Page 34 of Tangled Past
“That he’s a coward?” Rachel muttered.
“That he’s not ready for the endgame yet,” Asa said. “He’s still trying to control the narrative. To rattle us. To rattle you.”
“Well, it worked,” Maya said, her voice shaking. “I’m rattled.”
After Will and JT moved back outside to coordinate, Rachel sat with her back against the sofa, knees bent, breathingslowly. “Okay. New rule. No sitting near exterior windows. Ever.”
“Agreed,” Asa said.
Maya leaned into him and stared at the broken window for a long moment. “He’s not going to stop, is he?”
“No,” Asa said quietly, aware that this wasn’t what she wanted to hear. He wasn’t going to lie to her now. “Not until we stop him.”
“Can we?” she whispered. “He seems to be everywhere. The barn, my cottage, and now here. It feels like he’s always a step ahead.”
“He thinks he is,” Asa asserted. “But people like that? They always underestimate what happens when their victims start working together. When the story stops being theirs alone.”
She turned her face toward his shoulder, her eyes closing briefly. “Then let’s take it back before he rewrites anymore of it.”
Asa looked at the shattered glass, at the snow blowing in where the window used to be, at the darkness beyond. He thought of his father, radio clipped to his hip. The little boy with a flashlight and a voice in the shadows telling him to forget.
Of a dispatcher with a conscience who’d vanished and the nameless man on the other end of Maya’s mother’s fear. Still faceless. Still out there.
He tightened his arm around her. “We will. I promise you, Maya. He’s not the only one who remembers.”
Outside, the wind rose. Inside, surrounded by shattered glass and the people who refused to leave her, Maya drew a breath and held on.
