We stood for a moment after stepping out, neither of us rushing forward.
“I don’t need to go all the way across,” I said, more to myself than to him.
“We’ll go as far as you want,” he replied. “And if you want to turn back, we turn back. No questions.”
I nodded, grounding myself in the feel of his presence, the weight of his jacket around my shoulders, the fact that I wasn’t alone.
I took one step forward.
Then another.
The bridge loomed, but it didn’t feel quite as monstrous as it had before.
We walked slowly, the city stretching out behind us, the harbor dark and wide beneath the lights. I focused on the rhythm of our steps, the way his thumb brushed over my knuckles, the steady sound of his breathing beside me.
Whatever waited on the other side—of the bridge, of this night, of this new life—I was here for it.
31
WYATT
We started climbing the bridge hand in hand, and I felt it before I saw it—the fog rolling in from the harbor like a living thing, thick and gray and purposeful, moving across the water with the kind of deliberate intent that made you think of old ghost stories and warnings about the sea.
Sophie noticed, too, glancing out at the darkening sky where city lights were starting to blur into halos. "Maybe it's an omen," she said, her voice lighter than I expected given what we were doing, given the fear she was facing. "Help from the universe so I can't look down and see the water."
I squeezed her hand, grateful for the humor even if it was covering nerves, even if I could feel the slight tremor in her fingers. "Whatever works."
The fog came in fast—faster than seemed natural, faster than any weather I'd seen in Charleston—swallowing the city behind us first, then the lights along the bridge, then the water below us, until we were walking through cloud, surrounded by white-gray nothing that muffled sound and made the world feel smaller, more intimate, more isolated.
By the time we reached the top of the span—farther than Sophie had wanted to go, farther than we'd planned—we couldn't see the harbor beneath us at all. Couldn't see the city we'd left behind or the shore ahead. Couldn't see anything except a few feet of walkway in either direction and the cables rising up into the mist like something from a dream.
She stopped, eyes closing, chest rising and falling as she pulled in deep breaths.
I waited beside her, not pushing, not talking, not doing anything except being present. Watching her face in the diffused light, the way the fog caught in her hair like something ethereal, like she was part of the landscape instead of separate from it.
Then a voice cut through the mist, billowing from somewhere ahead of us, distorted by the fog.
"Wyatt Dane."
My entire body went cold, every instinct I'd honed over years of combat firing at once, adrenaline flooding my system.
Klein.
He materialized from the fog like something conjured from nightmare, walking toward us with that same sleazy grin I'd seen at Mama P's, but his eyes were different now. Wild. Unhinged. Burning with something that looked like madness barely contained behind a thin veneer of control.
His hair was disheveled, sticking up at odd angles like he'd been running his hands through it obsessively for hours. His suit was rumpled, tie loosened and askew, collar unbuttoned. He looked like he hadn't slept in days, like something had broken inside him and he'd stopped caring about the facade.
Something was deeply wrong with him—more wrong than the garden-variety asshole with a grudge I'd dealt with before.
He pointed a finger at me but spoke directly to Sophie, his voice dripping with contempt and something darker. "Do youknow the kind of criminal you're choosing to spend time with? The kind of man he really is underneath that heroic act?"
Every muscle in my body tensed, coiling tight, preparing for violence. But Sophie stepped forward slightly instead of back, chin lifting in defiance. "Wyatt didn't do anything wrong."
Klein laughed—sharp, bitter, the sound of a man who'd lost his grip on reality and found something twisted in its place. "You have no idea what he's done. What he's part of. What secrets he's keeping from you, even now."
Then his gaze snapped to me, eyes gleaming with something manic and triumphant, like he'd finally found the answer to a question that had been eating him alive. "I'm putting it all together, Dane. Victoria helped me see it—the patterns I couldn't see before. All the pieces are falling into place now. Your whole file is being dissected as we speak. Every deployment. Every mission. Every connection you've ever made."
Victoria. The name meant nothing to me, rang no bells, but clearly it meant everything to him.
