I nod once.
We sign off.
The connection drops with a little click that sounds louder than it should.
Silence settles over the room.
Lark exhales, shoulders slumping. “Sixty Bitcoin,” she says, staring at the dead screen. “That’s like… what? A billion dollars?”
“Not quite,” I say. “But enough to motivate people who shouldn’t be motivated.”
She walks around the crate to sit on the edge of the bed, mug cupped in both hands, staring at the floor.
For once, she’s not cracking jokes.
I sit beside her, close enough that our knees touch. My brain runs laps.
Stay.
Run.
Stay and maybe get pinned.
Run and maybe walk into something worse.
Neither option feels good.
Both feel better than being apart.
“What are you thinking?” she asks quietly.
“Honestly?” I blow out a breath. “I’m thinking about the difference between being hunted and being on a hunt.”
She tilts her head.
“I don’t like feeling like prey,” I say. “That’s not how we built this thing. We go after people. We set traps. We bait. We don’t wait around hoping not to get shot.”
“We don’t usually have our faces on a hit list while we do it, either,” she points out.
“Minor detail.”
She bumps her shoulder against mine. “You want to run,” she guesses. “Change locations. Make them work for it.”
“I want options,” I say. “Right now we have exactly two and both suck.”
She studies me for a long moment. “I’ll go where you go,” she says simply. “If you think staying is best, we stay. If you think running gives us a better chance, we run. I’ll bitch about the lack of showers either way, but I’m in.”
It hits me harder than any vow she could’ve made.
“I don’t want you to just follow my lead because you love me,” I say. The word still feels new in my mouth—awkward and precious. “I want you to push back if you think I’m wrong.”
“Oh, trust me,” she says dryly. “Iwill. But right now? I don’t know enough about the world these people operate in to make a better call than Dean and Arrow. If they say stay, I say stay. And if it starts feeling too much like ‘bait’ instead of ‘position,’ we re-evaluate. Together.”
Together.
The word settles something in me.
I wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her in. She comes willingly, tucking herself against my side, head resting on my shoulder. Her hair brushes my jaw; she smells like coffee and sleep and the faint floral of whatever soap the cabin came stocked with.
