"Kade Bishop." He mounts the bike and offers me his hand. "Guardian HRS calls me Bishop."
I take his hand, swing my leg over despite every rational instinct screaming at me not to. "Like the chess piece."
"Like the chess piece." He starts the engine, raises his voice over the rumble. "In Afghanistan, I identified an approach vector on a target—a physical position and angle of attack that every other operator on the ground had looked at and dismissed as impossible. Wrong elevation, wrong geometry, too many obstacles in the sightline. I spent six hours finding the one line through it that actually worked." A beat. "Took the shot. After that, the callsign stuck. Bishop. The piece that moves at angles. Finds lines nobody else sees."
He says it flat. Factual. No performance behind it. He's not trying to impress me—he's explaining the name, and the absence of ego in it makes the story land harder than any bragging would.
"Am I the king in this metaphor?"
He looks back at me, and something in his eyes makes my chest do something I don't have the bandwidth to examine right now.
"You're the whole fucking board, little bird."
Then we're moving again, but different. Surface streets, measured turns, mirrors checked with the regularity of breathing. The city thins and then drops away entirely as theroad starts to climb, and my ears pop with the first real altitude change.
The mountains rise around us.
And something cold moves through me that has nothing to do with the temperature drop.
I know this part of the range. The specific angle of these ridgelines, the way the road curves left before a long straight climb, the smell of pine and cold granite mixing at exactly this elevation. My grandmother used to drive me up through here when I was small—Sunday mornings, thermos of coffee for her, hot chocolate for me, no real destination. Just the mountains and the quiet and her hand on the gear shift. I haven't been back in years. Haven't had a reason.
The familiarity feels wrong now. Like standing in a house after a break-in—everything in its place, nothing safe.
I press closer to Kade's back and watch the tree line blur past.
The temperature drops with each switchback. My fingers go numb around his waist and he takes a brief stop to navigate a fallen branch across the trail, prying my cramped hands loose one finger at a time, working feeling back into them with a gentleness that doesn't fit the rest of this night.
"Almost there," he says.
I nod like I know wherethereis. Like I haven't handed my life to someone I know only through violence, orgasms, and forty miles of mountain road.
A cabin materializes from the forest like a held breath finally released—dark windows, weathered wood, alone enough out here that no one would hear anything at all. He parks the bike under a tarp lean-to that's invisible until you're already on top of it.
When he cuts the engine, the silence is absolute. Wind in the pines. A distant bird. My heartbeat.
He helps me off the bike. My legs hold, barely.
"My brother's place." He retrieves a key from under a rock that looks identical to every other rock. "He lets me use it during hunting season."
"It's May."
"Different kind of hunting season."
The key turns in the lock with a sound like something final, and as I follow him toward the dark doorway, a thought arrives with the force of something I should have had much earlier: I'm in the middle of nowhere with a man I barely know. A man who neutralized a professional killer in my hallway with his bare hands. A man who made me come four times, but whose last name I only just learned.
The sex was extraordinary. World-tilting. The kind that recalibrates you.
Ted Bundy was reportedly charming, too.
When Kade turns in the doorway, face unreadable in the dying light, shadows sharpening the line of his jaw, his eyes dark and unreadable—he's between me and the only exit. We both know I couldn't outrun him even if my legs were working at full capacity.
"Coming?" The word hangs in the air between us, carrying more weight than it should.
I look at him. Really look. The blood on his knuckles. The coiled readiness he carries in his body, even standing still. The gun barely concealed under his shirt. He saved my life—that's real. He also represents something that reached through my front door at five in the morning—that's real, too.
The forest presses in on all sides, dark and enormous. Behind me: forty miles of mountain road back to a city where people are actively trying to kill me. In front of me: a stranger who moves through violence the way other people move through traffic, offering shelter that could be safety or could be something else.
"Wren." His voice drops. Softer. The way it sounded last night when it was just the two of us and nothing else existed yet. "Your call."
