The low hum of the laptop’s fan was the only sound in the small cabin, a constant, whining counterpoint to the frantic thumping of my own heart.
Outside, the Louisiana swamp was a black mirror, swallowing the moonlight whole. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of stale coffee, damp earth, and Nash.
We sat shoulder-to-shoulder at his small kitchen table, the laptop a stark rectangle of light between us. Hours had bled into one another since our mad dash from the Devereauxs’ warehouse.
Adrenaline had long since burned away, leaving behind a gritty exhaustion that settled deep in my bones. But sleep was impossible. We were too close.
“Anything?” Nash’s voice was a low rumble beside me, the sound vibrating through the wood of the table and up my arm.
“More of the same,” I murmured, scrolling through another encrypted shipping manifest.
“Palm oil, illicit timber, knock-off designer goods. It’s enough to get them on a dozen federal charges, but it’s not what we’re looking for.”
It wasn’t about their empire. It was about Hannah.
Nash’s hand came to rest on the back of my neck, his thumb stroking the tense cord of muscle there.
It wasn’t a romantic gesture, not exactly. It was a gesture of solidarity, of grounding.
I’m here. We’re in this together.
But my body responded anyway, a slow, liquid heat pooling in my stomach. The warehouse, the chase, the shared fear—it had fused us together in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
We were two jagged pieces of a broken whole, and tonight, we fit.
“We’ll find it, Callie,” he said, his voice raw.
I leaned into his touch, just for a second, closing my eyes. “I know. It just feels… I feel like I’m chasing a ghost through a fog bank.”
“Then I’ll chase it with you.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. The low light from the screen carved sharp angles into his face, highlighting the scratch on his jaw from a splintered crate and the weary darkness under his eyes.
He looked dangerous and wrecked and beautiful, and the urge to close the final inch between us was a physical ache.
“There’s a hidden directory,” I said, forcing my attention back to the screen, my voice a little too rough. “Password protected. Looks like personal files, backed up from a private server.”
Nash’s focus sharpened. “Can you get in?”
“Give me a minute.” My fingers flew across the keyboard, running a simple decryption script I’d built years ago. It was a long shot.
But the Devereauxs were arrogant. They relied on fear and force, not sophisticated firewalls.
A progress bar crawled across the screen. We both held our breath. It hit 100%, and the folder icon unlocked. My heart hammered against my ribs.
“I’m in.”
The folder was a mess of poorly labeled files. JPEGs, audio clips, text documents. It was a digital junk drawer.
I started clicking through, opening images of lavish parties, expensive cars, and bored-looking women draped over Landon Devereaux, the family’s sneering heir.
“Standard rich-kid depravity,” Nash muttered, his disgust a palpable thing in the small space.
I kept clicking. Image after image of a life so vacuous it was almost painful to witness.
Then I saw a file name that made the air freeze in my lungs.
`SWAMP_NIGHT_08`. The date. The night Hannah died.
My hand trembled as I moved the cursor. Nash’s arm tightened around my shoulders, his body a solid wall of support. “Callie. You ready?”
I nodded, unable to speak, and double-clicked.
The image that filled the screen was grainy, taken from a distance with a cheap digital camera, but the content was brutally clear.
There was Hannah, her face illuminated by what looked like a car’s headlights. She was alive.
Her chin was lifted in defiance, her hands clenched into fists at her sides, her mouth open in a furious shout.
She was fighting. Even then, she was fighting.
A sob caught in my throat.
Looming over her was Landon Devereaux. His handsome face was twisted into a mask of rage, one hand raised, his body language pure menace.
They were at the edge of the cypress grove, the black water of the bayou gleaming just behind them.
This was it. The moment before everything went wrong.
“That son of a bitch,” Nash breathed, his voice a low, lethal snarl. “We’ve got him.”
But my eyes weren’t on Landon. They were drawn to the shadows at the edge of the frame, to a detail almost lost in the pixelated darkness.
A shape. The distinct silhouette of a man, half-hidden behind a thick cypress trunk.
“Wait,” I whispered, my voice barely a thread of sound. “Nash… zoom in. Right there.”
He followed my shaking finger, his own hands surprisingly steady as he manipulated the trackpad, enlarging the periphery of the photo.
The image distorted, the pixels bloating into abstract squares of color. But as the focus sharpened, the shape resolved into a figure.
A man in a uniform.
My blood ran cold.
He was younger, thinner, but the face was unmistakable.
The same weak chin, the same haunted eyes, the same set to his mouth that always seemed to be on the verge of an apology.
A young Deputy Ben Carter.
He wasn’t confronting anyone. He wasn’t intervening. He was just… watching.
A silent sentinel in the dark, bearing witness from the shadows as Hannah argued for her life with the most dangerous man in the parish.
“No,” I choked out, the word a denial against the irrefutable truth on the screen. “No, it can’t be.”
But it was.
The timeline crashed into place in my mind with sickening clarity.
Ben, the first on the scene.
Ben, who had handled the evidence.
Ben, who had steered the investigation towards a drifter, an accident, anything but the Devereauxs.
Ben, who had patted my hand and told me they were doing everything they could.
Ben, my father’s friend. The man I had trusted.
The air left my body in a rush, a hollow, guttural sound of pure betrayal. The cabin tilted, the screen blurring through a sudden film of tears.
He hadn’t killed her. He had done something so much worse.
He had watched. He had known.
And for ten years, he had said nothing. He had let her killer walk free.
He had let me and my family drown in the not-knowing, all to protect his own skin, his own burgeoning career, his place in the town’s corrupt hierarchy.
Nash swore, a violent, vicious curse. “He was there. The whole goddamn time, he was there.”
I was shaking, a deep, uncontrollable tremor that started in my core and radiated out to my fingertips. The grief I had carried for a decade came roaring back, but this time it was different.
It was poisoned with the acid of betrayal.
Every kind word from Ben, every sympathetic look, every promise to keep looking—it was all a lie. A performance.
“He lied to me,” I whispered, the words scraping my raw throat. “He looked me in the eye for ten years and he lied.”
Nash was out of his chair in an instant, turning me away from the toxic glow of the screen.
He pulled me into his arms, crushing me against his chest. I buried my face in his shirt, inhaling the scent of pine and gunpowder and him, and I finally broke.
The sobs tore out of me, ugly and broken.
It was a storm of grief for Hannah, for my father who died never knowing, for the stupid, naive girl I had been, who believed in the inherent goodness of people she’d known her whole life.
Nash just held me, his hands stroking my hair, his body a shield against the world. He didn’t offer empty platitudes or tell me it would be okay.
He just held me together as I fell apart, absorbing the shockwaves of my pain.
When the storm finally subsided, leaving me empty and shuddering in his arms, he tipped my chin up. His eyes, dark and turbulent, searched mine.
“He didn’t just lie, Callie,” he said, his voice deadly soft. “He didn’t just let her die. He watched. He stood by and he chose them over her. Over you.”
His words struck the last of my grief and forged it into something new. Something hard and cold and sharp.
Fury. A pure, crystalline rage that burned away the tears and left behind a terrifying clarity.
My trust had been the ultimate casualty tonight.
Fine. If I couldn’t trust anyone, I would trust myself.
If the system was broken, I would break it further.
I looked at Nash, at the matching fire in his eyes.
The space between us was charged with more than just shared anger and grief. It was a magnetic, desperate pull.
He was the only solid thing in my life that had just been ripped apart at the seams.
Before I could think, before I could second-guess it, I rose on my toes and crushed my mouth to his.
It wasn’t a soft kiss. It was a raw, desperate collision. It was fury and pain and a frantic need to feel something other than the hollow ache of betrayal. I tangled my fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, and he groaned, his arms banding around my waist like steel, lifting me against him.
His mouth was demanding, his stubble scraping my skin, the taste of him a mix of coffee and righteous anger.
This wasn’t about romance; it was about survival. It was a silent, frantic pact.
You and me. Against them all.
It was an affirmation that we were alive, and Hannah wasn’t, and the people responsible were going to pay for it.
He kissed me like he was trying to pour all of his strength into me, and I kissed him back like I was trying to anchor myself to the only person on earth who understood.
When we finally broke apart, we were both breathing heavily, our foreheads pressed together. The air in the cabin crackled.
The world had been upended, but in this one, small, charged space, I had found my footing.
I pulled back, my hands still framing his jaw. The vulnerability was gone, replaced by a cold, hard resolve. My voice, when it came, was steady. Unbreakable.
“Landon Devereaux killed my sister,” I said, the words tasting like metal. “And Ben Carter helped him get away with it.”
Nash’s hands tightened on my hips. “What do we do?”
I looked past him, at the damning photograph still glowing on the laptop screen. An idea, reckless and dangerous, began to form in the ashes of my grief.
They had hidden in the shadows for a decade. It was time to drag them into the light.
“They’re not just going to pay,” I said, my voice dropping to a low, chilling promise. “They’re going to burn.”