“What happened out there?” Jade asks, her voice muffling slightly against Mayhem’s shoulder before she turns her head, her hands resting flat against her husband's chest. She wipes a stray tear from her cheek, her sharp green eyes flicking between the three men. “Tell us. What did you find on Route 9?”
Dad walks over to the kitchen, pulls out a high-backed barstool at the marble island, sinks down onto it with a low, gravelly groan that makes my heart ache. He looks older in this light, the deep lines around his eyes carved deeper by fatigue and the heavy burden of leadership.
“It’s worse than we thought,” Dad says, his voice flat, stripped of all emotion. “Knox isn't just running a small-time distribution operation out of that ridge. He’s built a full-service, industrial-grade lab.”
I
