“I can’t. But we can’t stay here forever.” He flicked on his flashlight briefly, shielding the beam as he swept the cave. “There’s another way out.”
At the back of the cave, the rock folded inward into a narrow black seam—a passage leading deeper into the mountain. He hadn’t noticed it at first. He wished he hadn’t noticed it now.
“Where does it go?” Annie asked.
“No idea. But my dad always said these mountains are full of old cave systems. The Cherokee used them for centuries.”
She was quiet, and he could almost hear her calculating risk the way she always did—measuring danger not against comfort, but against necessity.
“Lead the way,” she said.
As he turned toward the narrow opening, Jack felt the weight of everything they’d just spoken settle fully into him. He had spent five years believing love was a liability. A weakness. A death sentence.
But standing in the dark with Annie’s hand steady in his, listening to the echo of her courage, he finally understood the truth.
Love wasn’t what made people vulnerable.
Love was what made them strong enough to walk into the dark and keep going.
He would keep her alive. He would uncover the truth Eleanor Blackwood had died to protect. And when this was over, he would spend the rest of his life proving to Annie Whitaker that choosing him had never been a mistake.
Even if it meant crawling through every cave in Tennessee to do it.
Chapter 9
Annie stopped so abruptly that Jack nearly collided with her back. Her attention had locked on the sandy cave floor, on the partial impressions stamped into the damp earth—boot prints, unmistakable and recent. The sight of them sent a cold heaviness sinking straight into her chest. They weren’t the first people to discover this underground route. Someone else had already been here. Someone moving through the caves with purpose. Someone who was almost certainly hunting them.
“How fresh do you think those are?” she whispered, though the enclosed chamber made even the smallest sound feel dangerously loud.
Jack crouched beside the tracks, angling his flashlight beam across them with the practiced focus of a detective. He studied the depth, the disturbed grit, the faint dark marks wheremoisture still clung to the impressions. “The edges are sharp,” he said quietly. “And there’s runoff where water dripped from their boots. Twenty minutes ahead of us. Maybe thirty.”
Twenty minutes wasn’t much of a lead, especially not if the people ahead of them knew these caves better than they did. Fear slid through her, familiar and insidious—but this time it didn’t settle alone. Beneath it burned something hotter. Sharper. Anger. She was tired of being hunted. Tired of flinching at every sound. Tired of people being hurt because powerful men had buried a crime instead of answering for it. Eleanor had been murdered nearly a century ago, and even now the truth was still costing innocent people blood and fire.
“Jack,” she said quietly, her voice steadier than she felt. “What if we’re going about this all wrong?”
He looked up at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… what if instead of running from them, we find a way to get ahead of them?” She gestured toward the footprints. “Whoever left those is between us and the exit. If we keep following the obvious route, we’re walking straight into a trap.”
Jack swept his light along the cave walls, the beam gliding over pale limestone ripples and shadowed pockets in the rock. “These formations usually interconnect,” he said. “Multiple chambers, side passages, vertical shafts. But Annie, these systems can run for miles. We could get lost down here.”
“And if we don’t change course, we could get killed.” She pulled the locket from her pocket, feeling its cold weight settle into her palm. “Someone is willing to murder for this. That tells me we’re close. Too close for them to be comfortable.”
Jack studied her, searching her face. “So what are you suggesting?”
She turned slowly, forcing herself to really look at their surroundings. The air didn’t move from one direction alone. There were unseen channels in the rock, faint drafts curlingacross her skin, whispering of other spaces beyond the darkness. “We find another route to the surface. We get to a phone. We call for backup. And then we go straight to that bank.” She lifted her chin. “Eleanor waited a hundred years for justice. I’m not letting her down because we were afraid to take a risk.”
For a long moment, Jack didn’t answer. She could almost hear the calculations unfolding behind his eyes—the danger of the unknown weighed against the certainty of an ambush. Finally, he lifted his light and angled it toward the far side of the chamber. “There. That passage slopes upward. It might lead out.”
The opening was narrow, barely more than a jagged seam in the stone, but she could see the incline as clearly as he could. It didn’t plunge deeper. It climbed.
“You sure about this?” he asked quietly.
“No,” Annie said. “But I’m sure about what happens if we don’t try.”
The new passage was immediately more demanding than anything they’d encountered so far. In some places they crawled on hands and knees, the stone scraping against their clothes. In others, the rock narrowed so severely that Annie had to shrug out of the canvas bag and push it ahead of her inch by inch while Jack guided from behind. The tunnel twisted upward, forcing their bodies into awkward angles. Her arms burned. Her knees ached. Her breath echoed too loudly in her own ears. Still, she noticed the change before Jack said anything.
The air felt different. Lighter.
