I’d bought that necklace at twenty-two. Before Iraq. Before prison. Before everything fell apart. I bought it for Julia Mercer, the only woman who ever made me believe I could outrun the darkness I was born into.
My hands started shaking.
The girl’s eyes fluttered open, and for a split second she looked straight at me—not with Julia’s green eyes, but something colder.
Gray.
The same gray I saw in the mirror every morning.
“What’s your name?” I asked, my voice breaking.
“Lily,” she whispered. “I’m seven.”
Seven.
I’d deployed nine months before she would’ve been born.
Julia had vanished while pregnant, buried beneath silence and a restraining order that never made sense—until now.
And suddenly, I knew.
I knew who did this.
Because the man Julia feared—the man she’d been involved with before me—was the same man who beat my mother to death in 1991 while I hid under the stairs, listening to her beg.
Harold Pike.
He was back.
And he had my daughter.
“Ethan!” I roared. “Keep her alive. If she goes down, you go down.”
Ethan didn’t flinch, already wrapping a thermal blanket around Lily’s shoulders. “She’s hypothermic and in shock, Jax. We need a hospital.”
“No hospitals,” I snapped, grabbing my kutte. “Pike has friends on the force. He’ll finish this if she shows up on a screen.”
I turned to the dog. Shadow was licking blood from his flank, eyes fixed on me. He nudged my boot and whined low.
“He knows where she is,” Logan said, already loading his weapon.
“The old farmhouse,” I said, the truth settling like a weight. “Pike’s family place. Twelve miles north. Same place he killed my mom.”
The room shifted. It wasn’t a clubhouse anymore. It was a unit. Chains rattled. Boots hit the floor.
“Ride,” the president growled, tossing me a shotgun.
The drive north blurred into rain and fury. I didn’t feel the cold or the slick road—only the phantom weight of a seven-year-old in my arms and Julia screaming in my head.
I left her, I thought. Prison for a bar fight. Walking away because I thought she deserved better.
Instead, I left her to a monster.
We cut engines a mile out. The rain covered our approach. The farmhouse stood rotting in an overgrown field, one window glowing sickly yellow.
I didn’t wait.
I kicked the door in.
Harold Pike sat at the kitchen table with whiskey and a cigarette. Older now. Thinner. Same dead eyes.
“Took you long enough, Jackson,” he rasped. “The kid make it?”