"The tree line," Cath says. "Straight north. A hundred yards."
I can see it. A dark mass against the lighter dark of the sky. Trees. The edge of a wood.
We cross open ground. The grass is wet and cold under my feet and I'm moving faster than I should, the muscles in my thighs burning. Cath keeps pace beside me, her hand on my elbow.
Fifty yards. Seventy.
Something moves at the tree line.
I stop. Cath stops. A shape detaches itself from the darkness between the trees and comes toward us across the grass and I know who it is before I can see his face because his scent reaches me first.
Cedar and whiskey. Dark, warm, deep. It rolls across the wet grass and hits me like a wall and my knees buckle.
Cath catches me. Her arm goes around my back and she holds me upright and I'm shaking, my whole body, because the scent is real.
It's not the memory I've been holding onto for nine weeks, fading a little more each day. It's him. Fresh and strong and right there and my body responds to it the way it responded the first time, in a security room on the second floor of a casino, with everything in me orienting toward him like a compass finding north.
He crosses the remaining distance at a run. He's in dark clothes, no suit, and he's moving fast, faster than a man his size should be able to move in the dark across uneven ground.
Viktor is behind him, I think. Other shapes. I can't focus on them because Dom is there and his hands are on my face, cupping my jaw, tilting my head up, and his eyes are searching mine in the dark.
"Theo." His voice cracks on my name. I've never heard his voice crack. Not once. Not in the security room, not during the heat, not when he told me I was his. His voice has always been level and certain and sure. It cracks now.
His thumbs brush my cheekbones. His palms are warm and they cover my ears and the world goes quiet.
"Are you hurt?"
I shake my head. My throat is too tight to speak.
"The baby?"
I take his wrist and move his hand down, off my face, and press his palm flat against the bump. The baby kicks. Right on cue, as if it knows. As if the cedar and whiskey soaked through my skin and reached it.
Dom's hand goes very still. His fingers spread across the curve of my stomach and his breath stops and in the dark Ican see his face change. The control drops. The mask drops. Everything he is and everything he pretends to be falls away and what's underneath is just a man with his hand on his child, feeling it move for the first time.
"Theo," he says again.
"I know," I say. My voice comes out like it's been scraped across gravel. "I know."
His other arm comes around me. He pulls me against his chest and I let him because there is nothing left in me that wants to resist this. His body is warm and solid and his scent wraps around me and the baby kicks again against the press of his stomach and I bury my face in his neck and breathe.
I breathe him in the way I breathed the night air sixty seconds ago. Like I've been drowning and this is the surface.
He holds me. He holds me on a dark field with his team behind him and the guards sedated on the ground and the concrete cell standing empty thirty yards away, and he holds me the way he should have held me from the beginning. Just to be near me, because he was afraid I was gone and I'm not.
"We need to move." Viktor's voice, low, from the tree line. "Vehicle's on the track."
Dom doesn't let go. He shifts, one arm staying around my shoulders, and we walk. His stride adjusts to mine without being asked. Shorter steps, slower pace. He can feel that I'm weak. He doesn't comment on it.
The tree line is dark and close and the ground underneath is soft with leaf mold. There's a dirt track, barely wide enough for a car, running through the wood. A black SUV sits on it with the engine off and the lights off. Viktor opens the back door.
Dom helps me in. His hand on my elbow, steadying. I sit and the seat is warm and soft and after nine weeks on a concrete floor and a stained mattress, the leather feels like sinking into butter.
He gets in beside me. Viktor takes the driver's seat. Cath gives me a hug, then whispers, “I need to go back. I can’t stay with you or they’ll know. Good luck.”
The doors close. The engine starts, quiet.
We move. The track bumps underneath us and then smooths as we reach a paved road. The headlights stay off. Viktor drives by the light of the dashboard and the faint glow of the sky.
