“You okay?” I asked him.
He started, sitting up in the chair, assessing for threats, and only relaxed when he saw it was me.
“Yeah.”
I unwrapped a sticky chocolate bar that looked as if it had been melted and re-solidified three separate times. It tasted like shit, and I shoved it to one side.
“Can I ask you something?” Rio said.
I nodded, leaning back in my chair and stretching my legs out, spine popping as I arched. “Shoot.”
“Tell me about the times you got away.”
“All of them?” I asked, raising a brow. “Or do you just want to know about the ones where I killed someone?”
Rio didn’t seem surprised at that. Maybe it eased his thoughts about the man he’d killed today to protect his family. Who knows. “Anything you feel okay telling me,” he said.
“The first couple of times I got away were clean.Evasive maneuvers, dumped files, scorched trails. I’d disappear before they even realized I’d been there. It felt like a game back then. Dangerous, but not deadly. Just me outsmarting whoever was trying to keep me out. Then it got serious. I worked out that every time I got anywhere near LyricNight, a contract would go up. Not warnings. Not threats. Bounties. The AI—or Kessler, or both—had decided I wasn’t just a nuisance. I was a liability to all that money and power he had. All it would take is for me to want a cut, and his reputation would be fucked.” I leaned forward in my chair. “And then the first real hit happened.”
Rio tensed, and I fought the need to clamber onto his lap and kiss away his worries. He needed to hear the bad bits that made me so understanding of what he’d done today.
“Some big guy—I never caught his name—decided to chance his luck. Tracked me to the back of a server café in Denver. He was twice my size and three times as mean, but he underestimated me. They all did in the end, I guess. He cornered me over a kill contract, said he wanted to make it quick. I told him that was considerate. I took out his knee with a wrench, drove a screwdriver into his throat, and ran.”
“Did he hurt you?” Rio asked and crossed to sit on the bed next to me.
“Yeah.” I wasn’t going to lie, even if it did make Rio flinch. “I made it away, okay. It was the first time I’d killed someone, and I backed off from LyricNight and the contract disappeared. I guess it reasoned that I was scared enough to back off. That was attempt seven…” I counted back. “… I think.”
“Jesus, Lyric.”
“Yeah, but I handled it. Then attempts eight and nine occurred close together—back to back, practically—right around the time the names associated with Kessler started getting burned. Public exposures. Quiet murders. A leak here, a dead body there. The more people on my watch list ended up dead or disgraced, the more the AI ramped up the contracts on me, and I guess it assumed it was me behind it. Not just get me alive orders anymore, but dead or alive—anything to get me off the board.”
Now, though? There was nothing else I could do. I’d hit a wall, run every angle, double-checked every tool and patch I’d loaded on the encrypted drive. Anything else would just be me going in circles.
And no matter how much I wanted to lean into Rio, kiss him until I forgot who I used to be, we had to stay sharp. Vigilant. Focused.
But it was after midnight now, and the motel room had taken on a quieter weight—the kind that cameafter an adrenaline rush, when exhaustion started to edge out fear.
Rio reached over to the nightstand and picked up a spare zip tie, holding it between two fingers. “You need to practice how you get out of these.”
I was confused. “I need to stay in them to make sure anyone knows I’m restrained.”
“Yeah, but if they take you from me…” He paused. “Fuck, Lyric, the thought of someone taking you away from me, where I can’t protect you…”
“I get it,” I reassured, then kissed him. “It’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” he said, desperately.
“We’ll make it okay. Together.”
“But if they take you, if they try to hurt you, I want your hands free to protect yourself. Okay?”
“Okay.” I held out my hands, and he hesitated.
“I fucking hate this,” he muttered. “You know that, right?”
“I know,” I said. “Show me how to get out then.”
His expression twisted as if he were about to argue, or refuse, or maybe throw the whole idea out of the window. But instead, he let out a breath through his nose and reached for the zip tie.
