He kills the engine and gets out.
By the time he’s around to my side, there’s a length of rope in his hand that wasn’t there a second ago. He doesn’t ask for my wrists. He takes them—one of his hands closes around both of mine like they’re nothing to hold onto, which apparently they are—and wraps the rope twice, one knot, while I twist against a grip that doesn’t register the effort.
Then he reaches in, gets an arm behind my knees, and hauls me straight up and over his shoulder like a roll of carpet he’s been told to move.
“No!” I fight—a knee into him, an elbow—and none of it lands anywhere that matters. My own voice sounds far away, screaming at a man who’s carrying me like I weigh nothing at all.
“You keep trying to hurt yourself,” he says, not even breathing hard, “you don’t leave me another option.”
He said he’d help. In the alley, he said he was there to help.
This isn’t what I thought that word meant.
He sets me down in the truck bed, cold metal and grit under me. A tarp comes out of the corner, and he shakes it open.
“Please don’t,” I say, and it’s the smallest my voice has been since I woke up.
He lays it over me anyway. The light goes. The tailgate slams. The engine turns over, and we’re moving again.
I work the rope in the dark, and it doesn’t give an inch. He’s left just enough room for blood, nothing more. He clearly knows how to tie someone up.
I’m not getting out of this.
That thought finally breaks something loose in me, lying in the dark with my wrists bound. The one time I was ever truly caught, I got myself out. Back at that research facility, a guard looked away at the wrong moment, and I got up and walked out.
A small part of my brain that had locked it all away is coming back to life. The months we’d been stuck there. Clinging to each other, until they took her away. I got out of there without her. A stroke of sheer luck that gave me an open door and a chance to use my glamour on the men who worked around us. I told myself I’d see her again.
I have spent every day since telling myself I would be the one who found her. I never once pictured ending up like this—wrists bound, a tarp over my face, heading back to certain imprisonment.
And the way he tied that knot—the way carrying me registered as nothing at all—I understand something now I didn’t back in that lane.
The first time, Aurora found me already free. Survivor. Someone worth being gentle with. That’s the woman Kaylin knows. That’s the woman Jericho nods to when he passes in the hall.
I’m not walking in as that woman this time. I’m walking in as a traitor, and there’s no version of that where anyone goes looking for my sister.
Getting free of him isn’t going to work the way getting free of the facility did. Throwing myself out of a speeding truck isn’t going to get me anywhere but dead. I’m going back there. They’re going to lock me up.
And if I’m locked up, who’s going to save Serenity?
Chapter 11
Decker
The road runs straight out of town before it starts to climb, and I don’t slow down until the buildings give way to trees.
I check the mirror. Empty road. Enough men got a clear look at my face today that empty doesn’t mean much yet.
I run it back while I drive, because that’s what I do when a job goes sideways. Find the moment it turned. Learn from it.
The meeting was a setup. That’s the first thing. Whatever she went down that lane expecting, the men waiting for her were there to close an account, and they’d planned it well. Two ends of the lane covered before she arrived. A vehicle in reserve. That’s not a handler losing patience. That’s an operation.
The second thing is harder to look at. So I make myself look at it.
I didn’t decide to go in there for her. There was no moment where I weighed it, picked a side, and moved. I was watching asuspect, and then I was breaking a man’s wrist, and I’m not sure how I got to that point. I’ve worked twenty years on instinct, and my instinct has never once skipped the part where I choose.
I rub a hand over my face, put it back on the wheel, fingers drumming.
I could dress it up. Tell myself I needed her alive because a dead suspect answers no questions, and that’s even true. A tracker protects the thread. Any professional would’ve done the same.
