Page 68 of Scarred By Sin

Whether the opportunity in front of him was worth the risk.

Brook stopped at her door. The thin strip of transparent tape stretched across the seam between the door and the frame. It no longer mattered, but she followed through with the motion of removing it before pulling her keys from her bag.

She unlocked the door.

The condo was still and quiet, though the familiar cinnamon scent did nothing to relieve the tension in her shoulders. The afternoon light came through the living room windows in long, amber streaks that fell across the hardwood floor. Jacob would be wondering if she’d come today to take down the murder board on her dining room wall, and she would remain inside the condo long enough for him to assume it, too. He would then take the risk to confront her.

To end her life.

Brook closed the door behind her with a soft click.

She set her leather bag on the entryway table and immediately unzipped the middle compartment. Two firearms were tucked inside, and she proceeded to take them out one by one, placing them where she’d already decided they would give her the easiest access. With how large her stomach appeared, there was a chance her brother might believe she didn’t have a weapon on her person.

She had one holstered behind her waist, should Jacob demand she relinquish one, but she had another tucked inside the prosthetic beneath her blouse. The prosthetic was the detail that held the entire operation together.

Brook had gone into labor eight days ago, the day after returning from Indiana. She’d delivered her son in the upstairs bedroom of Graham’s estate. There had been no hospital. No public record of admission, no insurance filing that could be traced, no digital footprint that Jacob’s resources could intercept. Graham had arranged everything months in advance, though the details had been quickly modified after discovering Jacob’s presence in the building.

An OBGYN who had served with Graham overseas had been on hand. A certified nurse-midwife, as well, along with a neonatal nurse in case of complications. All of them had arrived at the estate separately, through different entrances, at staggered intervals, and none of them had been told the full reason for the secrecy.

The delivery had been difficult. Fourteen hours of labor had tested her limit of endurance, but their son arrived healthy and screaming, seven pounds of fury wrapped in a white blanket. And when Brook held him for the first time, the fear she'd been carrying for close to nine months didn't vanish. It had rearranged itself into something far fiercer.

Their son was at the estate right now, in the nursery that she and Graham had finished just the other day. Arden was with him, rocking him gently, because the older man had refused to be anywhere else. The baby was safe. He had been protected from the moment Brook decided that Jacob would never know his nephew existed until their final confrontation was over.

The prosthetic belly was silicone, custom-molded to match the size Brook had been at thirty-six weeks, and it sat beneath her clothing with enough weight and movement to fool anyone who wasn’t pressing their hands against it. Charlie hadn’t questioned it. And Jacob, monitoring her through whatever camera feed he’d compromised, would see exactly what Brook wanted him to see.

A pregnant woman.

Alone.

Vulnerable.

The three things Jacob believed she was at the moment, and the three things she had never been less in her life.

Brook inhaled deeply as she crossed to the dining room wall.

The murder board stared back at her, the way it had for years. Photographs pinned in rows, newspaper clippings yellowed at the edges, lengths of red and blue string connecting faces to locations to dates in a grid that only she could read without a legend.

She reached up and pulled the first pin.

A photograph of Jacob in high school. She set it facedown on the dining room table. Then the next pin. A clipping from the Morton Times-News. Then another. A gas station receipt from a town in Montana. She worked methodically, pulling each piece from the wall and stacking them in a pile that grew behind her. With every pin she removed, the wall paint emerged a shade lighter than the surrounding paint.

After today, she wouldn't need any of it.

She would either walk out of this condo and never come back, or she wouldn’t be walking out at all. Those were the only two outcomes, and she’d made her peace with both of them before she’d kissed her son’s forehead this morning and handed him to Arden.

But there was one thing she needed to say aloud before Jacob strolled through the door…

“I love you, Graham.”

30

Jacob Walsh

August 2026

Tuesday — 4:19 pm

The two laptops cast a pale glow across Colin Vogel’s dining room table. Jacob sat in the chair nearest the wall with his back to the corner, the way he always positioned himself in unfamiliar spaces. He observed his sister make small talk with the doorman on the left screen while the right screen cycled through the building’s corridor feeds in four-second intervals.