“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.
