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Cold moves through me. “How would the Saints know about that entrance?”

Theo looks toward the trees where the motorcycle disappeared. Ezra’s fingers turn colder inside mine.

“I knew that road before I became the cemetery caretaker,” Theo says.

The silence is loud.

He draws in a slow breath, then looks at me. “I joined the Hollow Saints when I was seventeen.”

I feel the strike of the words in my shaky hands. Ezra flickers beside me. Theo continues before I can decide which feeling gets to speak first.

“They used old maintenance roads, boat landings, and flood channels to move around the swamp without passing through town. Hammer brought me through this entrance on one of my first runs. We came in from the east road, crossed near the abandoned landing, and left by water.”

“You were a kid trying to survive,” Ezra says quietly.

Theo’s gaze shifts to him. “Old enough to remember.”

I hear the devastation of what he doesn’t say.

“Did they keep using it after you took this job?” I ask.

“No.” The word comes hard and immediate. “Not with my permission. I blocked the road when I became keeper and changed the locks at the gates. I haven’t seen a Saints patch on this property since I left them.”

I believe him. That scares me almost as much as the fact that he was a member of the Saints.

The cemetery bell tolls again. This time, the route stone flashes on the coffee table.

Two bright pulses move through the carved water lines. A sharp knock follows beneath the floor, directly below the evidence we gathered.

I look from the glowing stone to Theo. “That rider wasn’t checking whether the cemetery road was open.”

Theo’s eyes meet mine. “No.”

“He was checking an old Saints’ access point. The one that reaches everything we found this morning.”

The motorcycle engine fades deeper into the swamp, but the danger it leaves behind settles over the house.

For the first time since I walked through Theo’s gate, the cemetery doesn’t feel like a safe haven separate from the world.

Chapter 14

Theo Heron

Pepper looks at me as if I’ve become another piece in the puzzle she’s trying to solve.

Her face is pale. Her curls have slipped loose from her scarf after the canoe trip, and the orange socks from her mother’s box glow soft and ridiculous against the dark floorboards. She’s still holding Ezra’s hand, though his fingers have blurred so much that hers nearly close through them.

She doesn’t run after my admission. Maybe that should comfort me. But the weight in my chest grows heavier, because she’s brave enough to stay for the truth and my truth isn’t an easy one.

The route stone flashes again on the coffee table. Two sharp pulses of light race through the carved water lines before dying back into gray stone. The brass tag beside it sits under the lamplight with her family name printed across old metal. My past and her bloodline are lying on the same table.

I shut the front door and turn the lock. The click sounds small against the wet hush of the cemetery, but Pepper flinches anyway.

“I need the plain version,” she says. Her voice is steady in a way that makes me want to kneel. “Please don’t make me fill the story in with what I already know about the Saints.”

I look at Ezra first because the habit of checking on him always pulls me there. He’s fading at the edges, but his eyes are clear. This story is his too. He knows the way survival can make a bad choice look like the only way out of a burning room.

Pepper doesn’t know that kind of life. She’s from the kind of place that sends care packages. And I wouldn’t wish it any different for her. But she deserves to understand.