Beneath was the lid to a metal storage locker, secured with a five-digit combination lock—nothing that couldn’t be snipped with bolt cutters or cracked with a little bit of patience—just a basic deterrent against curiosity should someone manage to accidentally stumble in.

Jill pressed the tumblers and rolled the numbers.

The lock was sticky, but it opened.

She raised the lid and secured it to the plywood.

Soft emergency lighting lit up the interior. That was new.

The rest was a time capsule of life on the run.

On the right, watertight, fireproof cases that held passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, all the paperwork necessary to backstop them, and a shitload of cash in multiple currencies. The rest were firearm and munition cases, sorted by purpose and stopping power, because Clare was, if nothing else, a hypocrite.

She’d started her kids with pellet-gun target practice when they were four, gotten them friendly with knives, fuck all lethal with a crossbow, decent with a compound bow, and to where they could play convincingly with any number of martial arts weapons, but she had never allowed them to keep or carry their own.

Her goal was knowledge and skill, not dependency.

In her view, they’d never be able to predict when or where an attack would come, and they traveled too much, crossed too many borders, and carried so little that they could never know what they’d have on them when it struck.

She wanted them smart, capable of thinking on their feet, able to anticipate and avoid confrontation in the first place, but for all that talk, Clare wasn’t big on following her own advice and always had reasons for playing by different rules.

She couldn’t safely transport weapons and ammunition across the globe, so she stockpiled and stashed them instead. They were her tools, she’d said, and she couldn’t afford to have to hunt them down through old contacts when she needed them in a hurry.

At the time, it’d been just one more convenient lie in an ever-changing story.

Nuance had been wasted on the young.

Jill understood it now.

The same reasoning that had driven Clare to bury her tools propelled Jill to raid this hideaway now. She reached for the fireproof cases, pulled them free, unlocked them, rifled through documents and identification, and retrieved the passports.

Like the dust that had been disturbed in the not-so-distant past, some of the photos and expiration dates pointed to Clare having returned within the past several years.

Jill pocketed two of Clare’s older passports.

The resemblance between mother and daughter, which was unmistakable enough to have drawn out killers from Clare’s past, made swapping ID a given.

She thumbed through the cash, about two hundred thousand dollars split between euros, Swiss francs, and US currency.

She took about half the dollars and most of the euros.