Page 22 of The Rook’s Obsession

It smells like nothing I’ve ever known.

And yet.

Something tugs at the base of my skull. Not a memory. Nothing that clear or defined. More like the ghost of a feeling. A sense that this air has been in my lungs before, a long time ago, in a life I can’t access. I push it down and follow Nick up the porch steps.

The wooden boards creak under our feet. He unlocks the front door and pushes it open, stepping aside to let me enter first. I scan the interior automatically: exits, sight lines, potential weapons. It’s a reflex.

The entryway opens into a living area with the stone fireplace I noticed outside, worn leather furniture, and big windows looking out over the lake. The kitchen is to the right, separated by a counter. A hallway leads toward what I assume are bedrooms. It’s clean, warm, lived-in. Someone has been here recently—there are fresh flowers on the kitchen counter and the fireplace has been laid with wood, ready to light.

And then I notice the photos.

They’re everywhere. On the mantel above the fireplace. On the walls. On a shelf by the hallway. The frames are mismatched—some wooden, some metal, all different sizes.

A family: parents and two children: a boy and a girl. The parents are young, smiling. They could afford to be happy. They didn’t know what was ahead of them. The boy is dark-haired, green-eyed, lanky in the way boys are before they grow into their bodies.

The girl is… me.

I know it instantly, the way you know your own face in a mirror, even though the face in these photos belongs to someone I don’t recognize. A child, maybe eight or nine in the earliest ones, grinning with a gap in her front teeth. In others, a preteen, awkward and leggy, squinting in the sunlight on the dock. Then a teenager, fifteen or so, sitting on the porch railing with her hair blowing across her face, laughing at something beyond the camera’s frame.

That’s my face. My eyes. My jawline before it sharpened into what it is now. I’m looking at myself, and I have no memory of any of it.

My chest constricts. I’ve been trained to maintain composure under circumstances far worse than old photographs, but something is happening beneath the surface I can’t fully control. A pressure behind my eyes. A tightness in my throat that has nothing to do with exhaustion.

I don’t remember this girl. I don’t remember this place. I don’t remember the parents smiling in those frames, and I don’t remember the boy standing beside me in photo after photo, his arm sometimes thrown over my shoulders, both of us mugging for the camera like nothing bad could ever touch us.

“These are fake,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds strange. Distant. “You had them photoshopped.”

Nick is standing behind me. I can feel him there without turning around. “They’re not fake, Laura.”

“Don’t call me that,” I grit out.

“They’re real. Every one of them.” His voice is infuriatingly calm and patient. “That’s you, and that’s Liam, and those are your parents. They died in the explosion on the boat.”

I stare at the photo of the teenager on the porch railing. She looks happy. Genuinely, unselfconsciously happy, the kind of happiness that comes from not knowing the world has teeth. I’ve never looked like that. Not once in the life I remember. Vincenzo didn’t raise me to be happy. He raised me to be a tool.

I have to turn away from the photos. I can’t look at them anymore.

Nick opens his mouth to say something, but before he can, the sound of tires on gravel draws both our attention to the window. A car is pulling up the driveway. A black SUV, similar to the kind I’ve seen a hundred times in my line of work. Armored, probably. The windows are tinted dark enough that I can’t see who’s inside.

“That’s your brother,” Nick offers behind me.

My pulse does something I don’t appreciate. It speeds up, hammering against my ribs with a force that has nothing to do with training or instinct and everything to do with a feeling I can’t name. I stand very still and watch through the window as the SUV comes to a stop behind the limo.

The driver’s door opens first. A man I don’t recognize steps out. Security, based on his build and the way his gaze sweeps the perimeter before he moves to open the rear passenger door.

And then the adult version of the boy in the photos steps out of the car.

He’s tall. That’s the first thing I register. Tall and broad, with the kind of build that comes from extreme discipline. Short black hair. He moves with a deliberate kind of authority, the way men move when they’re used to being in charge of every room they enter.

And his eyes are green. My shade of green, so close to what I see in the mirror every morning that it stops me cold.

He looks like me.

The thought pops up before I can stop it, and I crush it immediately. There are billions of people in the world. Resemblances happen. Two strangers can share a hair color, an eye color, a bone structure, and have absolutely nothing else in common. It doesn’t mean anything. Coincidence isn’t proof.

But my pulse won’t slow down, and that bothers me more than anything.

Nick goes to the front door and opens it. I hear them exchange a few quiet words in low voices on the porch. Then footsteps before Nick steps aside, and Liam Knight walks into the cabin.