There was a badge clipped to his belt, dulled by dirt but unmistakable. Deputy Mark Ellery.
Silas swallowed hard, already unlocking his phone. “I’m calling,” he said, and the words sounded older than he felt.
Juniper didn’t argue; she shrugged off her sweatshirt and pressed it hard against the worst of the bleeding, the fabric darkening almost immediately, her arms straining with the effort to maintain pressure as panic tried to climb up her spine and take over her hands.
When the dispatcher answered, Silas forced his voice not to crack, giving directions as precisely as he could, describing the bend near the old quarry marker, the split birch trunk, the way the trail dipped slightly before the clearing, and although his words felt clumsy he kept talking because silence felt more dangerous than mistakes.
Juniper leaned closer to the deputy’s face, noticing the way his eyes fluttered beneath half-closed lids, and then, unexpectedly, his fingers twitched and brushed against her sleeve.
“Don’t…” he rasped, the word barely more than a breath, and she bent closer, straining to catch it.
“Don’t what?” she whispered, as if volume could shatter him.
“Not the captain,” he forced out, each syllable scraped from somewhere deep and painful. “Don’t trust… Captain Rourke.”
The name hit her with a confusion that bordered on disbelief. Captain Leonard Rourke had been at every town fair she could remember, had handed out stickers at school assemblies, had once helped Silas retrieve a soccer ball from the police station roof; he was, in the uncomplicated narrative of childhood, one of the safe ones.
Deputy Ellery’s gaze shifted past her shoulder toward the trees, and fear—raw and unfiltered—flared there in a way that made her stomach turn cold. “They followed,” he murmured, and then his head sagged again.
