The video looped on my phone like a bad dream—staccato, pixelated, the silhouette, the flash—and then nothing. A white cut that might have been light, might have been a weapon, might have been nothing more than a camera catching movement. The text that followed—We have what you want. Come alone for confirmation or we send the list back out.—was the thin wire it felt like I was dangling from.
I punched at the screen until the vid stuttered and died. It didn’t make the retroactive shove of terror any quieter.
“Call the sheriff,” I breathed into the empty house, because that’s what anyone sane would do.
He was already on the line when Dominic’s name stopped being a living voice inside my head and became a file stored somewhere outside my reach. Sheriff Halloway’s answer was the flatness of
