Mercury: Liar.
Binary: There may be a nested loop from 2015 that haunts me.
Mercury: Tell me everything.
Binary: Absolutely not.
The Wyoming landscape had been scrolling past for hours, endless stretches of grassland giving way to foothills that grew steeper with every mile. Morgan shifted in the passenger seat and let her gaze drift to the back of Lincoln’s SUV.
Cases. That was the first thing she’d noticed when they’d loaded the vehicle—black cases of equipment she didn’t fully recognize. Electronics, scanners, devices withblinking lights and purposes she could only guess at. And beneath them, in a locked compartment Lincoln had opened with a biometric scan, weapons. More than she’d expected. Enough to make her stomach drop.
He’d prepared for this like a military operation.
Two days ago, that might have surprised her. Now she watched his hands on the steering wheel—steady, precise, the same hands that had touched her so carefully—and had to look away before he caught her staring.
The man who built fortresses and wrote code also rappelled down cliffs and packed weapons like he knew how to use them. Linear Tactical, he’d mentioned the day they went rappelling. She was beginning to understand what that meant.
But more than any of that was the fact that he was doing all of this for her. Risking his safety, his anonymity, his carefully controlled world. For letters. For pieces of paper.
Although, to her, they were more than that. They were proof that she’d been loved. And if she was going to lose that clarity in her mind, she desperately wanted to have the letters in her possession so she could remind herself.
And Lincoln, impossibly, had understood that. All the equipment in the back of the vehicle loudly announced he thought this was a dangerous idea, but he was still here, prepared to do it anyway.
His eyes moved to the rearview mirror, then the side mirror, then back to the road ahead. A constant rotation she’d been watching for miles. He drove exactly the speed limit—not a mile over, not a mile under—his body tight with a tension she could feel radiating across the console between them.
“Are you okay?”
He didn’t look at her. “Define okay.”
“You’re quiet.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “This is outside my comfort zone. All of it.”
Morgan waited. She’d learned that with Lincoln, silence often drew out more than questions. Not forcing him to talk, instead letting him continue at his own pace.
“I’m not a recluse,” he continued after a moment. “I see my family regularly. I exist in Oak Creek without significant difficulty—hang out with friends at the Eagle’s Nest like we did last night.” His fingers flexed on the wheel. “But there are more variables once I’m out of my house. And there are exponentially more variables for today’s situation.”
Her apartment. Her life. Walking into a dangerous situation.
“I mapped three different routes,” Lincoln continued, pulling her back to the present. “Identified fallback positions along each one. Calculated response times for local law enforcement in case we need to avoid them.”
Morgan stared at him. “You did all that this morning?”
“I did it last night. After you fell back asleep.”
After she fell asleep. After he’d held her while she cried about losing pieces of herself. After everything.
He hadn’t slept. He’d planned. For her.
“Lincoln—” She didn’t know how to finish. Didn’t have words for what it meant to be the person someone lost sleep over. The person someone planned escape routes for.
“There’s also the possibility that Randall has people watching the roads into Whitefish,” he continued, apparently unaware of what he’d just handed her. “I’ve been monitoring traffic patterns behind us. So far, nothing suspicious, but the variables increase significantly once we enter Montana.”
“I could go alone.”
The words came out before she’d fully decided to saythem. A reflex, maybe. The old instinct to protect people from the inconvenience of caring about her.
Lincoln’s head turned sharply. “What?”
