(Liam Romano's point of view)
Hailey’s eighth month of pregnancy had turned her movements into a slow, deliberate choreography. I watched her hands constantly caress the roundness at her center — our child, the first one born of us alone, without the ghosts of Ethan or Madison — and a tenderness braided with a sharpened alertness kept me taut and watchful.
The security systems Neri installed hummed reliably, but it was the small anomalies that carved at my sleep: an overly specific inquiry in town about remote properties, a truck with capital-city plates parked near the valley for two days. To most people they were coincidences; to a man who’d built an empire by reading patterns, they were warnings.
That morning, while I scanned the perimeter feeds, Neri cut through the channel without
