Page 4 of Silencing Stolen Whispers
Fleeting yet strange thoughts flashed through her disintegrating consciousness. Everything that had seemed so important no longer mattered.
The bar exam.
Nick.
Jade.
Bailey.
And Katherine. Mom. She was going to be so disappointed. All those years of pushing, guiding, and shaping Hannah into the ideal Scriven legacy. It all ended on a cabin floor.
All that potential, wasted.
All that investment, lost.
Hannah’s thoughts began to scatter like leaves in the wind, fragments of identity and memory swept away into nothingness. One final synapse fired with a quick flash of Bailey's face, not angry but laughing, from some distant summer day when they were kids, before expectations, before life had gotten in the way.
Then that too dissolved into a dark, peaceful oblivion.
2
Kinsley Aspen
July
Thursday — 8:12 am
Iknow you killed Calvin Gantz.
The words burned into Kinsley's mind as if branded there, each letter a searing accusation. She didn’t need to open the white envelope to read the message. Her name was written on the front in the same block lettering as all the others.
Someone had knowledge of her secret.
Someone had the ability to destroy her life.
Had she really expected anything less?
Kinsley had murdered a man in cold blood. The fact that she had done so to protect her family was irrelevant. It didn’t matter that the man had taken the lives of three others. She was no better than those she arrested in her line of work.
Her gaze drifted to the framed photograph on her desk. Lily, her eight-year-old niece, grinned back with a missing front tooth at last summer's barbecue. The happy image served as a grimreminder of why Kinsley had made such a spontaneous, horrible decision.
Why she had overstepped a boundary no one should ever cross.
Someone had been sending her the same six-word message on the nineteenth of every month since last October—the one-year anniversary of Calvin Gantz's death.
The ninth note.
The ninth time her world had paused for just a moment.
Well, tenth if she were to take into account that fateful night.
Kinsley managed to inhale some oxygen as she shifted her gaze from Lily’s adorable face to the clock on the far wall of the Fallbrook Police Department's Homicide Division. Her partner would be arriving soon, and she somehow had to get through another morning and afternoon without him noticing that she was slowly dying inside a little more each day.
She opened her desk drawer and slid the white envelope beneath some papers. The notes had always been left in random spots without security cameras—tucked under the windshield wiper of her Jeep, on her daily jogging route, and once even left on a park bench where she took Lily on weekends.
Today?
The messenger made a mistake by leaving the note on the counter of the coffee shop where she picked up her regular weekday order. It was a bold move that was hard for her to accept.
