Page 76 of In the Dark of the Past

Some things were allowed to just be true without being spoken.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Finn

I’d been a light sleeper since the academy.

So many years of being the person a town called when things went wrong had turned my nervous system into a hair-trigger alarm system. Creaking floorboard. Dog barking two streets over. Wind finding the gap under the back door. All of it registered, sorted, filed.

But for three hours, none of it had touched me.

I lay still in the gray pre-dawn and let myself understand that.

River was asleep on her side, facing away, one hand curled under her jaw. Her breathing was slow. Steady. The kind you only got when the body had finally given up arguing with the brain and decided to rest whether the brain liked it or not.

I watched the ceiling.

There was a water stain up there in the corner I’d been meaning to fix for two years. Some cracked trim above the window frame that moved every time the temperature dropped. The kind of house maintenance that kept getting swallowed by smaller fires—by calls at 3:00 a.m., by Linton forgetting to file his incident reports, by Eleanor Jenkins missing for fourteen years.

By River coming back.

After our time together, relearning each other, she’d said, “I don’t want the guest room” like it was a simple thing. Like nine years plus of space hadn’t happened between us. Like she hadn’t driven herself out of Maple Ridge with nothing but a handful of duffel bags and a reason to hate the place she grew up.

Like I hadn’t stood by and watched her go and told myself it was the right call.

None of it was simple.

But she was here.

Asleep in my house, breathing slowly, her hair a dark tangle across my pillow.

I thought about the back wall of her house. WE KNOW WHAT SHE FOUND. If it was about her mother, the Watchers had used her ghost like a weapon. Had walked into the one place she should have been safe and left their handprints on it.

My jaw tightened.

I shifted carefully, enough to glance at my phone on the nightstand. 4:38 a.m. The tripwire file had been live in the restricted system for three hours. If Jordyn was going to bite⁠—

River stirred.

Not awake. Just restless, a small sound that could have been a dream or a chill, and then she settled again, shoulders dropping.

Something in my chest pulled taut.

For a long time, I didn’t move.

My phone went off at 4:41 a.m.

Not with a call. It was one sharp vibration—the custom alert I’d set for the tripwire log. I was upright before the second pulse.

River woke the same way she did everything else, quickly and without drama. Her eyes were open and focused before I’d even reached the nightstand.

I checked the screen.

One restricted file. Accessed at 4:40 a.m. Opened, closed, reopened. Screenshots taken. Forwarded. Internally, to a county government address I didn’t recognize offhand, but which the system had already flagged as being routed through a private server.

“What?” River asked, her voice low.

I held up the phone.