“Uh-oh.”
She slapped him lightly on the arm and let her hand rest there for a couple of seconds before putting it on the ground and pushing up to sitting. “What will you do? When this is over?”
“Over? What’s that look like?”
Good question. “What if I told you there’s a place for you? With my team? A place where you’d be safe. People you can work with, for a cause. We can set you up with a new life, a new identity. You’d be—”
“On the run. Still.”
She opened her mouth to object and then shut it. “You don’t have to be alone, Elias.”
He nodded, silent. Her hand went back to his arm and stayed there. “It’s my watch. Sleep.”
After a while, his breathing evened out and Leo was left alone to think about what lay ahead. Not just the journey they’d have to complete—unless her team somehow tracked them down out here—but what they’d find once they arrived in Schink’s Station.
Would it be a massacre like the one he’d been accused of carrying out? Would another innocent person be blamed?
She dropped her face onto her bent knees and let the prospect—just the idea—run through her. For a few tortured minutes, she pictured it—arriving to find the place quiet and smelling of blood, the only sound the buzzing of flies on bodies.
Her eyes shut against the image, then opened to land on Elias’s dark form. The man’s strength was astounding. She admired it, the way she liked his preparedness and, frankly, his rough good looks. But more than all of it, she liked his heart. He’d lost so much, given so much, lived through hell. He deserved to be taken care of. To be loved.
The idea sent an uncomfortable jolt through her.
Shit. No. Not by me.
She didn’t do that nonsense. Didn’t know how. Oh, she loved her teammates. Ans and Von and Eric were stone walls she could lean on—men she’d trust with anything, go to the ends of the earth for. Literally.
And yet, in all the years she’d known them, she’d never once mentioned her mom. They hadn’t pushed, which she’d always appreciated. And God knew she’d never asked for their darkest secrets.
Now she wondered if maybe that emotional distance had paradoxically allowed her to get close to them.
Even as a kid, she’d never talked to anyone about her mom’s death. Not the counselors who’d chipped away at her—using art and music and every therapy available—and certainly not her dad. He’d pretty much sunk everything into music once Mom was gone, which had left Leo to dream, her eyes on the sky.
Shame washed over her. Guilt too. And something more elemental, something she’d never be able to describe. There wasn’t a word for this feeling, but she figured Elias knew it well—like she’d been a ghost all these years. Haunted. Doing things, experiencing them, but not really living.
Like she was equal parts flesh and blood and pain.
Bo stirred, pushing her from her morbid line of thought. Thank God, because she’d just about reached her limit of internal philosophizing. And this shit never did her any good.
Was the sky getting lighter?
Good. Though she was still exhausted and every bone and muscle hurt like hell, she couldn’t wait to get back on her feet again. To get moving and tackle another leg in this unexpected journey. To face whatever the day would bring.
With Elias by her side, that prospect didn’t scare her at all.
***
Maybe this sunrise—from the dark blue haze on the horizon to the flames eating up the sky—could cleanse the night’s ghosts. Maybe, Leo thought, the new day would bring something good. If nothing else, it would wipe away the vestiges of all that unintended intimacy. Like a bad hangover, the embarrassment of having over-shared weighed her down. She could only hope that the light of day would wipe the memories away, rather than shining a spotlight on them.
There was something hopeful about all that beauty, ancient, but fresh. The birth of a new day. Like snowflakes and human faces, no two sunrises were the same, and this one was hers. Just hers.
A cloud skittered across the rising sun, forever changing the view. She swallowed back a wave of premature nostalgia, already missing this bittersweet moment, this time and place, with this man to whom she’d already given too much of herself.
“Oh, shut up,” she whispered, rolling her eyes at her excessive sentimentality.
She took a bolstering breath and let herself look down at Elias. And then, it seemed wiser to wake him than to stare at the trail-worn lines of his face. Each one of them hard-earned. Each one deep and beautiful.
“Elias.” She spoke louder than she’d meant to, pushing every shred of longing from her voice. Hopefully. “Got to move.” The words puffed hot vapor into the cold air, and she shivered at the prospect of moving away from his warm body.
