When the guards’ footsteps fade down the hall, I reach into the hidden fold of my torn jacket and slide out the thin card I palmed earlier—a chipped piece of plastic I’d pried from the control panel in the interrogation room. My fingers shake around it, slick with sweat and dried blood, but I keep my grip steady. I’ve been planning this for days, memorizing doors, counting rotations, watching the locks. It’s all I’ve had to keep me upright. All I’ve had that belongs to me.
King’s good eye catches the movement.
“Tell me that’s a magic trick and not you being reckless,” he mutters, a faint grin tugging at the corner of his split lip.
“It’s our way out,” I murmur, the words steadier than I feel. “I can pick the lock with it. Tonight.”
He tries to sit straighter, pain flashing hard across his face before he buries it. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m done waiting for someone else to save us.” My voice is low but certain, sharpened by every hour I’ve spent chained to this floor imagining all the ways hope can rot. “I’m getting out. I’ll come back for you.”
King lets out a breath that’s half a laugh, half a groan. “Always figured you’d be the one to drag me through hell, not leave me here.”
“You can’t walk. You know it.” I say it gently, but firm enough that he hears the truth under it. We both do. His ribs are probably cracked. His shoulder hangs wrong. One leg barely twitches when he shifts it.
His grin sharpens into something almost proud. “That’s the first smart thing you’ve said all week.”
Despite everything, a small, bitter smile tugs at my mouth. It feels wrong on my face. Feels like using a language I forgot I knew. The quiet stretches again, and in it there’s something like understanding—two people bound by blood, by pain, by the kind of trust that doesn’t need words. It feels almost like having a brother. The kind I never had. The kind I maybe wasn’t made to have.
King studies me through the haze, breathing shallow. “Cash is going to lose his mind when you show up on your own.”
The name hits me like a pulse.
Jon.
The memory floods in before I can stop it. It never asks permission when it’s him. It just takes.
The mission had gone sideways earlier—intel wrong, timing off. I’d failed.
We’d both failed.
We’re stretched out on a hill just beyond the Greenport perimeter, the grass cool and damp beneath my back. The dirt smells like rain and crushed pine. A Hozier song bleeds softly through my headphones into the dark, sharp night air. I say dark, but the stars are so bright they look like someone scattered salt across black velvet. The whole sky feels too wide, too beautiful for the kind of day we had.
Jon lies beside me, silent, one arm behind his head, the other resting near mine but not touching. It isn’t awkward. It’s heavy, the kind of silence that fills your chest and stays there, turning every breath into something slower, deeper, more dangerous. His shoulder is just a few inches from mine. Close enough that I can feel the heat of him. Close enough that one small move would change everything.
He doesn’t tell me I did fine. He doesn’t lie to make me feel better. He just lets me breathe, lets me listen to the wind like it might have answers and stare at the sky like those same words might be written somewhere if I look hard enough. That’s always been his kindness—hard-edged, quiet, leaving room instead of filling it with bullshit.
If I turn my head, our eyes will meet and something unspoken will shift. The world will tilt on its axis and every sparkling ball in the sky will explode. Every rule I’ve built myself around will snap like wet thread.
I don’t.
I never do.
The memory shatters as quickly as it came. The cell walls press back in, cold and unrelenting. The music is gone. The sky is gone. There’s only concrete and blood and the taste of regret. I shove the image away and force myself to focus on the weight of the card in my palm and the pattern of guard rotations I’ve memorized. Left corridor every seventeen minutes. Outer postevery thirty. Cigarette break at the corner by the courtyard door. Weak hinge on the third latch.
King exhales slowly, watching me with that tired half-smile. “Just like that,” he murmurs, as if he knows exactly where my mind went.
I tighten my grip on the card and meet his gaze, steel for steel. “I’m getting us out,” I whisper, more to myself than to him. Because if I say it enough times, maybe it becomes true. Maybe I should stop sounding like a girl trying to convince herself she isn’t terrified.
And this time, I move. It’s cautious at first, swift but measured, knees against the cold concrete scraping scabs built up over days, but I don’t feel a single thing. I’m too focused on the prospect of freedom. Of air that doesn’t smell like other people’s suffering. Of home.
Not of him.
King smirks, half-broken and stupidly human, and I can’t help the laugh that rips out of me—wet and ugly and too loud in the cold air.
“Don’t forget my ass here,” King rasps, voice a raw thread of humor stretched over pain. “Remember that time Larkin left me chilling in a conference room with a ‘scented candle’ and two strangers who turned out to be a religious cult? That shit was fucking miserable—don’t pull a Larkin on me, Delilah.”
The joke lands like a slap and I cough from it, choking on a laugh that tastes like rust and blood, but it does what he intended: it lightens something that’s been too heavy for too long. It makes the walls, for a second, feel less like they’re closing in and more like an obstacle I can push past. Something with edges. Something beatable.
