“I’m serious,” I cut her off. “I want to put a baby in you. Right now. So you’re mine forever.”
“You’re not ready for a baby. We need to grow up a bit.”
“I’m ready.” I blinked, pulling back just far enough to hide my face.
Truth was, the more I thought about getting her pregnant, the more sense it made. She couldn’t get hurt if she were pregnant. People don’t drag a woman with a swollen belly into the line of fire. They don’t put a gun to the head of someone carrying a baby. And if she were home with me, heavy with my kid, she wouldn’t be running off to places I couldn’t follow.
Mackenzie didn’t know, but West had told me something that chewed at me every night: the Agency had pulled her and her mother out of the witness-protection program.
Whatever perimeter of protection they had surrounded them was gone. I was it now.
West didn’t sugarcoat it. He’d come to me with an option I couldn’t refuse the first day we had gotten back to camp, and he had pulled Mackenzie’s protection team.
TONY WEST
We’re going to run you through a security vet—nothing public, a shadow clearance.
Keep an eye out for a secure message in the next 24 hours.
When it hits, answer via the encrypted channel I set up. Don’t forward it. Don’t talk about it.
ME
What do I tell Mackenzie?
TONY WEST
Lie to her.
I could justify what I was doing a thousand ways. Protection. Duty. Love. But the truth was smaller and uglier: the line between protecting her and owning her was razor-thin. And I walked it every day, bleeding for it and loving the sting.
My size, my presence, I was a shield, sure. But I was also a threat. Even if I never used that threat on her, she felt it: the way her body curled into mine, the way she leaned on my chest like it was the only safe place left.
I told myself I was doing all of this—the control, the guarding, the possessiveness–to keep her alive.
But I was paranoid as fuck.
Jackson wasn’t just some asshole with a grudge. His threats had teeth. He knew things about her father, shit nobody should ever have known, and that made him dangerous in a way we couldn’t map. The problem was he’d vanished after the stabbing. Gone dark. No trail. No pattern. Nothing for the FBI to lock onto.
“That’s the worst kind,” West said one night when I called him in a pure panic. “When someone disappears, you don’t know where to push. Keep an eye out. We don’t know his plan, butyour marriage to Mackenzie will likely prompt him to act. Don’t trust him. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
West meant every word. We scoured every camera feed, every thread he might have left online. We pulled every lead. Every time we thought we’d pinned him—an ATM camera, a traffic cam—the footage would smear at the exact frame his face should’ve been in, a digital blind spot like he’d reached through the wires and erased himself. The bureau flailed at the edges. Jackson had gone off the grid on purpose.
Every noise in the dark, every stranger on the trail, felt like him. I watched the tree line until my eyes blurred. I listened to every voicemail, every dropped call, like a code only I could break.
But that wasn’t all.
Heather had started acting strange, stranger than usual. The jealousy wasn’t subtle anymore. Itoozedout of her. One afternoon in the dining hall, I had my hand on Mackenzie’s knee, feeding her strawberries off my plate, when Heather leaned in close.
“Ever wonder what would happen if we all switched roles for a day? I think Max would finally see what it’s like being with arealwoman. We’d look good together.”
The strawberry slipped from my fingers, hitting the plate with a soft, wet thud.
“What the fuck?” I muttered.
Heather didn’t flinch. She just smiled, slow and knowing, like she was letting me in on a secret only she understood. Then she picked up her tray and walked away, humming under her breath like nothing had happened. I pictured her hands, the way she gripped her tray. Strong. Too strong. For a split second, I saw those fingers on Mackenzie’s throat instead, and bile climbed in my throat.
But my stomach turned. It wasn’t a joke. Not with the wayshe looked at Mackenzie, like a rival to be erased. I felt it in my bones. We were on a collision course, and everyone was becoming a predator.
