"Cipher, talk to me."
"The signal is holding steady. He's still heading south, speed increasing. He's approaching the junction with 534."
If Harlan reaches 534, he has options heading east toward I-10 or west toward the backcountry. A man who's lived in this county his entire life knows every dirt road, every gate, every ranch crossing that doesn't show up on a GPS.
I will not let that happen.
Harlan doesn't know what he's taken. He thinks he grabbed a hostage, a bargaining chip, a federal agent he can leverage for safe passage. He doesn't understand that the woman in his truck is the one I spent years in Shadowland to protect, the one I'm still breathing for when better men have died. He doesn'tunderstand that every mile he puts between her and me is a mile I will cross with a gun in my hand and nothing in my chest but the cold, absolute certainty that he will not keep her.
Nobody keeps what's mine.
Alvarez is in custody. The compound is secure. Federal sirens wail in the distance as the response teams converge on the property behind me.
I grip the wheel and push the truck harder. Raven's transmitters are still broadcasting, two steady signals moving through the dark, and I follow them the way I've followed Raven Bishop since the night I carried her off that ranch a decade ago.
19
RAVEN
The zip ties bite into my wrists with every rut and dip, and Harlan is hitting all of them. He's driving too fast for terrain like this, the truck bottoming out through washouts and fishtailing on dirt that hasn't seen a grader in years.
He has both hands on the wheel, fighting the road. His service weapon sits on the dash in front of him, close enough for him to grab but far enough from me that reaching for it with bound hands would give him plenty of time to fight me off.
My head is pounding from where he slammed it into the doorframe when he dragged me out of the compound. Blood runs warm down my left arm from the gash he opened first, and my right shoulder screams every time the truck bounces over uneven road, which is constant now. The cuts he carved into my forearms with his knife are shallow but deliberate, the kind meant to hurt without doing real damage while Alvarez asked questions I refused to answer. They'd only been at it for a few minutes before all hell broke loose.
The worst part hadn't been the knife or the zip ties. It had been Alvarez. The way he strolled out among cartel operatives with the easy authority of a man who'd been doing this foryears. Knowing he was dirty was one thing. Watching him nod to Harlan to begin cutting was something else entirely.
The compound is behind us now, the gunfire fading to occasional pops in the distance. I saw Beckett wrestle Alvarez to the ground before Harlan hauled me through a side door I hadn't noticed. The assault had already been in full swing when he shoved me into his truck and tore out along a dirt road that ran behind the property.
He knows these roads the way only a man who has spent decades patrolling them could, and he's using that knowledge now to stay ahead of Jesse.
Jesse will come. I know that with the same certainty I know my own name, and I hold onto it because right now it's the only thing keeping the panic from swallowing me whole. Cipher is almost certainly overhead with the drone, and the transmitters wired into my shoe and hair piece are still in place. Harlan searched me, found the watch and the earrings, and crushed them both under his boot on the compound's gravel drive. But he didn't think to check the soles of my shoes or the hair piece, and that arrogance is going to cost him.
If Jesse gets here in time.
I shove that thought down hard and focus on what I can control. Keep Harlan talking. Keep him rattled. A man running his mouth is a man not thinking clearly, and right now his lack of clarity is the only advantage I've got.
"You're awfully quiet for a woman in your situation," Harlan says, his eyes fixed on the road.
"I'm thinking."
"About what?"
My heart is hammering so hard I'm surprised he can't hear it. I keep my voice level anyway, because the only weapon I have left is his fear. "About how many seconds you have left before Jesse Hollister puts a bullet through this windshield."
Harlan snarls and swerves around a dip. The truck accelerates, and the terrain is getting rougher. Scrub cedar and live oak crowd the shoulders until the road narrows to a single lane of packed dirt.
"Jesse's a little busy right now, sweetheart. Last I saw, his people were getting shot at from three directions."
"We have someone tracking every transmitter on me right now." I force the words out steady even though my hands are shaking, buried in my lap where he can't see them. "Jesse doesn't need to figure out where you went. He already knows."
"Shut up." His voice drops low and vicious. "You think this changes anything? Twenty years I ran that county."
Every word out of his mouth is a confession I can use, if I survive long enough to use it.
"You murdered Tom Pritchard with a taser and a tractor." My voice wavers on Pritchard's name, and I clench my bound fists until the zip ties bite deeper, using the pain to steady myself. "I saw the whole thing."
Harlan's hands twitch on the wheel before he steadies them. "Pritchard was a loose end. He got nosy, started poking around where he shouldn't have. Just like you."
