Page 93 of Shadowing You

He looked confused, and then seemed to realize what was happening.

No time to think it through.

Ethan barreled forward, leading with his shoulder, and tackled him. They went down together in the dirt.

The man was small but made of muscle and bone and a lifetime of hard work. He got a hand under Ethan’s jaw and shoved, hard, and Ethan’s head snapped back. An elbow caught him in the ribs, and his breath whooshed out on a grunt.

He hooked the man’s leg with his foot, swung his weight over, and rolled on top of him. The man bucked, aiming a fist toward his eye.

Ethan shifted and caught the blow on his cheekbone. White flared in his vision.

He pinned a wrist. Got the other one and bore down.

The man spat something at him in Mandarin.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry.”

He held him there a beat, until the man’s breathing changed. His fight stuttered, his eyes shifting from rage to determination. He wasn’t giving up, he was calculating.

Ethan had no choice.

Forgive me.

He drove his fist into the side of the man’s skull, one short clean blow. The man’s eyes rolled, and his head went slack.

Ethan pushed up off him and bolted for the moped.

He swung a leg over, jammed the key in. The engine caught on the first try, and he lifted the stand, turned the bike, and twisted the throttle.

Dirt sprayed behind him. He didn’t look back. He took the road down the mountain too fast, fishtailing on the corners, leaning hard.

A curve. Another. The cabin disappeared behind a screen of pines.

Lord, send him help.

He twisted the throttle to speed up.

Just not yet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Mei Lin leaned on the boulder, the cool stone hard against her shoulder.

She had no watch, but she didn’t need one to know that Ethan had been gone much longer than ten minutes. Long enough that she’d recited her favorite psalm five times. Long enough that her fear had scared away all the peace that the scripture had brought.

She shouldn’t have let him go.

She’d stood there like a fool while her husband had walked away, alone and unarmed. She should have demanded to know where he was going, and why, and what he meant to do when he got there.

In prison, she’d learned not to ask questions. She’d learned to accept whatever the guards told her without argument, without needing explanation. She’d trained the questions out of her mouth one by one, until silence felt safer than the sound of her own voice.

But Ethan wasn’t a guard, and this wasn’t prison. Her husband had left her again, this time with no explanation, and now she was hiding behind a rock, dreading what would happen next.

Lord, please.

An engine roared somewhere in the direction where he’d gone. It grew louder, then very loud, and then it shut off abruptly, right on the other side of the boulder.

Silence pressed against her ears.