The road stopped being a road about an hour after we left Eagle River, before we turned off.
The pavement turned to gravel, then dirt, then a narrow strip of frozen mud cutting through black timber like a scar. The truck’s headlights tunneled forward and swallowed the trees—thick pines and bare-limbed oaks that leaned in close like they were listening.
Rylie sat rigid in the passenger seat, her hands tucked under her thighs as if she didn’t trust herself to move. She’d put her coat on without me telling her. She’d followed me out the back door of the Tavern without a single question. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t terrified.
It just meant she was brave.
And for some reason, that made something inside my chest go hot and sharp.
The heater blew lukewarm air. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass every few seconds, pushing away mist that didn’t quite turn to rain. The radio was off. No music. No chatter. The kind of silence that made you hear your own thoughts too clearly.
I kept my eyes on the road. On the trees. On the mirror.
“Trigger?” Her voice was quiet. Not shaky. Controlled.
I glanced over for half a second. “Yeah.”
“How far?”
“Twenty more minutes or so.”
“Where are we going?”
“A cabin.”
She swallowed. I saw the movement in her throat. “Whose cabin?”
“Mine.”
That snapped her head toward me. Her eyes were wide in the dashboard light, a darker blue than the sky had been earlier today. “You… own a cabin?”
I almost laughed, but it came out as a short breath through my nose. “I don’t own much. But yeah. Every once in a while, I enjoy getting away and doing some fishing.
“In the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s the point.”
Her gaze stayed on me a beat too long, like she was trying to decide if I was kidding. If this were a joke. If I were teasing her.
I didn’t do much teasing anymore.
I’d stopped teasing the day I learned what it felt like to lose a man who’d been laughing one second and bleeding out the next.
She looked away and stared through the windshield again. “Thomas won’t find us?”
“He can’t.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
“I am.”
Rylie’s mouth tightened. “What if he—”
“He won’t,” I cut in, and my tone came out harder than I meant. I forced myself to breathe. To loosen my grip on the steering wheel before I cracked the damn thing. “He doesn’t know this place exists. It’s not in your dad’s files. It’s not intown records. There’s no mail route, no utility hookups. No cell service.”
Her voice got smaller. “No one knows?”
“My team knows.” I paused. “Wolf knows. Havoc. Ace. Ghost. Beast. Saint. They’re watching Eagle River right now, watching the tavern. Watching the roads. If Thomas shows his face in town, they’ll see it.”
