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I see everything.

The man at the head of the table: mid-fifties, silver-streaked hair, a face that was once handsome and now bears the marks of too many bad calls. Marcus Caldwell. He looks up from whatever he was reading, and I see the realization dawn on his face, not fear, not yet, but the shock of a man who just found out the trap he laid for someone else has snapped shut on him. Two of his guys go for their weapons. The other three freeze, their hands hovering above the table like they’ve been caught mid-prayer.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I’ve got your woman.” The bastard’s grinning like he’s proud of it. He’s banking on a reaction, trying to find a crack in my control. I don’t buy his crap for a second. My phone buzzes against my thigh.

Chapter 19

Trixie

I’m sitting on Carter’s cabin porch, wrapped in his jacket that still faintly smells of him—sweat and something darker, something that lives between us. My bandaged hands rest on my knees, palms up, the gauze glaring white against my dark jeans. Afternoon light filters through the pines, painting the porch in stripes of warmth and shadow. It’s been six hours since his last text. Six hours of silence stretching like a living thing, making it hard to breathe. Kane’s on his third perimeter check of the day, his boots crunching through the underbrush with that steady, military rhythm. My mother’s inside, brewing tea she doesn’t need, filling the silence with the clink of mugs and the hum of a woman trying hard not to show her fear.

My personal phone buzzes again, persistent, insistent. I was supposed to get rid of it and I’d forgotten about it in the chaos.

I pale at the thought of someone tracking us here.

I pull it from my pocket, my fingers thick and clumsy in the gauze. The screen lights up, and for one heartbeat, one perfect moment, I think it’s him. Carter. Checking in. Sending those two-word texts that keep me sane. But the number’s unfamiliar. A string of digits I don’t know, from an area code down south, somewhere I’ve never been.

My thumb hovers over the screen. The rational part of me, the nurse, the one who makes split-second choices where the wrong move means someone dies, flares up with a warning. Don’t open it. Burner numbers, unknown senders, the digital cloak of people who don’t want to be tracked. I know what this looks like. I’ve seen enough victims to spot a threat before it fully forms.

I open it anyway.

The message fills the screen, and the world stops.

If you want your man alive, come to the old mill on Route 7. Alone. One hour. Tell anyone and I put a bullet through his skull. No second chances. No negotiations. You come, or he dies. Your choice, Nurse Reyes.

The words blur. Reform. Blur again. My vision tunnels, the porch narrowing to a single point: the phone, the screen, the impossible arrangement of letters that mean Carter is⁠—

Alive.

The word slams into me like a punch. Not pain, but everything I thought I knew is suddenly tossed in the air. He was at the clubhouse. With Matthew, with Greyson, surrounded by brothers, guns, and the hardened resolve of men who’ve faced worse.

Alive. But not safe. The difference snaps a wire inside me, something vital that was holding together the last forty-eight hours, and now it buckles.

My lungs seize. Air turns thick and sluggish, refusing to budge. I’m gulping short, shallow breaths that barely touch my lungs, leaving me dizzy, clinging to the arms of the chair as if it’s the last stable thing in a sideways world.

The phone slips from my grasp, hits the porch with a sharp, splintering crack.

I can’t breathe. I can’t⁠—

The old mill. Route 7. One hour. Carter’s face, the way he looked at me in the parking lot, his eyes raw with desperate tenderness, the way he pressed his forehead to mine and whispered “Go” like it cost him everything.

I’m on my feet before I know it. My knees scream as skin stretches beneath the bandages, my muscles protest, but I’m moving, stumbling toward the stairs, my mind racing through the route, the distance, the time. Route 7. Forty minutes if I push it. The SUV is behind the cabin, the keys likely in the ignition, because that’s how guys like Kane roll, always ready, always set.

I’ll take it. I’ll drive. I’ll walk into that mill with nothing but my bandaged hands and the desperate, stupid hope that my presence is enough to keep him alive.

The door bursts open behind me.

“Trixie?” My mother’s voice, sharp with alarm. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

I can’t answer. The words are trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat, caught in the vise of a panic attack that’s turning my body into something I don’t recognize. My vision is swimming, dark at the edges, and the only thing that’s real, the only thing that matters, is the phone on the porch and the message on the screen and the clock already ticking down in my head.

One hour. Alone. Your choice.

There is no choice. There never was.

I bend to grab the phone, my fingers wrapping around the cracked screen. That’s when Tiana bursts out of the cabin, her dark hair flying, eyes wide with alarm. She’s been quiet all morning, curled up in the living room corner, lost in her own world. But now she’s a blur, flying across the porch.

She reaches me as I straighten, the phone gripped tight in my bandaged hand, my body already pointing toward the stairs.