Page 113 of The Weight Of Falling
“What is it?” My voice stays even.
He inhales heavily. “He’s saying he doesn’t just want to reach you. He plans to break you.”
Aaron’s fingers tighten on his laptop. Gideon angles himself a fraction more between me and the window.
“Thank you,” I say, because honesty is a kind of armor. “Now weallknow what we’re up against.”
“So Roy is not signaling a game,” Gideon says slowly. “He’s signaling damage.”
Aaron closes his laptop. “Then we treat this as a clear declaration,” he says. “Not a bluff.”
“What about Owen?” I ask. “Should we take this to him?”
Aaron is the first to speak. “We log it,” he says, in his calm, precise way. “Photos, timestamps. I’ll bag the piece and the packaging, but there’s no explicit threat here. Just a chess piece.”
“Whenever I bring something to the police, it ends the same,” Joel says, a little bitterly. “They file it and tell me to be vigilant.”
Gideon leans forward, forearms on his knees, eyes steady on me. “Owen’s a good man,” he says evenly. “He’s also a small-town sheriff with a small-town toolbox. He can note it down. He can patrol. That’s about it.”
Joel’s hand opens on his knee, then closes again. “Going to the authorities isn’t off the table. It’s just not our first move.”
Aaron nods in agreement. “We loop Owen in when we have something actionable.”
“In the meantime,” Gideon adds, “you tell us if anything feels off. Even small things.”
I straighten as a memory pricks. “There was this guy.”
Joel stiffens next to me, his eyes sharpening. “What guy?”
“Tell us about him, Kenzie,” Aaron asks in a calmer tone.
I do. I describe how he stopped me for directions, then asked me out for a drink. And how the whole encounter felt faintly wrong, though I couldn’t pinpoint why.
Aaron frowns. “Give me everything you remember about him.”
I give him as detailed a description as I can.
“We’ll look for him,” Aaron assures me. “I’ll check the hotel he mentioned. If he’s the copycat, he may have moved on. Or never stayed there at all.”
“I’ll use my resources,” Gideon says. “See if I can place him.”
Joel turns to me, his voice firm, his eyes implacable. “If you see him again, you call one of us. Do not approach him.”
“I won’t,” I reassure him.
“We’re all here for you,” Aaron adds.
“We have your back,” Gideon says in a quiet voice to Joel.
Gideon’s jaw is set. “He’s evil, but we’re a whole other kind of dangerous. And if he tries anything, he’ll soon discover just how dangerous we are.”
Gideon holds my gaze. “We’re all armed. We’ll do our best to make sure nothing happens to you.”
I’m grateful he’s not promising that nothing will happen to me. No one can make that promise. You can only control what you can. But when he sayswe’ll do our best, I trust their best.
All three men are formidable. Joel is strong, he works out. He’s taken all sorts of combat classes and self-defense classes. Aaron is fit and strong.
Gideon seems the most mild-mannered, but there’s a side of him I sense will do anything for the people he loves. For the people Kate loves. Joel, through no fault or choice of his own, has to live with darkness. But Gideon... It’s like he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty.
