Fletcher Jade and Fletcher Jade had apparently decided that the ground was not an option right now and his body had agreed to comply.His security had Daniel's remaining men contained in under
Nicole's POVMy step-brother's name was Daniel.I knew that from the tabloids, from the brief research I had done on the Harrington family in the weeks after Fletcher first told me about the inheritance, the careful late-night reading of a woman trying to understand the shape of the thing that had been coming for her. Daniel Harrington, thirty-one, photographed at galas and charity events and business announcements with the easy confidence of a man who had never once questioned whether he belonged in the room.He didn't look like his photographs right now.In the photographs he was polished, controlled, the public-facing version of a family that und
The morning of the fourth day I found my mother's photograph.Not lost exactly — I knew it was in my wallet, had always known, had put it there myself sometime in the first year after the accident when I was rebuilding the texture of my life from the outside in and had decided that having her face accessible was a form of anchor. But I hadn't looked at it properly in months, the way you stopped seeing things that were always present, and on the fourth morning when I was going through my wallet looking for the receipt from the small shop down the road I pulled it out and held it in both hands and looked at it for a long time.The fairground, she had told me once. Summer, when I was around ten. She had won something at one of the stalls, something small and plastic that I couldn't see in the photograph, and she was laughing with her whole face, the kind of laughing that closed your eyes and opened your mouth and made your shoulders shake, the kind that had nothing performed about it, ju
CHAPTER FIFTY ONE: AT THE BEACH Nicole's POV —The morning of the fifth day I finally slept without the nightmares.I knew it was five days because I had been marking them the way you marked things when the days had stopped having their usual distinguishing features, by the light through the window and the sound of the water and the specific quality of hunger that arrived at roughly the same hour each morning regardless of whether I had eaten properly the day before.I hadn't been eating properly.I knew that the way I knew most things about myself that I wasn't doing anything about, clearly and without particular urgency, the way you knew a tap was dripping but the kitchen was far away and the bed was where you were.The room had developed a shape around me.Not comfortable exactly, but familiar in the way that any space became familiar after five days of sleeping and not sleeping and sitting against the wall and watching the water through the window do its constant unbothered thing.
Flether's POVI was in the study at eleven at night when the tracker found her.Not because I had been watching it. I had the app open in the background the way you kept a window open in a room you weren't in, just in case, and I was going through the Harrington legal response with my reading glasses on and a cold cup of coffee beside me when the notification pushed everything off the screen.Device active. Location acquired.I took my glasses off.I looked
Fletcher's POVThe doctor came out at two fourteen.I stood up from the chair before she reached me and she held up one hand, the small gesture of someone who had learned that the fastest way to calm a parent was to get to the good news before they could catastrophise into the gap."The fever broke twenty minutes ago," she said. "Her temperature is coming down steadily. We want to keep her overnight for observation but the numbers are moving in the right direction."
Fletcher's POVI told her not to worry about Rachel.
A transaction.Love as payment for submission. Security in exchange for surveillance. A home that was really a cage."I need to check my phone," I said suddenly. "He said there's an app. I need to find it and delete it."Jess handed me my phone. "Do you know what to look for?""No. But I'm going to
Jemaya's POV I stared at my phone for a full five minutes before finally calling Jake.It rang three times. Each ring felt like an eternity."Jemaya." His voice was warm, familiar. "I was just thinking about you.""Hey." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "How are you?""Busy. The usual. H
Loise's POVI grabbed my journal from under my pillow and flipped it open to a fresh page, my pen hovering as I tried to organize the chaos in my head.*Fletcher Wolfe is suspicious as hell.*There, I'd written it down. Made it official.He was lousy at pretending to fit in—too careful with his wor







