There’s a version of this where I walk her calmly to the van, drive her up the mountain, hand Viktor a clean story with a bow on it.
This isn’t going to be that version.
“Grace, there’s more coming—”
She hits the gap at a dead run. She’s three strides in when a shape fills the far end, already reaching for her arm.
“Let go!” The scream tears out of her, the first loud sound that’s broken through this empty lane. She twists out from under his hand fast enough to tear free. But the same motion that gets her clear spins her hard into the side of the dumpster. Her head cracks the steel edge. Her legs give out.
She’s down before I reach her.
I put the new one headfirst into the brick wall and don’t wait to see if he gets up. I’m on my knees in the gravel with one hand under her jaw and the other finding the pulse at her throat, because that’s the only thing that matters to me right now.
It’s there. Fluttering. But there.
Blood’s starting above her ear, dark against how pale the rest of her has gone. Her whole body’s stopped fighting. Stopped fighting them, stopped fighting me, stopped fighting all of it.
More boots behind me. I don’t stop to look at them.
I get an arm under her knees, one under her shoulders, and stand.
She weighs next to nothing. That’s the thing that lands hardest as I lift her—how little there actually is to her, how easy it would’ve been for any one of these men to finish this if I’d been thirty seconds slower.
Her head falls against my neck. Her scent is right there, closer than it’s been all week, and the thing under my ribs that has always been restless suddenly goes still.
Not the readiness before a fight. The other thing. The thing that’s been circling, looking for somewhere to land.
It lands now. With her blood on my collar and men still coming up the lane behind us.
The man in me knows exactly what I’m carrying. Aurora’s suspect. The name I was sent to build a case against, an hour from closed.
Whatever’s under the man doesn’t care what she is on paper. It’s got one word, and it isn’t asking permission to keep it.
The bear says,Mine.
There’s an explosion from behind me. A round takes a chip out of the brick a foot from my head. I turn my shoulder into it and run, her weight cradled against my chest, gravel giving way to blacktop, the shouts behind us picking up into something closer to a hunt than a cleanup.
The truck’s four blocks out. Four blocks is a long way to carry a woman who won’t wake up, with men behind me who don’t much care if she does.
I don’t look back to count them.
I just run.
Chapter 10
Grace
The world comes back in pieces, and none of them fit right. Sound first: an engine, big and steady, moving fast. Then light behind my eyes, thin and gray. Then the ache above my ear, sharp enough that I fight down a groan.
I take stock. My hands move. My feet move. Nothing’s tied down.
I touch my head, and my fingers come back dark and wet.
The dumpster. That’s the last clear thing. The steel edge of it coming at me, then nothing.
Before that: two men in a lane, talking like my life was paperwork.Nothing personal, one of them said, like that made it a kindness.Liability. Different word. Same outcome.I remember the stillness right before his hand went for his jacket.
Then the gap between the buildings tore open, and something came out of it that put him on the ground before I understood what I was watching.
