Page 19 of Shadow Secrets
“And the connection to Sutton?”
Vivi didn’t answer immediately, her gaze bouncing to Sutton and back to Sebastian. That was answer enough.
Sutton saw the way Sebastian’s jaw tightened. A man whose face had been on the cover of People magazine was about to be dragged back into the spotlight he’d moved two thousand miles away to escape.
And Sutton, who’d spent six years trying to carve out anonymity in a town nobody watched, was going to be dragged in beside him. Assassin’s sister. Killer’s sibling. The old headlines, waiting in every archive, a search-bar away from being rewritten with her face beside his.
“I need to step out,” Sebastian said.
“Sebastian—” Vivi started.
“I need air.”
He didn’t look at Sutton as he left. He didn’t slam the door. He just moved, and the briefing room went quiet.
Sutton stared at the screen and the photograph of Sebastian on the stretcher. At the trending tags. At the fan account posts: Praying for Bastian. Ginger loved him. #findbastian
She felt sick.
“He’s been through this before,” Vivi said quietly to her. “The year after the shooting nearly broke him. He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat in public. Strangers would approach him for photographs while he was trying to attend a funeral.”
“I know.”
“You don’t, though.” Vivi’s gaze was kind but unflinching. “You saw the hero version the machine produced. The man behind it came apart quietly, and by the time he got here, he’d rebuilt himself around one simple rule: never be visible again. Never be identifiable. Never be the story.”
Sutton thought of the farmhouse on Miller Road. Sparse, functional, deliberately impersonal. No photographs on the walls. The kind of space a man built when he was preparing, always, to disappear again.
And she, Sutton Crenshaw, had brought the past back down on him by showing up on his porch.
“Can I go find him?” she asked.
Vivi nodded. “I think you’re the only person who should.”
He was at the edge of the training yard, staring at the tree line. The October wind had picked up, cutting through the thin weave of the thermal she’d put on that morning from the pile of clothes he handed her. It smelled like him.
She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to where he stood. He didn’t turn when she approached, but he shifted his weight half a step and opened the space beside him. An invitation without words.
She stepped into it. “They’re going to find you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And they’re going to find me.”
A longer pause. “Yes.”
She tried to imagine it and couldn’t. Not quite. The D.C. media coverage had been at arm’s length—footage of Penn’s mugshot, a few articles, occasional reminders on anniversaries that faded by afternoon. She’d been allowed to exist in the margins. In Blackridge, she’d been invisible. Dom didn’t Google people. Her clients didn’t read political news. The parlor’s rough block attracted people who wanted ink, not narrative.
All of that was about to change. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For bringing this to your door.”
Sebastian’s head whipped around. His blue eyes were shadowed by the low sun, unreadable in the slant of light. “You didn’t bring it. A man with a gun brought it. I’m the one who opened the door.”
“You could have let one of the others handle this. You could have kept your distance.”
He shook his head and stared at the mountains. “It wouldn’t have mattered, Sutton. The minute Ginger died, everything became fodder for the media again. This isn’t your fault.”
The wind blew her hair across her face. She didn’t push it away as she searched for the right words.
“I hated being famous,” he said. “It turned me into something I didn’t recognize. Every room I walked into, people already had opinions about me. Who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to feel, who I was supposed to love.” He paused. “You know what the hardest part was?”
