Page 5 of Malice

Evan laughs. It comes out too short, too flat, like it ran out of air before it could become anything. “I’m already dead.”

“We’re offering justice.” Isaac’s voice dips lower, the kind of quiet that filled the barn before, not peaceful, more like the calm before a storm.

Evan’s gun trembles. His eyes flicker over the faces: my father, Trenton, Carter, Matthew, Kane. Every one of them is the same. Steady. Unyielding. Waiting.

“Make sure it hurts.”

Morgan’s voice. Soft, trembling around the edges, but holding firm, nowhere near breaking.

Evan’s grip loosens for a heartbeat, in shock, or something he wasn’t ready to feel, and Morgan slams her elbow into his injured wrist with all she’s got.

The sound that comes out of him isn’t human.

Before the echo fades, Carter charges. He hits Evan low and hard, driving through him the way he’s driven through a hundred opponents—hips first, no hesitation, no wasted motion. Evan crashes hard, the gun skidding away on the dirt floor. Carter is already on him, and just like that, it’s done.

“Get her out.”

My father’s command, followed by strong, careful hands guiding me toward the door, to the cold air, the brittle grass, the vast, dark sky above us.

I stumble out, smacking into the freezing air like a wall. My legs give out. Morgan is there, her arm taking my weight, her lip split, eyes bright with something just shy of tears.

I lean into her and gaze up at the sky, the real sky, open and immense, and I try to remember how to breathe without it feeling like drowning.

Inside the barn, I hear my father’s voice drop to a low murmur, a secret meant for Evan’s ears alone.

“They’re not going to kill him, are they?” The question slips out, barely there.

Morgan steadies me, meeting my eyes with her own, cold, careful, and something else beneath, almost a promise.

“No,” she says.

For a moment, she says nothing more. Engines idle. Boots scrape over frozen earth. The barn breathes out its darkness and decay into the night.

“They’re going to make him wish he’d gone to prison.”

Chapter 1

Trixie

The smell hits me straight away. Lavender laundry soap, a whisper of lemon polish, and the dusty sweetness of old paperbacks that have sat on these shelves so long their scent has become part of the air. I know this scent as deeply as I know my own heartbeat.

My childhood bedroom.

The mattress cradles me with its familiar, comforting softness, like an old friend. The springs yield just enough, letting the tension in me unravel.

I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing my lips tight. The walls are still that pale blue I picked out at twelve after nagging Dad for days. The posters are still there, those boy bands I said I’d outgrown but never had the heart to take down. Glow-in-the-dark stars cling to the ceiling. Matthew and I threw them up one summer, all crooked from laughing so hard.

Home. The word moves through me like something breaking free. I look up at the ceiling, my eyes finding the water stain instantly. It looks like a rabbit’s head, right above and to the left of the light fixture. I used to trace its shape with my eyes when I couldn’t sleep. One curve, then another, the long ear, the shorter one, the little dent where the plaster bubbled and never settled. I trace it again now, automatically, like grabbing onto something familiar when I’m feeling lost.

My body feels strange, like I’m wearing it but it doesn’t fit right. The memory of the exam at Mercy General runs through me. The crinkle of paper. The cold stirrups. A calm voice asking what I remembered while the same harsh overhead light I’ve worked under a million times glared down, exposing everything I wanted hidden.

I recognized those kits. I’d passed them to patients, clipboard in hand, keeping my voice steady and warm, while they stared at the ceiling, wishing to vanish. Now, it was my turn with the ceiling tiles.

“Dad?” I ask, my voice strange and thin, like it’s been soaked through and left to dry. He’s by my side in an instant. I hear the creak of the old reading chair, the one with the worn floral pattern I begged for at seven, claiming it was essential for my supposed intellectual pursuits. I hear him settle with a soft sigh. Somehow, he’s always looked too big for that chair, though he’s never complained about it.

“I’m here, sweetheart.” His voice is calm, practiced over years of choosing which words to voice and which to swallow. But his eyes are doing something I don’t have a name for yet, something unguarded and almost desperate. I didn’t see it when Matthew tumbled from the oak and broke his arm, not even during Mom’s worst days. None of those moments carved the lines in his face like this.

He’s holding it together, just barely. The silence between us stretches, heavy with unsaid things. I can feel his unspoken question like I can feel my own jittery pulse.