chapter four

“Baby, I was wrong. Please. Just let me in.”

Lucan’s voice came through the gate speaker on the ninth of October, thin and rehearsed. On the monitor he stood at the iron gate in his navy suit with white roses in one hand. Behind him, Sabine sat in the passenger seat of a dented sedan, sunglasses on.

Beside me, Kellan Rourke folded his arms. I had hired him four days ago through a veterans’ security firm: thirties, Marine posture, a gaze that missed nothing. He hadn’t asked why a woman living alone on a mountain needed thermal cameras and a night patrol. He had walked the property for three hours, made a list, and started work.

On his first morning he had asked only one question. “Who are we expecting?” I told him, “Not who. When.” He nodded as if that were a perfectly reasonable answer and went back to measuring sight lines. By the third day he had two of his men on the property, Teodor and Soren, and a rotation that left no blind spot on the road. I had never seen anyone build a defense so quickly, or so quietly.

“Ex-husband?”

“Ex-husband.”

“Want him gone?”

“Not yet.” I straightened my jacket. Six days of training and real food had changed the woman in the dark monitor. Broader shoulders. Steadier eyes. “Walk down with me.”

I stopped ten feet inside the gate. Lucan pushed the roses through the bars.

I had imagined this moment a hundred times in the dark of my last life, when I had nothing to do but replay my mistakes. In every version I begged. In every version he looked past me. I had never imagined my own voice would be this level, or that the sight of him would feel like looking at a house I used to live in.

“You look amazing. Listen, I’ve been a fool. Sabine means nothing. It ended the night you left.”

In the car, Sabine lowered her sunglasses and glared at him.

“She seems to disagree,” I said.

“She’s upset. Ione, I’ve lost everything. My firm suspended me this week. Orsolo’s men came to my office.” His voice cracked, and I couldn’t tell whether it was real. “I have until the sixteenth. And then I found out you inherited forty million dollars, and I thought, after six years, maybe you could help me.”

“Forty-three,” I said.

His eyes sharpened. He couldn’t help it.

“And I do want to help you.” I took a folded paper from my jacket and held it up. “Orsolo sold me your note on Tuesday. A hundred and forty thousand dollars, due the sixteenth. You don’t owe him anymore, Lucan. You owe me.”

The roses slipped from his hand into the gravel.

For a moment he only stared at the flowers in the dirt, as if they might explain what had happened to the rest of his plan. In six years I had never watched Lucan lose control of a room. It was oddly quiet, like watching a building settle.

“You bought my debt?”

“Pay me by the sixteenth or I collect. I’ll start with the watch.”

His face went white, then red. “You can’t do this. We were married!”

He reached for the old voice, the soft one that used to work on me like a key in a lock. “Ione. Think about what we built.” I did think about it. A kitchen I had paid for. A lease I had signed. A dinner table where I had always set one more place than I used to.

“We were. Do you remember what you said at the end?” I let a beat pass. “‘I married you because you were useful. You cooked, you carried, you paid.’”

Lucan’s mouth opened. Closed.

“I never said that,” he whispered. “Not to anyone. Not once. How could you possibly—”

He stopped. He was not a stupid man, and he had just heard me quote a sentence he had not spoken yet.

Sabine climbed out of the car, shaking. “You’re insane! You were always nothing! You were—”

“Sabine.” I looked at her nails, still painted. “Did you enjoy the polish? I’d steal it again.”

She went silent. Her face was gray, and she held her left hand pressed against her chest, the way Tamsin had held hers.

Up close, her lips were cracked and her skin had the waxy sheen of a fever that wouldn’t break. The black thread had climbed past her wrist and was crossing her forearm in slow, branching lines. I could see it as plainly as a road map.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

“Your arm.”

“It’s a rash.”

“Go to the hospital, Sabine.”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” She laughed, high and thin. “You’d love for me to disappear.”

I said nothing. Nothing I said would have reached her.

“Ione, please.” Lucan gripped the bars. “I’ll do anything.”

“I know what anything means to you,” I said. “It means until it costs you.”

Kellan stepped forward. “Time to go, sir.”

Lucan didn’t fight him. He looked back once, and for a second I saw something I had never seen in six years of marriage: fear. Then Kellan walked him to the car, and Sabine’s screaming faded down the mountain road.

“Ruthless,” Kellan said, coming back to my side. He sounded approving.

“In eight days it won’t matter. Debts won’t matter. Nothing like that will.”

He glanced at me but didn’t ask. He was learning when not to.

“You said eight days,” Kellan said quietly. “Not eight days until the sixteenth. Eight days until what?”

I watched Lucan’s car disappear around the bend. “Until everything changes.”

He nodded slowly, like a man who had served under officers who knew a hit was coming and refused to say how. “I’ve followed worse leaders on less information,” he said. “Just tell me when it’s time to move.”

I almost smiled. Of everyone I had gathered so far, he was the one I trusted most, and I had known him for four days. In my last life, I had trusted a man for six years and been wrong. I did not yet know which instinct to believe.

The radio on his belt crackled. Teodor, one of his men on the north fence, sounded tense. “Boss. Dogs are going off all along the ridge. Every one in the valley. And there’s a woman at the gate who says she knows Ms. Calloway.”

“Hold her at the gate,” I said. “Check the car and check her hands. Look for bites.”

Kellan raised an eyebrow. “You’re taking a stranger’s word?”

“I haven’t heard a word yet. But nobody walks out of a hospital mid-shift unless they’ve seen something they can’t stay for.”

On the second monitor, a dusty hatchback had stopped at the gate. A woman in hospital scrubs stood beside it, hands shaking, a lanyard still around her neck. She looked straight into the camera.

“My name is Imara Voss,” she said. “I’m a doctor at Harrowgate Medical. You’ve been buying every antibiotic in three counties, and I walked out of my shift an hour ago. I need to tell someone what came into my morgue, and I think you already know.”

I did.