Page 109

This is the ground I learned after leaving the Saints. Honest work. Hours of mowing, pruning, hauling broken branches, resetting toppled markers, walking rows until grief and labor replaced the stink of exhaust and gun oil.

Hammer brought his token here anyway.

My phone buzzes again.

Unknown number.

Clock's running, Heron.

My teeth press together until pain sparks behind my eyes.

The cemetery thins into scrub near the east cut. Saw palmetto claws at my jeans. Brambles drag along my jacket. The air changes as I move farther from the house, wetter and sharper, with the low rot scent of standing water beneath the green.

The old landing sits past the maintenance cut, near a strip of higher ground where logging trucks once turned before the county forgot the road existed. Hammer liked it for handoffs. Out here, there are no porch lights or neighbors. Plenty of shallow water to swallow tracks before sunrise.

At seventeen, I thought secrecy meant competence. At twenty-nine, I know secrecy means Hammer has the upper hand.

He picked the time and place. He told me to come alone, and I obeyed before I made anyone else part of the decision. Whatever is waiting at the landing, I’m already playing by his rules.

My phone screen glows in my hand. No response from Wes yet. He might be asleep. He might be driving here. He might be cursing me already.

I open Pepper's contact.

Her last text sits above the keyboard.

Ezra says if we forget the cheese next time we go to town he is suing for emotional damages.

I stare at her words under the moonlit branches.

I know Hammer holds the power here, but I can’t make myself turn back home. If there is a chance he knows something that can help Ezra, I have to take it.

A twig cracks somewhere ahead. I go still, breath held low.

Where I expect to see a ghost from my past waiting with a cigarette cupped in his palm, smiling as though he gave me a roof instead of a debt, there is only silence.

I move toward the bend and catch sight of the old landing through the trees. It’s empty.

The grass is bent in the middle track, but not at the sides. A print near the mud has been pressed deep by a boot angled wrong for a man approaching from the water.

My stomach drops in a slower, colder way.

Hammer taught me bait before he taught me loyalty. Obvious signs are for the person you want looking at them. Good work happens where the watcher is not watching.

Fuck.

The texts were sent to the boy who still believes speed and might can outrun loss.

My boots tear at the mud. Branches slap my shoulders as I move back through the cut, faster than sense allows but not fast enough for the panic burning through me.

I call Pepper. It rings once. Twice. No answer.

I call again, still running. The third ring cuts off.

"Theo?" Her voice is thick with sleep and seeped in fear.

My lungs seize. "Pepper."

"Where are you?"