Page 42 of In the Shadows
“Don’t touch anything. I’m twelve minutes away.”
The line went dead. Lila sat in the quiet of her bedroom, holding her phone against her chest, listening to the house settle around her. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. The ceiling fan clicked softly. The lamp in the living room—the lamp she hadn’t turned on—glowed like a beacon through the hallway.
They wanted her to know. That was the part that made her sick. They could have searched the house and put everything back exactly the way they’d found it. Professionals would have. But they’d left the lamp on. They’d left the study door open. They’d wanted her to walk in and feel the violation of it, the intimacy of a stranger’s hands on her father’s things.
Ronan was there in eleven minutes.
She heard his car on the gravel, the door closing without a slam, his footsteps on the porch—quick but controlled, a man who was hurrying without running. She met him at the front door.
He looked at her face, and whatever he saw there made his jaw go tight.
“Show me.”
She walked him through the house. Room by room, the same path she’d taken. He didn’t touch anything either, but his eyes moved over every surface with the kind of systematic attention she’d seen him bring to the centennial venue assessments—only this time, the rigid set of his shoulders and the whiteness of his knuckles told her everything his face wouldn’t.
In her father’s study, he crouched beside the filing cabinet and examined the handle.
“The lock wasn’t forced. They had a key, or they picked it.” He stood. “What was in these drawers?”
“Nothing. Not anymore. I moved everything after you told me to keep the originals separate.”
“So they came looking for files that aren’t here.”
“They came to scare me.”
He turned. Looked at her. In the dim light of her father’s study, with the desk lamp casting shadows the same way it had when Daniel Bennett sat here working late into the night, Ronan’s expression shifted from controlled fury to something she couldn’t quite name.
“You’re not staying here tonight.”
“This is my house.”
“This is a house where someone came in while you were at work, searched your father’s belongings, and left a message. That’s not a home right now, Lila. That’s a crime scene.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Run?”
“You’re supposed to let me keep you safe until we finish this.” He stepped closer. Not to intimidate—to be near her. The difference mattered. “Pack a bag. Stay at my place. Just for tonight.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we figure out how they got in, and we make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
She wanted to fight him on it. Wanted to plant herself in this house and dare them to come back. But the lamp was still burning in the living room, and the study door was still open, and the air in this house didn’t smell like her father anymore. It smelled like a stranger.
“Fine,” she said. “But I’m coming back tomorrow. This is my home, and I’m not letting them take that from me.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
She packed a bag in four minutes. Toothbrush, change of clothes, and the charger from her nightstand. She paused at her father’s bookshelf on the way out and touched the spine of his favorite Tom Clancy. It was warm from the lamp that shouldn’t have been on.
Ronan was waiting by the front door. When she reached him, he took the bag from her hand. His fingers brushed hers in the transfer, and she held on for a beat longer than she needed to.
Neither of them said anything about it.
They walked to his car in the dark, his body angled between her and the street, and she let him drive her away from the house where she’d grown up.
The cottage was small and sparse.
Lila had been here once before—briefly, when this all started. She’d barely looked at the place then. Now, standing in the living room with her overnight bag in her hand, she took it in. A laptop on the kitchen table. A jacket hung by the door. Two coffee cups in the sink. The life of a man who didn’t plan to stay.
