Page 23 of Out for Blood
The TV keeps playing in the background, and the sound is far away now, forgotten by both of us.
Tyler exhales deeply through his nose and gets to his feet. He doesn’t rush, and somehow that makes it worse.
He crosses the room in a few controlled steps, every movement decisive. Pausing at the drawer and then pulling it open to retrieve the phone.
My gaze is transfixed on him.
As his eyes read the screen, his nostrils flare slightly and his shoulders square. Whatever softness was there a second ago vanishes, replaced by pure concentration.
He doesn’t say a word or look my way. Alternatively, he turns and heads straight for the office. The door shuts behind him with a quiet click, but in the sudden silence, it sounds deafening.
As I sit rooted in the same place, my pulse starts to climb as the weight of what is about to happen settles in.
This is how it always starts. A text. A name.
It sets everything into motion, whether we are ready or not.
I’ve learned not to follow him right away although, in the beginning I did.
I used to run after him not letting that door close, needing to know, needing to see, needing to be in it the second he was. It never ended well, not because Tyler put up a barrier but because I was not ready for what lurked behind that door.
For the things we would find, the horrors we would witness, and the way we would have to harden ourselves just to endure them.
Now I linger, and I give him some time. Allowing him to break into it first and assess, decide, build the angle, and figure out exactly how deep it goes before I step into it with him.
Knowing that once I do, there’s no stepping back out.
After a while, I force myself upright and make my way down the hall. The house feels hollow now, the air crisp on my skin. As I approach the door, I can already hear the rapid clicking of keys.
Tyler has thrown himself headfirst into this.
As I am about to open the door, memories consume my vision as to how this all started.
When we first arrived on the island, Tyler built a fishing charter business. Early mornings out on open water, salt drying on his skin, and tourists chasing adventure and sunshine. It took off faster than either of us imagined. Within a few months, bookings stacked out weeks in advance, money was progressively coming in, and it became enough that he could scale back and bring on managers to handle the day-to-day.
From the outside, we looked like we belonged here, as though we had built something normal.
Beyond funding our lives, it financed our side operations. Taking down local traffickers.
While I was working at the hotel as a receptionist, I cultivated connections with the women who worked there.
The kind that you form when you’re all regarding the same things, feeling the same undercurrent even if no one says it out loud. Bartenders, waitresses, and housekeeping attendants were around my age or younger. All of them were far from home, and they all carried that same cunning awareness that something about this place wasn’t as safe as it pretended to be.
We learned each other’s rhythms, covered shifts, walked out together at night, and shared knowing looks when something felt off.
We never said the word, protection, but that’s what it was.
Marie and Sofie slipped into that circle without effort. Marie was a waitress, and Sofie was a housekeeper. They were sisters. Marie was the older one, and Sofie couldn’t have been older than fifteen.
Marie moved through her day as if she had learned early how to take care of herself, fast on her feet and constantly scanning the room without making it obvious. Sofie was always close by her side, delicate, tooyoung, and still holding on to the kind of innocence you want to preserve.
They were inseparable, and somehow, they became inseparable from me too.
They came over to our house after shifts, had dinner with Tyler and I, and laughed with us like they had always been there. Tyler liked them immediately and was easy with them in a way he rarely was with anyone outside of us.
Somewhere in that, something shifted in me, my heart ached for Blair, and they reminded me of her.
Not in the conventional sense, like how they looked or sounded, but how it felt to have them there. As though something I had lost had been placed back into my hands, just long enough for me to believe I could keep it.
