Mia was out there. With a fucking monster.
Chapter 27
Mia
Darkness.
I surfaced slowly, consciousness filtering in like water through cracks. My head pounded—a deep, nauseating throb that pulsed behind my eyes. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong.
I was moving.
The rumble of an engine vibrated through whatever I was lying on. Leather beneath my cheek, smooth and cool. The back seat of a vehicle. My hands were bound in front of me, rough rope biting into my wrists.Don’t panic. Don’t move.
I forced myself still, kept my breathing even despite every instinct screaming to thrash, to fight, to claw my way free. The vehicle rocked beneath me, tires crunching over gravel. No voices. No radio. Just the engine and the road and my own pulse hammering in my ears.
Think. Remember.
The last thing I could piece together was the car accident—Lark beside me, both of us driving back from Billings. The impact from out of nowhere. Glass shattering. The world spinning and spinning until it stopped.
Bishop. It had been Bishop.
It all came back to me. The missing box of mementos. Fear that Oliver had figured out Coop had been working undercover. Calling Travis to see if he could get word to Coop.
Had he been able to?
The vehicle slowed. I pushed myself upright, blinking against the pounding in my skull. Through the tinted windows, headlights cut across a clearing. Trees. Rock face.
Gravel popped under the tires as we rolled to a stop.
The driver’s door opened. Bishop stepped out, his boots crunching on gravel as he walked around to the rear passenger door and pulled it open. He stood outside, face blank, hands loose at his sides. That same military stillness I remembered. Ready for anything.
He stepped back, giving me room to climb out.
My knees nearly buckled when my feet hit the ground. I steadied myself against the SUV’s frame, squinting against the glare of the headlights. And then?—
A dark opening in a hillside. Timber framing gray with age. The late-afternoon sun didn’t reach inside—just a few feet past the entrance, the light gave way to black.
Was that an old mine?
“Good to see you again, Mia.”
I spun toward the voice.
Oliver stood ten feet away. But something about him was off.
His clothes were wrong—the pressed khakis streaked with dirt, the expensive button-down untucked on one side with a dark smear near the hem that could have been blood or grease. A bruise darkened his jaw, purple-green and angry against his paleskin. His hair, usually so perfectly styled, looked like he’d been running his hands through it for hours.
The polished veneer he’d worn like armor at the compound, at the Gathering, every moment I’d seen him—it was cracked now. Showing something frayed and desperate underneath. I hoped it had all been caused by Coop.
But despite his disheveled appearance, Oliver’s eyes hadn’t changed. Pale as winter ice. Empty as a corpse.
“I’ve been looking forward to this,” he said.
Bishop maintained his impassive expression, but I knew he wanted me to suffer. Payback for his nose.
Just the two of them. No soldiers stationed around the clearing. No guards watching the perimeter. Whatever this was, it was stripped down to its essence.
And I had a feeling it was personal.
