Page 69 of You Can Run

Behind her, she heard the soft sound of him lowering into a chair, facing the glass and the water. When she paused at the hallway entrance and looked back, the pale rectangle of his phone screen was there again in the dark, held low, its light catching the sharp line of his jaw.

Jessica stood under the oversized rainfall showerhead, her forehead pressed against the cool marble of the wall, and let the deluge hit the nape of her neck.

She had scrubbed her skin until it was raw. She’d used an exfoliating sponge she found in a silver basket, scouring away the grit of the Galveston marsh and the invisible, oily residue ofthe last forty-eight hours. She wanted to be clean, but more than that, she wanted to be new.

But as the steam rose, thick and white as a sea fog, the walls of the glass house seemed to dissolve.

She looked down at her hands. They were trembling, but not from the cold. She thought of the pier. She thought of the way the light had left Ferrera’s eyes. She thought of Trent, screaming into the night in a truck that was never meant to come back.

You can run, the voice in the back of her head whispered—the one that sounded like Ryan.But you can't hide.

She reached up and squeezed the water out of her hair. The pink dye ran in pale, rose-colored rivulets down her arms, swirling into the drain like fading memories. She was alive. Against the odds of the cartel, the cops, and the man who had betrayed her, she was still here.

The water began to cool, the high-capacity heater finally reaching its limit. Jessica reached out and turned the heavy chrome handle, cutting the flow.

The sudden silence was absolute. She stood in the center of the marble bathroom, the steam swirling around her ankles, and listened.

She heard a footfall in the hall outside the bathroom.

Dante sat on a white slipcovered armchair that felt like a cloud. He’d found a bottle of Macallan 18 in the wet bar. He didn’t use a glass. He took a long, burning pull straight from the bottle.

He watched the clock on the microwave across the kitchen, the green digits the only light in the room besides the stars and whatever was left of the moon. It had been twenty minutes sinceshe'd gone upstairs. He heard the shower cut off. In the sudden absence of running water, he heard her exhale.

Something in his chest did what it had been threatening to do for three days.

He picked up the phone and set it on the kitchen counter, face-down, away from the chair.

Then he walked down the hall.

The bathroom door was ajar, a thin blade of light falling across the dark hallway floor. He could hear her on the other side of it.

He stopped outside the door. Put his hand flat against the wall beside the frame and stood there. Two years. For two years he'd kept her at arm's length, both physically and mentally. Standing here now, he couldn't remember a single reason why.

He pushed the door open.

The bathroom was all white tile and warm steam, a single vanity light burning above the mirror. She was standing at the sink, completely naked. She'd been looking at herself in the mirror—he could see it, the caught expression of someone interrupted mid-thought.

She didn't startle. She just looked at him in the mirror's reflection, her eyes finding his, and she didn't say anything. Neither did he.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

The air in the room didn't just feel thick; it felt pressurized. It was the same static that preceded a lightning strike, a physical weight that made it hard to draw a full breath.

The steam was still heavy in the air, warm against his face, carrying the smell of whatever soap the management company stocked, something clean and unisex, nothing like her, and yet here she was inside it. He crossed the small room in two steps and stopped behind her, close enough that she would feel the heat of him, and looked at her in the mirror.

His gaze traveled over her with the hunger of a man who had been starving in a desert. He saw the slope of her breasts, the dip of her waist, and the long, graceful line of her legs. She had a scar he didn't remember, low on her left shoulder, pale and thin. She had new lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there at twenty-two. He'd spent thirteen years constructing a version of her from memory, and the real woman was both less and more than all of it in ways he didn't have language for. She was perfect. She was his home. And she was a stranger.

“Dante.” His name in her mouth, barely above a whisper.

He brought his hand up and moved her hair off the back of her neck, slow and deliberate. He felt her breath change. He watched it in the mirror, the small shift in her breathing, the way her eyes went somewhere inside herself, like she was checking something before she let herself feel it.

He pressed his mouth to the back of her neck.

She made a sound, a low, involuntary exhale.

His hands found her waist, her ribs, and he took his time—not because he was careful by nature but because he didn't want to miss anything.

She turned in his grip and then she was facing him, her back against the sink's edge.