Her radio crackled with static—no signal this deep in the rock. Her phone showed the same. No way to call for backup.
No way to call Noah.
He would have come out here with her in a heartbeat if she’d alerted him to what Bonner had said. Except she’d walked—run—away from Noah, and now she no longer had him to count on. How many times had he been her backup? How many times had she done the happy dance in her heart when he called her his partner?
That was exactly the problem. She couldn’t afford to need anyone that much.
A tremor shook the ground, sending loose rocks skittering across the cave floor. Ripley whined softly.
“It’s okay, girl.” Sabrina reached for the dog, but it was hard to say whether she was comforting Ripley or the other way around. “Nothing to worry about. That was just a baby quake.”
The words had barely left her mouth when a second tremor hit—harder, longer. The cave walls groaned ominously.
Then the world exploded.
The roar of falling rock drowned everything else as the aftershock ripped through the canyon. Sabrina dove for the back of the cave, pulling Ripley with her as debris rained down.
When the dust settled, the entrance to the cave had vanished behind a wall of broken rock.
She was trapped. Like, actually trapped, not just unable to leave without running into the guy with a gun.
And no one else knew she was out here.
CHAPTER 20
Darkness had a texture. Sabrina had never noticed that before, but trapped in this cave with only the sound of falling rocks and Ripley’s anxious breathing, she could feel it against her skin. Heavy. Suffocating. As impenetrable as the walls she’d built around herself.
“Just breathe.” The words disappeared into the blackness, swallowed by the tons of rock pressing down around them.
She’d experienced a lot of tight spots in her life. Literal ones, where she’d wedged herself into cracks in the rock face that barely accommodated her shoulders. Metaphorical ones, where she’d had to prove herself over and over to men who thought she didn’t belong in their world.
This was both. And neither. Because she’d never been this kind of trapped before.
The dust hadn’t fully settled from the rock fall that had sealed the cave entrance. It wasdark. Like really dark, the kind that crawled through your eye sockets and made you imagine you could see light, creating patterns that didn’t make any sense. Just like nothing in her life made sense anymore.
Was this what surrender felt like? Having absolutely zero control over anything?
She’d lost control the moment she’d spotted that guy on the trail. Everything after had been pure reaction—running, hiding, getting trapped. A series of choices that weren’t really choices at all.
Like how she always ran. From everything.
The thought hit her like falling rock, impossible to dodge. Her specialty was running. From her father’s disappointment. From relationships. From Noah.
Bad time to be thinking about him. He would have spotted the guy with the gun before she did, probably. Working together, they could have handled it.
Instead, she’d charged ahead alone. Like always.
Alone was how she did things, and she’d get through this cave in that way too. Well. Alone except for the dog.
Ripley whined softly, and Sabrina forced herself to breathe through the band of pressure squeezing her chest. “We’re fine. This is just another problem to solve.”
The words echoed off the cave walls, mocking her. Nothing about this was fine. She was trapped in a cave with unstable geology during an earthquake that may not be done, no way to call for help, and an armed man outside who clearly didn’t want her asking questions about Annie Ross.
A tremor shook loose more debris, sending pebbles skittering across the cave floor. The sound burrowed into her brain, taking root alongside the dozens of other thoughts she’d been avoiding.
She didn’t need Noah. She didn’t need anyone.
Even in her head, the words rang hollow.
