Kade leans hard into a turn that defies physics, and my thighs burn from gripping the bike. The wind steals my breath, my screams, everything except the raw terror of moving too fast through a world that's just tried to kill me.
A car cuts into our lane. Deliberate. Not careless.
Kade's body goes rigid beneath my arms, every muscle coiling at once. He downshifts—engine snarling—and threads the needle between the aggressor and a delivery truck. My knee barely misses the truck's bumper as we pass, so close I could read the plate if my eyes weren't squeezed shut.
"Hold on." He shouts it over his shoulder.
I want to laugh. What else would I be doing? My hands are locked around his waist like rigor mortis; my body molded to his back like we're one organism fleeing extinction.
Red light ahead.
He doesn't slow.
We blow through the intersection in a symphony of horns and squealing brakes. A sedan misses us by inches; the driver's face a pale blur through glass. My stomach drops as we go briefly airborne over a speed bump, landing hard enough to click my teeth together.
In the side mirror, I catch it: black SUV, tinted windows, keeping pace three cars back. It's been there since we left my apartment. Since we left the man zip-tied on my hallway floor. Since my life became a John Wick movie, and I am very much not John Wick.
Kade takes an off-ramp at the last possible second, tires shrieking. The SUV tries to follow but gets caught by a semi during the merge. That won't hold them long.
He hammers the off-ramp, cuts across three lanes, and ducks onto a service road I didn't even see. Under an overpass, double back, weaving through an industrial district of loading docks and blurred warehouse walls. Left, right, right again—turns that follow no logic I can parse. He's not just evading. He's laying false trails.
Another check in the mirror. No SUV.
Kade doesn't relax.
We emerge onto a different highway, run it two exits in the wrong direction, and cut across to a parallel road. Ten minutes of this before he finally pulls into a gas station—circling it once, scanning sight lines—before tucking the bike behind the building near the dumpsters.
The sudden stillness after all that motion makes my ears ring.
My legs shake so badly when I try to dismount that he has to catch me, hands finding my hips before I hit the ground.
"Bathroom," I manage, and stumble toward the door marked CUSTOMERS ONLY.
The mirror shows me a stranger. Hair wild. Eyes too wide. Yesterday's makeup smeared into something between a walk of shame and war paint. There's blood on my sweater sleeve. Not mine. His, or the other man's—I don't know, and I can't think about it right now. I splash cold water on my face with shaking hands, trying to locate the woman who danced with complete abandon twelve hours ago.
She's gone.
In her place is someone who now knows what a professional killer's eyes look like up close.
When I come out, Kade's at the counter. Water bottles, protein bars, and three prepaid phones still in packaging. He pays cash from a roll thick enough to choke someone. The clerk doesn't look at us twice—the practiced blindness of someone who works graveyard shifts and has decided that not seeing things is a survival strategy.
Outside, he tears open a phone package with his teeth, spits the plastic, and his fingers move over the screen with the efficiency of someone who has done this exact thing many times before.
"Frost, it's Bishop." His voice drops into something clipped and professional, so different from how it sounded in the dark that I almost don't recognize it. "I need intel on Black Helix and a UX freelancer named Wren Calloway."
My name in his mouth, spoken to someone else, lands like a small shock.
He glances at me. Something apologetic moves through his expression.
"Yeah, the bar wasn't exactly empty." A pause. "It got complicated."
He ends the call and pockets the phone.
"What do you mean 'complicated'?" I push off the wall. "That's what I am? A complication from a bar?—"
"That's not what I said." He runs a hand through his hair and looks at me—really looks—for the first time since we fled. Whatever he sees makes his expression shift. "Frost needs to understand what Black Helix wants with you. The more we know, the better I can protect you."
"Who's Frost? Who areyou?" The questions pile up faster than I can sort them. "I heard you say Kade at the apartment. Is that even real?"
