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I had ruined her. I had taken the one safe place she had and turned it into a trap.

A low, persistent buzzing sound cut through the ringing in my ears. At first, it registered as the other phone vibrating on the counter, or maybe a mosquito trapped in the room. But it was too mechanical, too steady. It was getting louder. I lifted my head and stared out the window above the sink. The blinds were slanted open to let in the morning light, offering a view of the side yard.

Through the glass and past the screen, movement flashed near the treeline where the dense vegetation gave way to the lawn. A dark shape hovered in the air, roughly thirty feet off the ground.

A drone.

It hung there like a giant, malevolent insect, its rotors blurring against the blue sky. Then it dipped lower, moving closer to the cottage with a brazen intrusion that made my hands curl into fists. The red eye of a camera lens glinted in the sunlight, focusing directly on the window where I stood.

They weren’t just at Conch Republic. They weren’t just at the gate. They were inside the perimeter.

I slammed the blinds shut, and my heart leaped into my throat. I backed away from the window and let instinct take over. The deadbolt on the front door was secure. The back door was locked. But locks didn’t stop drones. Deadbolts didn’t deter telephoto lenses that could see through gaps in the shutters.

Another sound emerged, deeper and more ominous than the drone. A rhythmic thwup thwup thwup beat against the air in the distance, barely audible. The noise was deeply familiar from accident scenes when Trauma Star was inbound, or during search and rescue ops.

A helicopter.

"There you are." Sutton’s voice came from the hallway. Soft, sleepy, and filled with a warmth that twisted the knife in my gut.

I turned around slowly, dreading what was coming. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom and wore my gray shirt, her legs bare, her hair a messy, beautiful disaster that spoke of everything we had done in the dark. Yawning, she stretched her arms over her head, oblivious to the siege engine assembling outside our walls. She looked like a woman who had just had the best night of her life and was waking up to a future she thought she could keep.

"Good morning." A smile curved her lips as she walked toward me. "I smelled coffee, so I thought..."

Her voice trailed off as she registered my posture. Rigid and backed against the counter, I probably resembled a man facing a firing squad. She took in the white-knuckled grip of my hands on the edge of the sink, and the expression on my face that carried the weight of someone observing a fatality. The smile slid off her face, replaced by a dawn of confusion and fear. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen, her bare feet gripping the floor.

"Ben?" she whispered. "What’s wrong?”

Oxygen refused to fill my lungs. Speaking felt impossible. My only remaining instinct was to lie to her—to tell her it was nothing, grab her, put her in the truck, and drive until we found a place where cameras didn’t exist. But no such place existed. The drone outside the window was proof of that. The helicopter approaching cemented it.

I snatched my phone from the counter. Dread anchored my boots to the floor. Showing her that article was the last thing I wanted to do but she needed to know that the fortress had fallen.

"Sutton." My voice emerged as a rasp, a broken thing sounding like gravel in a blender.

She took a step toward me, her hands reaching out. "You’re scaring me. What happened?"

"I’m sorry." The words tasted like death.

I held the phone out to her, the screen still glowing with the TMZ headline. The red letters seemed to pulse in the dim light of the kitchen.

"We didn’t implement our plan in time. They found us. They’re here."

Chapter Twenty-Three

SUTTON

The sound registered. Not just noise but a physical pressure that vibrated in the hollow spaces of my skull and rattled the dishes in the kitchen cabinets. The relentless, rhythmic thwup-thwup-thwup beat against the roof of the cottage like a giant fist, demanding entry. I sat on the gray couch with my knees pulled to my chest and wrapped in the thick afghan Ben had draped over me ten minutes ago.

The cottage, which had been a fortress against a tropical storm only yesterday, now felt like a trap. Ben had closed the storm shutters again to block out the prying lenses, but they couldn’t block out the sound. It was a constant reminder that the invisible dome of safety Ben had constructed around us had been shattered by text messages and a GPS pin.

Ben paced the length of the living room, a caged animal wearing a path into the wooden flooring. He still wore the same shorts as last night, his sculpted chest bare, his muscles tense and corded with stress. He held his phone to his ear, his knuckles white against the black casing, listening to Hunter give a sitrep from the main gate.

"This is private property," Ben snarled into the phone, his voice rough with a fury that worried me all the more because I knew it was fueled by fear. "If they cross the gate line, you have my permission to remove them. Physically."

He paused, listening, his jaw ticking rhythmically. "I know the sheriff is there. But if one of those drones comes lower than the tree line, I’m taking it out with a shovel, Hunter. I’m not kidding."

He hung up without saying goodbye and tossed the phone onto the armchair. He stopped pacing and scrubbed his hands over his face, pressing his palms into his eyes as if he could physically push the headache back into his skull. He stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, his back to me.

I wanted to stand up, cross the room, and wrap my arms around his waist. I imagined pressing my face against his back and telling him that it was going to be okay, that we would figure it out. Instead, I stayed frozen on the couch. The dynamic in the room had shifted tectonically since he had shown me the TMZ article. I wasn’t just his lover anymore. I was the disaster that had landed on his doorstep and exposed the past he had spent so much effort rising above. Touching him would be an imposition, like adding weight to a man who was already buckling under the load.