"Check your phone."
I held his gaze one more beat. Then I reached back—carefully, slowly, keeping my other hand where instinct coulduse it—and pulled the phone from my pocket. The screen lit. One new message from a number I'd never seen, arriving on a line that a very small number of people on this planet were supposed to know existed.
An address. Charleston, South Carolina.
"What is this?"
"An invitation." He said it the way you'd offer a seat at a table. No pressure. No sales pitch. "A tryout. To see if you're ready for the next chapter."
I looked at the address. Looked at him. The scar on his forearm was serious—old, deep, earned by something with claws or teeth, not shrapnel. He wore it the way certain men wear the things they've survived. Without explanation. Without apology.
"I'm not interested in being some kind of Blackwater contractor."
He pushed off the truck. Rose to his full height, which was considerable, and I realized he'd been making himself smaller on purpose. Making the approach easier. The kind of social calibration that came from real training—the kind that teaches you how to read people before it teaches you how to break them.
"Name's Ethan," he said. "Same line of work as you. Different house. Better mission." A pause. "You've got a month with nothing to do. Why not make use of it?"
That should have pissed me off. Any other night, it might have. But he delivered it without swagger, without the smugness of a man trying to impress. He said it the way one professional acknowledges another—we did our homework, and you'd have done the same.
"Come to Charleston," he said. "Private plane's waiting. No strings. Just come see what we're building."
I had a dozen questions stacked up like rounds in a magazine. How he knew about my leave. How he'd gotten the number to a phone that was supposed to be buried so deep evenghosts couldn't find it. How he'd tracked me to a bar I hadn't planned on visiting, in a town I hadn't planned on being in, on a trip I'd booked six hours ago on a whim.
But before I could chamber a single one, he turned and walked toward a black SUV at the far edge of the lot. No hurry. No pitch. The quiet certainty of a man who'd said what he came to say and trusted the message to work.
Over his shoulder, half-caught by the wind:
"Hope to see you in Charleston."
Then he was gone. Taillights on the county road, swallowed by dark and distance.
I stood there for a full minute. Maybe longer. The cut on my head had stopped bleeding. The stars were still huge. Cigarette smoke drifted out through the bar's screen door, thin and blue in the light.
I looked at my phone. The address glowed against the dark screen.
Charleston. A city I'd never been to. People I didn't know. Reasons nobody had explained.
Or I could drive east. Twenty-eight miles to the ranch. Stand at the fence. Study the same roofline, the same red barn, the same paddock where I'd first learned to ride things that wanted me gone. Feel whatever that was going to make me feel, and then drive away again—because that's what I'd been doing for twelve years. Circling the thing I couldn't land on. Orbiting a life I'd left behind.
One place held secrets.
The other held ghosts.
Tonight, I'd rather face the secrets.
I climbed into the truck, dropped the phone on the dash, and pulled out of the lot heading not east—not toward the ranch—but toward the small county airstrip where a plane was apparently waiting for a man it had no business knowing about.
The highway opened up ahead of me. Flat. Dark. Empty. The kind of Texas road that doesn't care where you've been and doesn't ask where you're going.
I drove.
3
LOUISA
Ipacked like I wasn't coming back.
Not dramatically. I didn't pull every dress from the closet or stand in the center of my bedroom weighing what mattered. I just—packed efficiently, the way I did everything, and somehow ended up with two full suitcases and a shoulder bag.
