2025-06-05 06:21:47Vivian’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe she’s not just a Carter.”
Jake looked up.
Vivian continued. “If she’s sniffing around, then she’s either working with Holt… or she’s getting too close to finding you.”
Jake’s voice dropped. “You think she suspects?”
“No. But Holt might.”
Jake paced. “The Carters think I’m just Amanda’s embarrassment. I’ll stay that way. Go back to the mansion. Be the broke son-in-law, quiet and harmless.
While Diane’s unconscious, I'll keep an eye on her phone, and wait for any call, if Holt was at the bar, he would call and lead me straight to him, he's been wanting to see me, so have i”.
“And if she’s loyal to Holt?” Vivian asked.
“I’ll find out. Either she’s playing both sides… or she just made herself a target.” Jake said and left in his Honda to the Carter mansion.
“What was so important, that you had to leave the hospital?” Amanda asked as Jake tried to enter his room which was just opposite hers.
“Wel… well I had a quick delivery to make,” Jake said avoiding eye contact, “when are we going to see my mother in law?”.
“I would pretend like I didn't hear what you called her, you would go and check on her tomorrow morning we would join you later on”
Jake gave a slight nod and entered his room.
The next morning Jake arrived at the ICU, Diane laid unconscious, her face pale against the hospital sheets.
Jake stepped in quietly, carrying a paper cup of hospital coffee he hadn’t touched.
No nurses in sight. Just the monitor beeping beside her.
Her phone was on the tray table. Locked, but not guarded.
Jake glanced at the hallway, then moved closer back in. He picked it up like he’d done it a hundred times before. Just a concerned son-in-law, with no bad intentions.
The screen lit up with one missed notification. Not a message. A call from a private ID, no name, no number. Just the time: 14 minutes ago.
Jake’s eyes narrowed.
He tapped around, looking for more—no saved contact, no message history. Clean. Too clean.
But then he found it: a hidden app, disguised as a calculator. He pressed the right passcode, a trick he’d learned watching Diane type before. The app opened.
GhostLine.
Jake scrolled. Recent activity. No names, just ID strings but one stood out:
X742-A, Connected 0:46 seconds Location ping: South Side, near the docks.
Jake pulled his phone from his coat and tapped open a small tool, a ghost-sync app Vivian had once slipped onto his burner and had access to.
Clone Active Session Logs?
Confirm.
He hit yes. A bar loaded. Within seconds, the encrypted logs transferred to his phone. Not messages, just call times, ID tags, location bounce data.
Enough.
Jake set Diane’s phone back exactly where it was.
He stepped back, with his eyes on Diane's face. “I hope you’re not working with him,” he muttered.
In the hallway, his phone beeped, a reply from Vivian already.
X742-A is Holt’s old comms ID. You found him.
Jake stared at the message.
He slipped out of the ICU and walked toward the elevator, and took the elevator down. No one noticed him leave. He didn’t look back, and didn't think about the CCTV.
Jake arrived at Vivian’s House, 30 Minutes Later
Rain softly hit the windows, Vivian was in her kitchen, standing by the island. On the counter were two phones: hers and a cloned one tied to Diane’s phone, linked to Diane’s information.
Jake walked in, soaked from the shoulders down, still gripping the wheel of his thoughts.
Vivian glanced at him. “You got the message?”
Jake nodded. “X742-A. That’s him?”
“Yes.” She slid the phone toward him. “When your father was still alive, Holt ran all encrypted calls through that tag. We used to intercept them for surveillance. But after Michael died, he vanished. Now, he just pinged back.”
“He’s been watching Diane. Maybe all of us.” Jake replied
“Then we give him something to see,” Vivian said, already typing.
Jake leaned in. “What are you doing?”
“Luring him out.”
She composed a message from Diane’s cloned signal. Simple. Controlled.
I'm fine. We need to talk. Same place you mentioned in case of emergency. Tonight. It's urgent.
Jake raised an eyebrow. “What place?”
Vivian looked at him. “There was a field they used to meet when Holt was a co-worker, it's an open land, private enough for covert exchanges. I still have the coordinates.”
She hit send.
Few seconds later, her screen lit up.
Got it. I'm on my way. Come alone.
Jake exhaled. “He’s paranoid.”
“He’s Holt. Of course he is,” Vivian replied. “We move now. He won’t wait.”
Vivian drove and Jake sat beside her, he hadn't thought being the heir to the Kane syndicate would come with a lot of danger.
“You sure he won’t recognize me?” Jake asked.
Vivian kept her eyes forward. “Holt’s never seen your face. Just your father’s bloodline. So You’re a ghost to him.”
Jake gave a faint nod. “Let’s keep it that way. Until I’m standing in front of him.”
Vivian’s hands tightened on the wheel. “He’s expecting Diane. He’ll come expecting a conversation.”
Jake looked at her. “Then let’s give him one.”
They drove the next few minutes in silence, the field was just miles ahead, hidden at the back of a few trees.
Vivian slowed the car and parked behind an old rusted fence, and they stepped out.
Jake looked around the area. “You sure he’ll come alone?”
Vivian nodded. “He’s arrogant. Always thought he was untouchable.”
A black SUV rolled up from the other side of the field, the lights went off, and engine went off.
Jake and Vivian moved to stand in the center of the clearing.
The SUV door opened.
Holt stepped out, putting on a black coat and no smile
He stopped when he saw Vivian.
He became confused. Then suspicios, then angry.
“Where’s Diane?” he asked firmly.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter Six Hundred and Thirty
A hundred and fifty years after Jake Sullivan walked into the river, the canyon woke to find Jake’s apple waiting on the bare ground as it always did (perfect, red, warm).Only this year the apple was split cleanly in half, as though someone had taken one deliberate bite and set the rest back down.No one had touched it. No child had been brave enough. No elder had been curious enough.The two halves lay side by side in the grass, juice still glistening, scent drifting across the square like a memory that refused to stay buried.By sunrise the entire settlement had gathered (five, maybe six thousand now, spread across both rims and down the river valley). They stood in a quiet circle the way their great-grandparents once had around a dying silver tree.Ember Sullivan (Asha’s granddaughter, ninety-one years old, hair the color of late snow, eyes still sharp enough to map a ridge by starlight) knelt and lifted one half of the apple.She did not hesitate.She bit.The taste rolled th
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Nine
Fifty-one years after Jake Sullivan was laid beneath the ordinary tree, the canyon celebrated its hundredth harvest festival.The tree (now two hundred feet tall, trunk thick as a house, roots sprawling across half the old cemetery) had become the heart of Defiance in every way. Children climbed it, lovers carved initials in its bark that vanished by morning, and every autumn it dropped Tomorrow apples by the wagonload. People no longer spoke of the silver tree except in stories told to wide-eyed young ones who thought the Maw was a dragon.Hope Sullivan died peacefully the winter before, at ninety-nine. They buried her beside her parents, and the tree dropped one perfect red apple onto her grave that never bruised, never rotted.That night, for the first time in a century, the tree spoke.Not in wind. Not in Jake’s recorded voice.It spoke aloud, in the canyon, in the dark, in a voice every soul from the oldest elder to the youngest child recognized instantly (rough, smoke-cured,
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Eight
They buried Jake Sullivan on the first day of autumn, when the cottonwoods were bleeding gold into the river and the air carried the first bite of winter.The whole canyon shut down. No school bells, no hammers on anvils, no children shouting in the square. Even the goats stood quiet in their pens. Thousands walked behind the litter of woven wildflowers and cedar boughs, but no one spoke above the hush of boots on dust and the soft creak of wagon wheels. The river itself seemed to lower its voice, as if it understood the weight of the man it had carried in life and was now carrying in death.Hope walked at the front, one hand resting on the edge of the litter, the other cradling the mended violin against her chest like a child. She was seventy-eight now (the same age Jake had been when he walked away), hair silver as moonlight on water, face carved deep by sun and grief and joy in equal measure. Her eyes were dry. She had cried every tear she owned the night the runners brought him
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Seven
Jake Sullivan was seventy-eight the year the Tree stopped giving.He noticed it before anyone else, because he still walked to the silver tree every dawn the way other men check the weather or their pulse. That morning the branches were bare, the fruit gone, the bark cold for the first time in fifty years.He stood there a long time, palm against the trunk, waiting for the familiar pulse of thirty-three thousand names.Nothing answered.He was not afraid.He was tired in a way that went past bone, past marrow, into the place where stories are born and end.He did not tell anyone what he felt. Not Hope, not Asha, not even the Tree itself. Some knowings are private, even from the people you love.Instead he went home, kissed Elara’s stone on the way past the cemetery, and began packing.A simple pack this time. One canteen. The knife he had carried since the Long Walk. The cracked violin Lilah had pressed into his hands the week before she died, saying, “You still owe me a song, o
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Six
It happened without warning, the way the best and worst things always do.One morning in late summer, the silver tree bore no fruit.Not a single luminous orb hung from its branches. The leaves were still perfect, still shimmering, still warm to the touch, but the harvest that had fed the canyon in body and memory for three generations simply failed to appear.At first no one worried. Trees have off years. The old-timers shrugged and said they’d eat regular apples and remember on their own.But the next morning the leaves began to fall.Not the gentle, one-per-year ritual leaves that never withered. These were ordinary leaves, silver turning dull, drifting down in silent thousands until the ground beneath the Tree looked like a moonlit snowfield.By the third day the trunk had gone cold.Asha (now thirty-three, mother of two, elected to the canyon council because someone had to be) stood beneath the bare branches with her daughter Ember and felt the same chill her great-grandfather Ja
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Five
Asha Sullivan was twelve the year the last person who had seen the Maw died.Old Marta (once Mrs. Guzman, once simply Marta, once no-name at all) slipped away in her sleep at ninety-four. She was the final living soul who could still describe the sky bleeding upward. They buried her beside the Memory Wall with a silver leaf tucked beneath her folded hands, and the canyon closed the circle.That spring, the schoolchildren asked Hope to tell them the story of the shadow one more time.Hope stood on the porch that had once belonged to her parents (now hers, though she still thought of it as theirs) and looked at thirty bright faces who had never known a night without stars they could trust.She told them the short version.“There was a darkness that tried to make us forget how to choose. We chose anyway. That’s all.”The children nodded solemnly, then immediately asked if they could use the trebuchet to launch watermelons instead of pumpkins this year. Hope said yes, because some lessons
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