The air in the Devereaux study was a toxic cocktail of gunpowder, stale cigar smoke, and spilled bourbon.
Outside, the night was torn apart by the strobing red and blue of police lights, painting the mahogany walls in frantic, bloody strokes.
The chaos was a physical presence, a hum under my skin that refused to settle. I watched, numb, as deputies led the Devereaux family out, their faces pale masks of disbelief and fury.
The patriarch, a man who had ruled Veridian with an iron checkbook, looked small and withered in handcuffs.
His son, the one who’d held a letter opener to my throat not twenty minutes ago, was a sobbing, blubbering mess.
The truth, once uncaged, had devoured them whole.
My phone felt heavy in my pocket, the live stream ended, the recording saved.
Evidence. Justice. Hannah’s ghost could finally rest.
But I felt no triumph, only a bone-deep exhaustion that threatened to pull my knees out from under me.
Then, through the sea of uniforms, I saw Ben. He wasn’t directing his deputies or conferring with detectives.
He was just standing there, near the shattered remains of a decanter, the sheriff’s star on his chest looking like a lead weight pulling him down.
The authority had been stripped from him, peeled away layer by layer until only the man—the boy I used to know—was left. And he looked broken.
His eyes found mine across the room, and he started toward me, his steps heavy, deliberate.
Every instinct screamed at me to turn away, but I was frozen, held in place by the morbid curiosity of seeing the story through to its final, bitter end.
Nash was on the other side of the room, leaning against a marble pillar by the French doors.
A dark bruise was already blooming high on his cheekbone where Devereaux’s fist had connected, and a cut split his lower lip.
He wasn’t looking at me, but I could feel his gaze all the same, a steady, protective weight. He was giving me this space, this final confrontation, trusting me to handle it.
“Callie,” Ben said when he reached me. His voice was raw, stripped of its usual command. It was the voice of a man confessing his sins in a godless room.
“I…” He trailed off, his gaze darting around the ruined study as if the words he needed were scattered amongst the debris.
“Don’t, Ben,” I said, my own voice surprisingly steady. “It’s over.”
“No.” He shook his head, a desperate, jerky motion. “It’s not. Not until you understand.” His eyes, the same clear blue I had once thought held the sky, were now clouded with a storm of regret.
“I saw it, Callie. That night. I was on patrol, doing a final sweep near the Devereaux property. I saw the headlights. I saw him… with Hannah.”
The air left my lungs in a painful rush. It was one thing to suspect, to piece together the clues. It was another to hear it from his lips. “You saw him kill her?”
He flinched, the truth a physical blow. He couldn’t quite meet my eyes, focusing instead on a point over my shoulder.
“I saw him strike her. I saw her fall. By the time I got there… she was gone. He was gone. There was nothing but the blood on the cypress roots.”
A cold, quiet rage began to replace the exhaustion. “And you did nothing.” It wasn’t a question.
“My father…” he began, his voice cracking.
“He found me there. He knew what it would mean. A Devereaux killing a Thorne. It wouldn’t have just been an arrest, Callie, it would have been a war. The two founding families, tearing this town apart. He said it would destroy Veridian. That the town’s survival was more important than one life. He convinced me… he ordered me… to bury it. To protect the peace.”
“The peace?” I let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. “You mean the lie, Ben. You protected a lie.”
“I protected you!” he shot back, his voice rising, raw with a pain that had clearly been festering for years.
“I knew what they were capable of. I thought if I kept it quiet, if I kept you close, I could keep you safe from it all. I could give you the life we always talked about. The house on Willow Creek, the Sunday mornings on the porch, the quiet. The safety.”
He took a step closer, his hands coming up as if to touch me, then falling back to his sides. He was laying his heart bare, but the heart he was showing me was rotted with compromise and fear.
He was offering me a picket fence built on a graveyard.
“That life, Ben? It was never real,” I said, the words soft but final. “It was a beautiful story, but it was hollow. Safety built on a secret that huge isn’t safety. It’s a cage.”
I looked at him, at the handsome, earnest face I had once loved so fiercely, and all I felt was a profound and aching pity.
Pity for the man he could have been if he’d been brave enough.
Pity for the boy who had let his father’s fear become his own.
The anger was gone, burned out, leaving only the ash of what we once were. He was a ghost from a life I no longer wanted.
My eyes, of their own accord, drifted past him, seeking out the one solid thing in the spinning chaos of the room.
Nash.
He was watching us now. His dark eyes held no judgment, only a deep, knowing understanding.
He was bruised, bleeding, and had walked willingly into the heart of the storm for me. He hadn’t offered me safety.
He’d offered me his strength. He hadn’t promised me a quiet life.
He’d promised me the truth, no matter how jagged or painful. He hadn’t tried to protect me from the fire; he had walked through it with me.
That was the difference. All the difference in the world.
A choice, clear and absolute, settled in my soul. It wasn’t even a choice, really. It was an inevitability. A recognition.
“I’m sorry, Ben,” I whispered. And I was. Sorry for the pain he was in, sorry for the man he’d failed to become.
Then I turned my back on him.
Every step I took toward Nash was a severance. The snap of the final thread connecting me to Ben, to the girl I used to be, to the life of careful, curated peace I once thought I craved.
The noise of the room faded away—the crackle of radios, the murmur of deputies, Ben’s shattered silence behind me.
The world narrowed to the space between me and the pillar, to the man leaning against it as if he’d been waiting for me all his life.
When I reached him, I didn’t say a word. I just lifted my hand, my fingers trembling slightly, and laid it on his chest, right over his heart.
I could feel the steady, strong beat of it beneath my palm. A rhythm that matched the frantic thrumming in my own blood, calming it.
His gaze searched mine, asking a dozen questions without a single word. His own hand came up to cover mine, his grip warm and sure, an anchor in the swirling chaos.
The calluses on his palm were a familiar comfort, the map of a life lived honestly, without apology.
“It’s over,” I breathed, the words meant only for him.
“Almost,” he rumbled, his voice low and laced with a weariness that mirrored my own. His thumb brushed over my knuckles, a spark on scorched earth.
He dipped his head, his forehead resting against mine.
The smell of him—whiskey, sawdust, and the clean scent of the storm that had just passed—filled my senses, chasing away the last of the room’s acrid taint.
He wasn’t a promise of an easy future. He was a promise of a real one. A future that would be messy and raw and passionate and true.
We were two scarred people who fit together not because we were perfect, but because our broken edges matched.
“Are you okay?” he murmured, his breath ghosting across my lips.
I looked into the depths of his eyes and saw my own reflection, stronger and fiercer than I had ever been. “I am now.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me, a slow, tired smile touching his cut lip. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
He didn’t need to say anything else. I didn’t need to either.
The choice was made. It had been made the moment he’d taught me how to find my own strength, how to fight my own battles.
It had been made in the back of a smoky bar, in the humid quiet of his cabin, in the heart-stopping moment he’d thrown himself between me and danger.
He kept my hand in his, his fingers lacing through mine. The simple connection was more intimate, more binding, than any promise Ben could ever have made.
It was a pact.
A beginning.
“Come on,” Nash said, his voice a quiet command that was really an invitation.
“Let’s go home.”