She stood and stepped away from the car, holding the phone up. The signal blinked to one bar, then vanished again. She walked toward the fence line, away from the heat coming off the Corolla, watching the corner of the screen. One bar appeared.
Missed calls and messages began loading. Axel had called twice. He’d also sent a text before he knew she was gone. There was no version of Axel she needed to protect herself from. She’d driven all night running from a man who had never tried to control her.
Now she wanted to tell him she’d made a mistake and needed him. She opened his contact and moved her thumb toward the call button.
Tires screeched and pulled onto the gravel behind her. Reese turned. A white van with a ladder rack had stopped on the shoulder behind the Corolla. The driver’s door opened, and Wade stepped out.
Cold dread moved through Reese before she understood what she was seeing. He was here. Not in Spokane, not in a nightmare, not in the future she had been running from. Here, on the side of the road, with no one close enough to hear her scream.
Wade took one step away from the van. Reese turned from the road. Gravel shifted under her shoes. She gripped the phone more tightly and ran for the fence.
She crossed the ditch and reached the three strands of barbed wire. She lifted the top strand, forced down the middle one, and pushed herself through. A barb caught the back of her shirt and tore the fabric before releasing her. She ran into the sagebrush. The ground was uneven, covered in rocks and low bushes. The pregnancy had changed her balance, the weight of her belly slowing her.
Her foot landed badly on a rock. She caught herself, but the phone flew from her hand and disappeared into the brush. She didn’t stop for it.
Wade came through the fence behind her. He didn’t shout. She could only hear her own breathing, the brush scraping her jeans, and his boots gaining on her. She screamed. But there was no one to hear.
Wade grabbed her upper arm and pulled her around. Reese drove her elbow toward him, scratched at his face, and brought her heel down on his foot. She made contact several times, but he didn’t release her. He caught one wrist and then closed the same hand around both of them. He was too strong for her to break free.
“Stop it,” he said in a calm voice. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
Reese managed to pull one hand free and scratched his face hard enough to break the skin. Wade exhaled sharply, more irritated than hurt. He tightened his grip, forced her arms against her chest, and turned her back against him. His forearm pressedacross her collarbones as he pushed her toward the fence. She dug her heels into the dirt, but she couldn’t stop him.
At the fence, Wade stepped on the bottom wire and lifted the middle strand. He pushed Reese through without letting her go.
The van’s side door was already open when they reached the road. He forced Reese inside, and she landed hard on her hip and shoulder. By the time she turned around, the side door was already closing. Reese grabbed the interior handle and pulled, but it didn’t move.
Wade got behind the wheel, started the engine, and pulled onto the highway.
Chapter
Twenty
Axel hackedinto the municipal camera network and had the feeds open across four monitors. He searched outward from Reese’s apartment building. The Corolla appeared on Main Street before dawn, then again at the eastbound highway ramp.
The ramp connected to the state highway. Several miles outside town, a county traffic counter had a low-resolution camera mounted on the same pole, and the county equipment still used the manufacturer’s default password. Axel was into the feed in under a minute. The Corolla passed the camera and continued east. After that, the highway didn’t have cameras for forty miles.
Axel entered the plate number and partial VIN into every system that recorded vehicle locations, the state plate readers, toll cameras, insurance databases, repossession reports, and the commercial aggregator Steel Protection paid for. Then he created an alert for county dispatch and incident reports.
Axel called Reese again, and the call went straight to voicemail. He’d called nine times since morning and gotten the same result. Her phone was still off. He set it down and returned to the camera feeds.
Dom stopped near his desk. “Tell me what you have.”
“She left before dawn and headed east on US 20,” Axel said. “I found the Corolla on the highway camera outside town. After that, coverage disappears. I flagged the plate anywhere it might surface.”
Dom studied the map. “She could’ve gone a long way by now.”
“I know.” Axel looked at the empty stretch between towns. “What worries me more is that her car is old. It’s been ticking all summer. If something goes wrong, that stretch of highway doesn’t have cell service.”
A county dispatch notice flashed in the corner of Axel’s left monitor. He clicked it open. A passing motorist reported a disabled gray Toyota sedan on the eastbound shoulder of US 20. Hazards on. No driver visible from the roadway. Response pending. The plate was incomplete, but the make, color, and partial plate matched Reese’s Corolla.
Axel opened the dispatch note on the main monitor. Dom leaned closer to read the report. “Is that her car?”
“Yes. But she’s not in it.”
The fear went cold in Axel’s chest. A breakdown was bad. An empty car was worse.
“Do you think she walked from there?”
