haunches with a quiet sigh of released pressure, his job done.
Vincent did not move. He could not breathe.
The world contracted until there was nothing left but the weight of the metal in his palm. His thumb, calloused from years of gripping steering wheels, contracts, and firearms, drifted across the worn backplate.
The engraving was faint, smoothed down by decades of thumbs doing the exact same thing, but the cursive letters were burned into his memory before his eyes even read them:
Clara.
Vincent’s heart slammed against his ribs with a violence no bullet had ever managed.
Twenty years.
Twenty years since the summer night in Scituate when a rival family had wired his father’s coastal boathouse with plastic explosives. Vincent had been eighteen, dragged out of the flaming surf with third-degree burns and shattered ribs, screaming into the saltwater as the timber collapsed into the ocean. His father
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