I turn.
There’s a second one behind me, where the road meets the street. Same stillness. Same certainty—the kind a man wears when he’s done this before and already knows how it ends.
One ahead. One behind. Nothing between them but wall.
They didn’t come to talk. They came to take me.
Run.
My wolf comes up fast, small and dark, clawing for a way out that isn’t there. She never learned to fight. She only ever learned to disappear, and there’s nowhere left to disappear to.
The man ahead of me takes a step.
If they take me, it ends.
Viktor knows her name. Jericho does too—they told me, back when Aurora took me in, that they’d find her, and they meant it. It just hasn’t been enough. I was never going to be the one who got her out. But I’m the only proof she’s still breathing, the only one who’d know if the pictures ever stopped coming. If I’m gone, there’s no one left to notice when they do.
I was never the brave one. I never launched a rescue. I stayed small and watchful and told myself it was the same thing as keeping her safe.
The man reaches into his jacket, and I open my mouth to say something, anything at all—
And the only thought left in me is that she’ll never know I tried.
Chapter 9
Decker
I’ve had eyes on her since the gate. Not close. Far back enough that if she’d checked her mirrors, I’d have read as any other truck working the switchbacks. She didn’t check. Not once, the whole way down the mountain.
I leave the truck out of sight once the road levels into town and cover the rest on foot. Slow. Unremarkable. A man with nowhere particular to be, same as half this town on a weekday.
The depot run is clean. In, out, forty minutes, nothing about it that reads wrong. If I were building today’s case off the depot alone, I wouldn’t have one.
It’s the hardware store that starts pulling at something. She’s in for two items and comes out wearing a face that’s working too hard at looking like nothing’s wrong. I lose her for a second on the sidewalk—that odd flicker she does—but I narrow my eyes and she comes back into focus.
She cuts around the side of the building instead of back toward the van.
I hang at the corner and watch her take the narrow lane behind the stores. Gray asphalt, a dumpster, brick that nobody’s bothered painting in twenty years. The lane opens into a gravel lot at the far end. The kind of place a person picks when they want two minutes with somebody and nobody walking past to notice.
I let out a breath that tastes like disappointment.
So this is it.
I find a gap between the hardware store and the building next to it, narrow enough I have to turn sideways, and it gives me a view the length of the lane without putting me in it. She’s stopped halfway down, phone at her ear.
Her spine goes rigid. Whatever’s coming through that line isn’t the exchange I drove down here to catch her making. No packet changes hands. Nobody’s waiting to take anything from her. She’s just a woman standing very still in an empty lane, talking on a phone.
She lowers the phone. Doesn’t move for three full seconds.
Then it happens.
A man steps out at the far end, where the lane opens onto the lot.
I go still too. He’s not hurrying, because he’s already exactly where he means to be. He was here before she was, waiting. Average build. The kind of face you’d forget on a train, which is its own kind of tell. Men that unremarkable don’t end up standing alone at the mouth of a dead lane by accident.
A second one closes the other end behind her, where the lane meets the street.
Neither has wings. Two men on foot, broad daylight, walking toward a woman with nobody around to ask questions. That’s a job somebody planned to be quiet.
