The silence after that felt heavy—an admission without words.
“Where are you?” Luc asked, all business.
“Still at the motel. He’s onto her now. Since I haven’t cleaned up the loose ends, he's probably onto me, too. We’re exposed.”
“Get out. Now. I’ll find you a hole. Don’t move until I call.” The lineclickeddead.
Tonio slid the phone into his pocket. He walked from his room and found Sofia in the motel's dim lobby, a cup of cold coffee between her hands.
When he slid into the seat across from her, Sofia’s eyes were waiting, full of fire and fracture. “Well?”
“We need to be ready to move. The second I get the word.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere you can breathe.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping. “But getting there means going dark. Now.”
She stood, her chair scraping loudly. “You don’t get to just give orders.”
He rose to meet her, his voice low and lethal. “Yes, I do. Because while you were getting the truth, I was starting a war with the most powerful man in the state and possibly my own family to keep you alive. So you follow my lead.”
She held his stare, searching for the lie, finding only cold, unflinching resolve. A flicker of understanding passed through her eyes—the true scale of what he had just done. She gave a single, slow nod. “You just started a war for me.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
Luc called an hour after dawn.A cabin. Upstate New York. No details. Just a location. It turned a crisis into a cross-country haul. Utah to New York meant two, maybe three days on the road if they pushed hard and stayed invisible. They stripped the motel room in minutes—bags packed, surfaces wiped, trash gone. Routine muscle memory. When a powerful man wanted someone erased, the danger wasn’t loud; it wore a badge and walked in through the front office asking for guest logs.
The first stretch was distance, not comfort. One stop for gas in Wyoming. One drive-thru coffee Tonio barely tasted as they crossed into Nebraska. They didn’t talk much, but he caught Sofia staring out the window, her fingers tracing absent patterns on the glass. He caught her looking at him several times—quickflicks of her gaze filled with awe, doubt, and even fear. Tonio understood, so he didn’t push her. She’d been taught her entire life to trust no one, and now she was in a car with him, heading toward a remote cabin. Her instincts were good. She should be wary of him.
Most people were. For many, hewasthe monster—the bogeyman who came knocking when their time was up.
But Tonio had always believed women should be protected, cared for. Maybe that came from watching his father with his mother. The man had drilled into Tonio and Luc that love was a weakness, that it made men hesitate, and hesitation got you killed.
Yet Tonio had seen the truth in the quiet moments—his father softening around his wife, tender in ways he never showed the world. And God help the man who so much as looked at her wrong. His father had turned those men into enemies without a blink.
Tonio never forgot it.
By nightfall, the highway was empty and endless. Adrenaline gone, fatigue clung to Tonio’s shoulders, every mile heavier. His eyes burned as he scanned exits for a place no one would remember them being. Five hours since the last stop.
Sofia shifted in her seat, groggy. “Are we stopping soon?” she asked, pushing her hair back. “I need a bathroom. And real food. Not whatever counts as dinner at a gas station.”
“Yeah. Working on it.” He glanced over. The dashboard light traced the curve of her neck, the defiant set of her jaw even in half-sleep. He saw the survivor who’d outlasted terror, the woman who was brave enough to go after a senator, and the woman who—by simply existing—had become the single biggest threat to his existence.
He wanted her. That much was undeniable. What he didn’t know was for how long. A few nights tangled between thesheets… or months… hell, maybe even years. That he even wondered if this was an anomaly. He had never taken the same lover to his bed twice. Never. No woman would ever be allowed to track him, set him up, or be used as leverage against him. Growing up in this life—as the blade for his family—Tonio learned early that letting someone close was an invitation for an enemy to find your soft spot. Most men who eventually cracked did so because of their wives, their lovers, their children. Precious weaknesses. Easy targets. And Sofia—brave, determined Sofia—was also naive, innocent, and far too unprepared for the kind of danger that followed him like a shadow.
She didn’t belong anywhere near a man like him.
“I wanted to ask about the small crosses that dot your left shoulder blade,” she said quietly. “I saw a bit of them when you showed me your SEAL tattoos.”
Tonio’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t. Each one represented a life taken. The count wasn’t even accurate anymore; he’d stopped marking them two years ago.
She must have sensed the shift in him, because her voice softened. “Are you very religious?”
“No.” His answer was flat, devoid of anything but truth. “They represent the number of lives I’ve taken.”
She gasped, but she recovered quickly. “Oh. In the war. It must have been so hard to be a Navy SEAL.” A beat. “What age were you when you joined?”
“Nineteen.”
