“And the girl comes too, obviously. Can’t leave her here with the compound empty,” Diesel added.
“Obviously.” Ryan’s voice was flat.
“Better keep her in line. Oliver doesn’t tolerate complications. If she becomes a problem…” Snake let the threat hang.
“She won’t be a problem.”
“Good. Because if she runs her mouth or tries anything stupid, it won’t just be her who pays. Oliver will assume you brought a liability to his operation.”
“I said she won’t be a problem.”
“Six hours, Coop. We leave with or without you.”
Their footsteps retreated. The door closed. I heard the lock turn.
I came out of the bathroom fully dressed to find Ryan standing at the window, hands braced against the frame. The moonlight caught his profile—jaw clenched, shoulders rigid with tension.
“You came back.” His voice was rough. “Why the hell did you come back?”
“I overheard them on my way out. If I hadn’t been here, they would have known you were a cop.” I moved closer but kept distance between us. “They were going to kill you. Slowly. Something about what Oliver did to a DEA agent.”
He turned to face me, and the expression on his face was pure agony. “You should have kept running.”
“They would have killed you.”
“That’s my risk to take. My job. Not yours.”
“You were trying to save me,” I said quietly. “I couldn’t let you die for it.”
He laughed, bitter and broken. “Save you? I’ve made everything worse. Where we’re going tomorrow—Oliver’s compound—it’s even more dangerous. More isolated. No town for twenty miles. No escape routes I’ve scouted. And Oliver…”He scrubbed a hand over his face. “These guys are Boy Scouts compared to Julian Oliver.”
The weight of it settled over me like a funeral shroud. I’d given up my chance at freedom to save him, and in doing so, had trapped myself even deeper in this nightmare.
“I really thought I was going to die,” he admitted, voice barely above a whisper. “When they came in and you weren’t here. Snake had made up his mind—I could see it. The safety was off. His finger was on the trigger.”
His voice cracked on the last word, and suddenly, he was pulling me against him, arms wrapping around me like he was drowning and I was the only solid thing in an ocean of chaos. His whole body shook—just once—a violent shudder that told me exactly how close to death he’d been.
“Thank you,” he breathed against my hair. “God, Mia, thank you. You shouldn’t have come back, but…thank you.”
I let him hold me, felt the desperate grip of his arms, the way his heart hammered against my chest. This wasn’t the calculated embrace from before, designed to sell a lie. This was raw. Real. A man who’d just stepped back from the edge of death, holding on to the person who’d pulled him to safety.
“I couldn’t let them kill you,” I whispered against his shoulder. “Not when you were trying to save me.”
He pulled back just enough to look at my face, his hands coming up to frame it. His thumbs brushed my cheekbones, and for a moment, we just stared at each other—two people trapped in an impossible situation, bound together by trauma and necessity and something else neither of us wanted to name.
“What happens now?”
“Now?” He dropped his hands but stayed close, our knees touching as we sat on the edge of the bed. “Now we try to survive Oliver. Try to maintain this cover until I can figure out how to get you out. Because where we’re going…” He shook his head. “Thebarn was a safe house. The compound here is a waystation. But Oliver’s place? That’s where the real monsters live.”
We sat in silence, both of us realizing the truth of our situation. I’d saved his life, but in doing so, I’d sealed my own fate. Whatever happened next, wherever Oliver was taking us, we were trapped in it together.
The clock on the dresser showed 1:47 a.m. Four hours until dawn. Four hours until we walked even deeper into hell.
Neither of us would sleep tonight.
And both of us knew that by sunrise, everything would be infinitely worse.
Chapter 7
