Diego hasn’t spoken since we hit the highway.
His hands grip the wheel at ten and two. Knuckles white against the leather. His jaw is a rigid line, a muscle feathering beneath the stubble. His eyes never stop moving—rearview, side mirror, road, rearview—but he won’t look at me.
I’m still wearing his thermal shirt. It smells like him—gun oil and cedar and the sharp, metallic tang of fear. My own fear. The kind that hasn’t faded even though we made it out. Even though we’re alive.
Anger radiates off him in waves. It fills the minivan like smoke, thick and choking. Every mile marker that flashes past is a countdown to something I’m not ready for.
I try once to break the silence.
“Diego, I?—”
“Don’t.” One word. Sharp as a blade.
I close my mouth. Swallow the explanation, the justification, the dozen things I want to say. He’s not ready to hear them. Maybe I’m not ready to say them out loud.
Because part of me knows he’s right to be angry.
I logged in. I broke protocol. I painted a target on the only safe place we had because I couldn’t stand feeling useless. Because I needed to do something. Because Cassandra Brennan doesn’t hide in hotel rooms while other people fight her battles.
And now men with automatic weapons almost cut us down in a hotel room that smelled like room service coffee, and we’re fleeing through rural Pennsylvania in a stolen minivan with stick-figure family stickers on the back window.
We’re alive because he jumped out a window.
The memory keeps replaying in fractured images: the door splintering inward. The wind rushing through the shattered glass. His arm like iron around my waist. The sickening lurch of free fall. The way the rope sang while he controlled our descent with nothing but grip strength and sheer will.
And the bullet. The one that should have caught him in the shoulder.
I saw the trajectory. The muzzle flash. The angle was wrong—or it should have been right. Instead, the wind shifted. Or he moved. Or something intervened at exactly the right microsecond.
He either has a guardian angel or he’s lucky as shit.
It doesn’t feel like luck. It feels like something else entirely. Something I can’t explain, and he refuses to acknowledge.
“We need gas.”
His voice is rough. Clipped. The first words in what feels like forever.
“Okay.”
He doesn’t respond. Just takes the next turn, pulling into a truck stop that looks like it hasn’t been updated since the Reagan administration. Fluorescent lights flicker over pumps with analog dials. A semi idles in the far corner, its driver nowhere in sight.
“Stay.” He barks a one-word order, like I’m a dog.
I want to call him out on this, but his anger is too hot.
He’s gone before I can respond. I watch him through the dirty windshield—the controlled stride, the way his gaze sweeps the perimeter even now. Even exhausted. Even furious.
He’s still protecting me. Even as he’s shutting me out.
My hands shake with too much adrenaline burning itself out inside my body. I press my hands flat against my thighs, willing them to stop. They don’t. Days of accumulated terror have to go somewhere, and apparently, it’s decided my nervous system is the exit route.
When he slides back behind the wheel, he doesn’t start the engine. He stares through the windshield at nothing. The truck stop lights cast harsh shadows across his face, deepening the hollows under his eyes.
“Diego—”
“Not now.”
The words cut. Sharp. Final.
