I believed him. Maybe not fully yet. But the belief had a foothold.
“I hate that I’m the only target,” I whispered. “It makes me feel … highlighted. Like an outline waiting for a dart.”
“He won’t hurt you,” he said. “And if he tries, I’ll make him regret the impulse.”
“Do you think he’s on parole?” I asked. “Isn’t there supposed to be … someone? A person to tell him where he can’t go?”
Gideon’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, like a weather front moving in. “I’m checking on that,” he said. “I’ll know more by morning.”
I stared at him. “How did this happen?”
“I think the world is cruel,” he said, echoing me with less poetry and more facts, “and sometimes it’s organized about it.”
The back of my neck prickled. I sipped the tea, sweet and sharply comforting. “Do I need to go to a hotel?” I asked. “Should I run for a while? Change locations?”
“No,” he said. “We don’t run. He’ll learn.”
“And if he doesn’t learn?”
“Then I teach him.”
The way he said it eased a muscle I hadn’t unclenched since twelve.
We ate off the tray like kids at a slumber party, Maude materializing to drop off whipped cream and to fuss, then disappearing. At some point, the constant tremor in my hands stopped for the night. The world didn’t right itself, but it got close enough to stand on without wobbling.
When the dishes were gone, Gideon set his phone face-down on the nightstand and looked at me like I was a map he wasn’t done learning.
“Sleep here,” he said. Not a question. A promise. “You don’t have to be alone tonight.”
I hesitated, then whispered, “Will you—just hold me?”
He didn’t even blink. “There’s no place else I’d be.”
When he lay down beside me, his body curved around mine like it had always known the shape. The world outside could have fallen away, and I wouldn’t have noticed. His arm slipped around my waist, hand settling over my heart.
19
GIDEON
Ididn't sleep.
Wouldn't. Old instincts, the kind drilled into you until they're more reflex than thought. In the field, sleep meant vulnerability. Sleep meant missing the sound of a boot on gravel or the metallic whisper of a weapon being drawn.
And Hazel needed me awake.
She slept fitfully beside me, her breathing uneven, punctuated by small sounds that broke my heart—whimpers, half-words, the kind of noises that come from dreams you can't escape. Every time she shifted, my hand found her automatically, a steady pressure on her hip or shoulder, something to anchor her to now instead of then.
The inn helped, at least. A place this old was its own early warning system—every floorboard had an opinion, every hinge announced itself, every window rattled its frame when the wind changed direction. If someone tried to get in, I'd hear them long before they got close.
I lay there in the dark and ran the day's events on a loop, frame by frame, looking for what I'd missed.
Sam Jarrow stepping out of the cab. The way he moved—careful, pained, like a man who'd learned to make himself small. The new backpack. The worn clothes. The tired eyes that swept the property with something that wasn't quite wariness and wasn't quite familiarity.
I should have known then.
Should have felt it the way I'd felt ambushes in Indonesia, the way I'd sensed snipers in Mosul before they squeezed the trigger. That crawling sensation at the base of your skull that sayswrong, wrong, wrong.
But I'd been dulled. Softened by happiness and morning sunlight and the easy rhythm of fixing things instead of breaking them. I'd looked at Sam Jarrow and seen a weary traveler who needed a bed, not a threat who needed eliminating.
