Hold on,Lily whispered.He’s almost here.
“Did you know your great-great-grandmother tried to stop my family?” Winston knelt in front of Vivienne, his gun resting casually on his knee. “Mathilde Hawthorne. She put protective wards all through this lighthouse, thinking she could trap us, force us to abandon our operation.”
“She succeeded.” Vivienne’s voice came out steady despite the fear coiling in her stomach. “Your family couldn’t use the lighthouse the way they wanted. That’s why you expanded into the tunnels, why you had to hide.”
Winston’s laugh was bitter. “She delayed us. Nothing more. We adapted. That’s what the Aldrich family does—we adapt, we survive, we thrive. Your family just . . . watches. Listens to ghosts. What good has that ever done?”
“Lily found the evidence. Martha never stopped believing. And now you’re finished.”
“Am I?” Winston stood, moving to the window. “Gerald is in custody, yes. Jeremy and Tyler too. But I’m still free. And once I eliminate you and that detective, I’ll have time to disappear. New identity, new life. The Aldrich operation will go dormant for a generation, then resurface when everyone’s forgotten.”
He said it so casually, as if their deaths were minor inconveniences rather than murder.
“Brooks won’t come alone.” Vivienne tested the zip ties again, but Winston had secured them tightly. “The FBI is watching this lighthouse.”
“Let them watch. By the time they move in, you’ll both be dead and I’ll be gone through the tunnels. They’ve already searched the network—they think they found everything. But there are passages even Gerald doesn’t know about. Passages mygreat-great-grandfather dug in 1875 that lead to a cave system two miles up the coast.”
Footsteps echoed from below. Heavy boots on iron stairs.
Winston raised his gun, positioning himself behind Vivienne. The cold metal pressed against her temple.
“One sound and I pull the trigger. Understand?”
Vivienne nodded slightly. Her heart hammered so hard she thought Winston might hear it.
Brooks’s voice carried up through the tower. “Winston! I’m here. Let her go.”
“Come up, Detective. Alone.”
More footsteps. Slower now. Methodical. Brooks climbing toward them.
Vivienne closed her eyes, reaching for her abilities despite the missing pendant. The spirits responded weakly, their voices like distant wind. She needed them stronger. Needed Mathilde.
Mathilde,she thought desperately.Grandmother. Please.
The temperature in the lamp room dropped five degrees. Frost formed on the windows despite the rain. Winston’s breath misted in front of his face.
“What the hell?—”
Brooks appeared in the doorway, weapon drawn. His eyes found Vivienne first, cataloging her injuries with a single glance. Then they shifted to Winston, cold and calculating.
“Let her go,” Brooks said. His voice was steady, but Vivienne could see the tension in his shoulders, the white-knuckled grip on his gun. “It’s over, Winston. The FBI has everything. Your family’s in custody. You can’t win this.”
“I can take one more Hawthorne woman with me.” Winston’s finger tightened on the trigger. “That’s worth something.”
The frost on the windows thickened. Vivienne felt Mathilde’s presence growing stronger, drawn by her desperation andBrooks’s fear. Other spirits gathered too—Lily, Karl Kelly, all the victims whose lives the Aldriches had stolen.
“You shoot her, you lose any leverage you have,” Brooks said. His eyes flicked to Vivienne, and in that brief glance she saw everything he wasn’t saying. Trust me. Hold on. I’ve got you.
Something shifted in the air between them. That connection—the one that had been growing since the day he walked into The Mystic Cup, the pull she’d felt when she first saw him—suddenly snapped into focus, becoming something tangible. Her grandmother Emmeline’s journal had said he would be her anchor, that the shop had been preparing for his arrival since before either was born. And now Vivienne understood what that meant.
She could sense the pattern of his thoughts like ripples in water, could feel the sharp edges of his fear for her underneath the calm exterior, could taste the metallic determination flooding his system as he calculated angles and timing. It wasn’t reading his mind exactly—more like feeling the shape of his intentions, the emotional architecture of his plan.
And somehow, impossibly, she knew he could feel hers too. The connection ran both ways now, a bridge built from weeks of learning to trust each other’s methods, of him opening himself to things he’d never believed in, of her learning to ground her visions in the practical reality he lived in. Two very different ways of seeing the world, somehow aligned in this moment.
When I drop, shoot.
Brooks’s eyes widened slightly. He’d heard her. Actually heard her thoughts.
