Chapter 4 What Colt Knew

Reid's POV

I heard the gate buzz from my room, and I was at the top of the stairs before I even decided to move.

I told myself it was curiosity. I told myself I just wanted to see what kind of girl my stepbrother had pulled into his latest arrangement. I had seen Celeste. I had watched what happened to her. I was not going to watch it happen to someone else without at least getting a look at who was walking through the door.

Then the door opened.

And my brain just stopped.

She was older. Three years older, obviously, because three years had passed. Her hair was different. She was taller. But the way she stood, duffel bag on one shoulder, chin up, eyes moving around the room like she was already calculating exits, that was the same. That was the girl who used to stand at the end of the dock and dare me to jump first and then laugh when I did.

Nora Voss was standing in my house.

She looked up and saw me.

I watched her face do what faces do when something is familiar, but the name will not come, a small pull, a frown, recognition knocking on a door she had not opened in years.

She did not know me yet. But she would.

That was almost worse.

I came down the stairs. I stopped three steps from the bottom because my legs made that decision without asking me. She was right there. Close enough that I could see she had not slept well, the kind of tired that lives behind the eyes and does not go away after one good night.

"Nora Voss," I said.

Something moved across her face when I said her name. She asked how I knew it. I did not answer that. I needed ten seconds to think, and I did not have them, so I just said my name and watched the moment she connected Harren to Colt, and her expression went careful and closed.

Colt appeared from the side hallway.

Of course he did.

He had probably been standing there the whole time. Colt did not miss things. Colt did not wander into rooms accidentally. Everything he did was on purpose, including the timing of his entrance right at the moment when I was running out of things to say.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Three years of living in the same house had made us fluent in a language that had no words, and what his expression said right now was: back off, Reid.

What I said back was: not a chance.

He showed Nora to her room. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened to their footsteps go down the hall, and I counted to ten, and then I went to find Colt.

He was in the study when I caught him. Door open, already behind his desk, already looking at his laptop like the conversation had not happened and was not about to.

I closed the door.

"Nora Voss," I said. "You chose Nora Voss."

"She was available and qualified"

"Don't." I put both hands on the desk and leaned forward. "Don't give me the recruitment speech. You know who she is. You know I know who she is. So stop performing and tell me why."

Colt looked at me for a long moment. His face did the thing it always did, went completely still, like a surface with nothing underneath. I had spent three years learning to read past that stillness. Right now, it was telling me he had expected this conversation and had already decided how much he was going to give me.

"She is trustworthy," he said. "Her background is clean. Her situation gives her motivation to stay quiet and stay compliant. She is exactly what the arrangement requires."

"She is someone I know."

"I'm aware."

Those two words hit me like a door slamming.

"You used her," I said. "You used the fact that I knew her. Why? So I would play nice? So I would cooperate with your arrangement instead of blowing it up as I did with Celeste?"

He did not answer. He did not need to. His silence was its own answer.

I stepped back from the desk. My chest felt tight. "You have no idea what you've pulled her into."

"I know exactly what I've pulled her into. That's why I chose someone capable of handling it."

"She is not a piece on your board, Colt."

"Everyone is a piece on someone's board." He said it without cruelty. That was the worst part. He was not being cruel. He genuinely believed it. "The difference is whether they know it or not. I intend to make sure she knows."

"Oh, you'll tell her the truth? All of it?"

He held my gaze. "Enough of it."

Enough. Not all. Enough.

I left the study before I said something that could not be unsaid.

I went to my room, sat on the edge of my bed, and stared at the wall.

Here is what I knew about Colt's arrangements: they were never simple. Celeste had come in thinking it was sixty days and a favor, and she had left looking like someone who had survived something she could not name. I had asked her once, just once, what happened. She looked at me with those rebuilt eyes and said, "Ask your brother what he's protecting and why he needs a human wall to do it."

I never got a straight answer from Colt.

But I knew this: two years ago, before Celeste, there had been another girl. A junior. She was at Whitfield for one semester, and then she was gone, transferred, vanished, and nobody talked about her because in this school, things connected to the Harren name had a way of disappearing quietly.

I knew her first name. Just her first name.

Colt had never confirmed anything. But the scar on his jaw had appeared that same semester, and he had never once explained where it came from.

I got up. I needed to warn Nora before dinner. Before she walked into that dining room without knowing what she had agreed to.

I went into the hall.

And stopped.

Nora was standing at the photo wall. The family photo. The one with the lake house in the background. She was leaning close, very close, and her hand had come up to touch the edge of the frame.

She had found herself in it.

I watched her go still, the way people go still when the ground moves.

Then she turned around, and Colt was at the end of the hallway, and they were looking at each other, and I was watching the moment she realized this had never been random.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out.

Unknown number. A number I did not recognize.

One message.

She's already in danger. You have until dinner to decide whose side you're on. Choose wrong, and she ends up like the first one.

I read it three times.

The first one.

Not Celeste.

Before Celeste.

My hand tightened around the phone.

Someone else knew about the girl who disappeared. Someone else was watching this house right now. And they had my number, which meant they had been watching me, too.

From down the hall, I heard Nora say Colt's name.

I put the phone in my pocket, and I moved.