Chapter 3 Before Dinner

Nora's POV

I did not move.

Colt was at the end of the hallway. Reid's voice was rising from downstairs. The photo was right in front of me, my eleven-year-old self standing at a fence line I recognized better than my own reflection.

And I was standing in the middle of all three things with nowhere to go.

"Nora." Reid again. Closer now. He had moved to the bottom of the stairs. "Come down. Please."

That word, please, was what got me. Reid Harren did not seem like someone who said please easily. It sounded like it had been pulled out of him.

I looked at Colt one more time.

His face gave me nothing. But his jaw was tight, and Colt Harren, from everything I had seen in two hours, did not get tense without a reason.

I walked past him toward the stairs.

He did not stop me. But as I passed, he said, very quietly, "Be careful what you believe before you have the full picture."

I kept walking.

Reid was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The moment I reached the last step, he turned and moved toward the back of the house, clearly expecting me to follow. I followed.

He pushed open a door that led to a small room, plain, no photos, just two chairs and a window. He closed the door behind us. He did not sit. He stood with his arms crossed and looked at me like he was about to say something he had been rehearsing.

"I know you," he said. "You don't remember me yet, but you will. Lake Carden. Three summers. You used to race me to the end of the dock, and you always cheated, and you always won."

The memory hit me so fast it felt like a physical thing.

A boy with a gap between his front teeth, laughing so hard he fell off a paddleboat. A whole summer of running and daring each other and staying out until the sky went dark. Then the next summer, he was back. And the next. And then my grandmother sold the property, and we never went back, and I never knew his last name.

Reid.

I had not thought about that boy in three years.

"That was you," I breathed.

"That was me." He uncrossed his arms. "And I need you to listen to me right now, Nora, because dinner is in forty minutes and after that it gets a lot harder to talk to you without Colt knowing."

"What does that mean?"

"It means my stepbrother does not do anything without a reason. This arrangement, you living here, playing his girlfriend, it is not what he told you it is."

My stomach tightened. "He told me he needed someone for family events. Sixty days. The debt gets cleared."

Reid looked at me with something close to pain. "Did he tell you why? Did he explain anything about what the family events are for, or who is going to be there, or what you are actually being used to protect?"

I said nothing, because no. He had told me almost nothing.

"There was a girl before you," Reid said. "Celeste Vaughn. She did the same arrangement last year. She is still at Whitfield. She does not talk about what happened, and she switched friend groups, and she laughs too loud at things that are not funny." He paused. "She looks like someone who got burned and rebuilt herself over the damage."

The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.

"What happened to her?" I asked.

"I don't know everything. That's what scares me." He took a step forward. His voice dropped. "I know Colt is protecting something. I know it is serious enough that he needs a human shield he can control, and I know that whoever stands next to him becomes a target for people I have never even met." He looked straight at me. "You are not a girlfriend to him. You are a strategy. And strategies get sacrificed when the game changes."

My mouth was dry. "So why are you telling me this?"

"Because I know you," he said simply. "And you deserve to walk in with your eyes open."

The door opened.

Colt was standing in the frame.

He looked at Reid. Then at me. Then, at the two chairs we had not sat in, the closed door, the conversation that had clearly been about him.

His expression did not change. That was the thing about Colt, the absence of reaction was its own reaction.

"Dinner," he said.

Reid held my gaze for one second more. Then he walked past Colt and out the door.

I moved to follow. Colt stepped to one side to let me through, and as I passed him, he said, just as quietly as before, "He means well. He's also only telling you the pieces he knows."

I stopped. "And you'll tell me the pieces he doesn't?"

He looked at me. Something in his eyes was different from every other time he had looked at me today. Not warmer. Just less guarded. Like, for exactly one second, he forgot to keep the wall up.

"Maybe," he said. "If you give me a reason to."

Then it was gone. The wall was back. He nodded toward the dining room and followed me out.

Dinner was its own kind of battlefield.

Colt's stepfather sat at the head of the table. He asked me three polite questions, and I gave three careful answers, exactly the way Colt had told me to. Reid sat across from me and said almost nothing, ate almost nothing, and looked at his plate like it had personally offended him.

I was cutting into my food when Colt's stepfather said, pleasantly, "Colt mentioned you come from the Carden Lake area. My first wife's family had property there."

I looked up.

Reid's fork went still.

Colt did not react. But his hand, resting on the table next to his glass, closed into a very slow fist.

"I used to go there as a kid," I said carefully. "My grandmother's place."

Colt's stepfather nodded, smiled, and moved on to another topic.

But I was not listening anymore.

Because under the table, something had been placed beside my hand. Quietly. Without looking at me. A folded piece of paper.

From Colt.

I waited until the stepfather was mid-sentence. Then I unfolded it in my lap.

Four words.

Do not trust anyone.

I looked up at Colt. He was listening to his stepfather with a perfectly neutral face, not looking at me at all.

I looked at Reid. He was already watching me. He had seen Colt pass the note. His expression told me he had no idea what was in it.

Two brothers. Two warnings. Both are pointing in opposite directions.

And I was sitting between them with a secret neither of them knew I was carrying, because under the table, in the pocket pressed against my leg, my phone was buzzing.

I slid it out just far enough to read the screen.

Unknown number. The same one who texted me the first day.

One message.

I know why Colt really chose you. Ask him about the girl who disappeared from Whitfield two years ago. Before Celeste. The one nobody talks about.

My heart stopped.

I pressed the phone flat against my thigh and stared at my plate.

Two years ago. Before Celeste. A girl nobody talks about.

The scar on Colt's jaw.

My hands were not steady anymore.