Mr. Briggs.
Isaiah’s heartbeat didn’t race. It sharpened.
Lillian’s eyes widened, but she didn’t shrink. She grabbed Isaiah’s sleeve, not to stop him, but to stay anchored.
Kline whispered, “Go. Now. Through the side window.”
Isaiah didn’t argue. He pulled Lillian toward the small window, lifted it, and helped her out into the night.
They hit the ground running, the moonlight silvering the leaves around them.
Behind them, the church door banged open.
Briggs’s voice roared, “Carter! You think you’re clever?”
Isaiah didn’t look back until the trees swallowed the church and its angry lantern light.
When he did look back, he saw Briggs standing in the doorway like a stain that refused to wash out.
And Isaiah knew.
The quiet part of their fight was over.
Colonel Whitcomb didn’t confront them right away.
That was his first mistake.
He tried to smother the problem the way he smothered everything else: with money, intimidation, and the assumption that nobody beneath him could keep standing if he pressed hard enough.
The next day, he called a meeting in the big house parlor with the local magistrate, a lawyer from Charleston with slick hair and colder eyes, and Reverend Kline, whose hands shook so badly he could barely hold his hat.
Whitcomb paced beneath a portrait of his “ancestors,” men whose faces had the smug calm of people who’d never feared consequences.
“This is slander,” Whitcomb snapped. “A plot cooked up by an overgrown field brute and a defective girl who can’t even string a sentence together.”
Lillian stood outside beneath the live oak, listening through the open window, Isaiah beside her.
Her chest rose and fell, steadying. She didn’t hide anymore.
Isaiah’s voice stayed low. “He’s trying to decide whether to crush us fast or quiet,” he murmured.
Lillian’s lips moved around hard syllables. “Let… him… try.”
Inside, the lawyer’s voice oiled the air. “If there are documents,” he said, “we seize them. If there are witnesses, we frighten them. The law bends toward property, Colonel. It always has.”
Reverend Kline’s voice cracked. “She spoke,” he whispered. “Lillian spoke to me.”
Whitcomb stopped pacing.
The room went silent.
“What did you say?” Whitcomb asked, dangerously calm.
Kline’s throat bobbed. “She… asked for the ledger.”
Whitcomb’s eyes turned into knives. “That girl hasn’t spoken a word in fifteen years.”
Outside, Lillian’s hand rose to her throat.
