chapter 6: What Was Inside

Scarlett stared at the envelope for a full ten seconds before she made herself pick it up.

Her name was written across the front in handwriting she didn't recognize, careful and slanted, the kind of penmanship that belonged to someone who took their time. No stamp, no postmark. Which meant whoever left it hadn't mailed it at all. They had stood on this exact spot, close enough to touch her door, sometime in the last few hours, while she'd been inside pouring wine and laughing with Nora like her life hadn't already changed shape.

She should have called Draven or the police, but her hands were already tearing the seal, some reckless part of her needed to know before she let herself be afraid.

Inside was a single photograph.

It was her, standing outside the courthouse that morning, the divorce folder tucked under her arm, sunlight catching the loose strands of her hair. A photograph taken from across the street, close enough to be clear, far enough that she'd never noticed anyone watching. She remembered that exact moment. She remembered feeling, for one brief second, like she had finally taken control of something in her own life.

Someone had been standing there the entire time, documenting it.

On the back, four words in the same unfamiliar handwriting.

HE KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE.

Scarlett's knees went weak enough that she had to sit down on the floor of her own entryway, the photograph shaking in her hand, the eviction notice still crumpled beside her where she'd dropped it. Two pieces of paper.One threats.One warning.Both arriving in the same night.

She didn't think. She called Draven.

He picked up before the first ring finished. "What's wrong."

Not a question. He already knew something was wrong.

"Someone left an envelope outside my door." Her voice came out thinner than she wanted it to. "A photo of me. From this morning. Outside the courthouse."

"I'm coming back up."

"Draven, there's writing on the back."

"Don't touch anything else. I'll be there in ninety seconds."

He hung up before she could ask how he could possibly be ninety seconds away from a building he'd already left. She didn't have time to wonder about it, because the knock came exactly ninety seconds later, and when she opened the door he looked like a man who had run the entire distance without breaking a sweat, his chest barely moving.

He took the photograph from her hands, careful, like it might shatter, and she watched his face change as he read the back. Not fear. Fury, controlled and cold, banked behind eyes that had gone darker than she'd seen them.

"This is his handwriting," Draven said.

"Whose?"

"Malachi's."

"How do you know his handwriting?"

"I've had reason to know it."

The name landed in her chest like a stone dropped down a well, the sound of it still echoing after it hit bottom. "You said he was dangerous. You didn't say he was capable of standing outside my apartment."

"He wasn't." Draven turned the photograph over again, studying it like it might confess more if he looked hard enough. "He doesn't do his own errands. Someone left this for him. Which means he has people watching you closely enough to know exactly where you'd be and exactly when."

"Why me? I didn't even know Malachi existed twelve hours ago."

"Because of me."

The admission came out low and rough, like it cost him something to say it plainly.

"Explain that."

He set the photograph down on the counter, deliberately, the way a man sets down something he doesn't trust himself to keep holding.

"Malachi and I have history that predates you by a long time," he said. "He's spent years looking for a way to hurt me that would actually work. Threats against me don't work. I don't frighten." His jaw tightened. "But you. you're new. You're unprotected. And the moment he realized you mattered to me, you became the easiest way to reach me."

Scarlett sat with that for a moment, anger and fear tangling together until she couldn't separate one from the other.

"So I'm a target because of you."

"Yes."

"You don't get to just say yes like that."

"You deserve the truth more than you deserve my comfort." His eyes held hers, steady despite the storm underneath. "I won't lie to make this easier to hear."

"Then tell me what he wants."

"To make me watch you suffer. That's all Malachi has ever wanted from anyone standing too close to me."

"Why do you care what happens to me?"

"I don't know yet." He said it like the admission unsettled him more than the threat had, and then he shut the door on it before it could go any further. "That's not something I owe you an answer to tonight."

She wanted to argue with him. She wanted to tell him that a man couldn't care about a stranger, that whatever he felt was some trick of circumstance and adrenaline and a bar three blocks from her apartment. But she was still holding a photograph of herself that a stranger had taken without her knowledge, and the argument died somewhere behind her teeth.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. A text from an unknown number, no name attached.

She almost didn't look. She looked anyway.

Ask him what happened to the last woman he tried to protect.

Scarlett's stomach turned to ice. She held the phone out to Draven without a word, and watched every trace of color leave his face when he read it.

"Draven." Her voice had gone very quiet. "What happened to her?"

He didn't answer right away. He set her phone down on the counter next to the photograph, lining them up like evidence, and when he finally looked at her again, his expression had shuttered, a door closing on a room he clearly didn't want her walking into.

"Not tonight," he said.

"You don't get to do that. Not after everything you just told me."

"I'm not protecting a secret, Scarlett. I'm protecting you from what it would mean to know it right now, in the middle of all of this." His voice had gone rough at the edges, and for the first time she heard a crack in the control, a note that sounded almost like grief. "Ask me again when you're not sitting on your own floor holding a threat with your name on it. I'll answer you then. I promise you that."

She wanted to push. Every instinct told her to demand it now, to refuse to let him hide behind timing the way he'd hidden behind not yet since the moment they'd met. But she was tired, and frightened, and some quiet, stubborn part of her recognized the difference between a man protecting himself and a man protecting a wound that hadn't finished bleeding.

"Fine," she said. "But I'm holding you to that promise."

"I know."

He didn't move to leave this time. He simply stood there in her kitchen among the wreckage of the night, the photograph, the eviction notice, the unknown number still glowing on her phone, and Scarlett understood, with a clarity that frightened her more than any of it, that whoever the last woman had been, she was about to become the next chapter of that story whether she wanted to or not.

Before she finally let herself sleep, she gathered the photograph and the eviction notice off the kitchen counter and set them side by side on the coffee table, like she needed them within sight to believe any of it was real.