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A car door opens. Closes. Then nothing. Wind knocks metal against the building with a hollow clang before gravel finally crunches behind the workshop. Smart.

My gaze cuts toward the rear entrance. Heller noticed a difference. Maybe my motorcycle. Maybe the unlocked door sitting wrong. Doesn’t matter. He knows.

The outside security light snaps off. Pitch-black. My pulse steadies. Good. Fear is easier than grief. I know what to do with fear.

A faint scrape comes from outside the rear wall. I lower my center of gravity, listening. Wind. Leaves. Metal siding flexing in the cold. A footstep. Left. No—behind.

I turn just as the rear door bangs inward. Light explodes. Not from the ceiling. A gunshot. The muzzle flash burns my vision. Wood splinters off the workbench beside my shoulder. My ears ring, but adrenaline floods my veins, cold and electric. I hit the floor and move before the sound finishes echoing through the building. Another shot cracks through the dark.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Heller’s voice. Older than the one I built in my head for seventeen years—not frail, not frightened. Angry. I circle behind an equipment cabinet while moonlight flashes intermittently through the windows as clouds race overhead.

“You break into the wrong fucking property? I don’t have nothing here.”

I say nothing. Let him listen to his own breathing. He moves carefully. He knows the room. Knows where every obstacle sits. I don’t. That gives him the advantage for exactly as long as I let it. My heartbeat thunders in my ears, so loud I’m half-afraid he can hear it.

Another flash of moonlight. Gray hair at the temples. Lean frame. Dark jacket. He holds the gun in front of him. My grip tightens until the sickle’s wrap creaks. Easy. I need him able to talk.

He turns. I move. He fires. The shot goes wide when I slam into him.

We hit a shelving unit hard enough to dump tools across the concrete. The gun stays in his hand longer than I expect. He drives an elbow backward, catching me beneath the ribs, knocking the air from my lungs. For one second, I can’t breathe, and the panic that tries to rise isn’t mine. It’s a wheezing nine-year-old’s. I shove it down and hold on.

I grab his wrist. He brings his forehead into my face. White bursts through my vision. “Fuck.”

He tears free. The gun skids beneath the workbench. Neither of us goes for it. We circle.

Moonlight splinters through one narrow window and catches half his face. Martin Heller. The man Jubilee found hidden beneath seventeen years of garbage records, dead addresses, and old Halloween photographs. The man who took my brother. He looks ordinary. I hate him for that too.

His eyes drop to the sickle in my hand. Then lift to my face. His head tilts. “Cannon.”

Everything inside me stops. Ice floods my veins, then fire. Heller wipes blood from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. Then, he smiles. “Took you long enough.”

I don’t feel myself move. One second he’s standing six feet away. The next, his back hits the wall hard enough to rattle the tools above us. My forearm locks across his throat. His pulse hammers against my arm. Fast. Alive. I could end it right now. Twenty pounds of pressure. Maybe thirty seconds. My whole body begs me to.

“Where is my brother?”

The smile disappears. And that scares me more than if he had laughed. Cold sweat breaks out along my spine. For the first time tonight, I’m afraid. Not of him. Of the answer.

“Where is Grady?”

His eyes flick toward the back room. I drag him through the doorway. My lungs seize all over again at the sight of the mattress. It’s worse, because now there’s a face to put beside it.

“I kept it clean.”

I stare at him. “What?”

“The room.” My grip tightens. “I kept them warm.”

Them. The word lands like an axe. How many chairs at how many tables? How many mothers sitting by phones?

“There was heat. Food. Blankets. I wasn’t some fucking animal.”

A laugh punches out of me, ugly and jagged, and my eyes sting. “You chained children to a wall.”

“For their safety.”

Everything in me goes cold. My heartbeat slows, the way it only does right before I move. “Say that again.”