"No. It's an observation."
"Then it doesn't require a response."
"It doesn't. But I'd like one."
She finishes the cigarette. Stubs it out in the cupholder, which I'll be annoyed about later but don't mention now. She rolls up the window. The smoke dissipates. The car fills with clean air and the leather smell of Emilio's jacket and the cheap motel soap she used this morning.
"I had a different name," she says. "Before."
I keep my eyes on the road. My hands on the wheel. I don't move, don't react, don't do anything that might spook her into closing back up.
"I left it behind. Along with everything attached to it."
"Why?"
She turns and looks at me. Directly. No mask, no filter, no ice-queen composure. For three seconds, maybe four, I see the woman under the architecture. Tired. Angry. Scared in a way that goes deeper than mafia hit squads and compromised compounds. Scared in a way that has roots.
"Because staying would have killed me," she says. "And I decided I wanted to live."
She turns back to the road. Pulls her jacket tighter. Tucks her chin down.
The conversation is over. She's given me exactly one piece, and she's locked the rest behind a door I don't have the key to yet.
But I heard it. The fear under those words. The history compacted into a single sentence. Staying would have killed her. Not the job, not the finances, not the inconvenience of a life she'd outgrown. Something with teeth. Something that left marks she's been covering with nice clothes and good posture and a name that belongs to a woman who only exists because the woman before her couldn't survive.
I drive. She watches the road. I don't push.
But my hands are tight on the wheel, and there's a heat in my chest that has nothing to do with the car's shitty heating system and everything to do with the four words she didn't say.
Someone hurt me. Before.
I'm going to find out who.
And when I do, I'm going to handle it the way I handle everything.
Quietly.
And with a brutal vengeance.
Until then, we keep moving because while Leone sorts out shit at the compound, the harder we can make it to track Charlotte’s movements, the better. The last fucking thing we need is someone finding her, grabbing her and flipping our progress on the mole on it’s head.
So, we keep moving. According to Emilio’s texts, Alexandra is getting closer to tracking the security company that set up the internal surveillance and Leo is right on the tail of figuring out who the fuck is pulling the strings.
Hopefully they get it done, before shit hits the fan.
Chapter Six: Charlotte
Sixdays.
Six motels, two stolen cars, one safe house that turned out to be a storage unit with a cot and a space heater that smelled like burning dust. Six days of highway and silence and the slow, grinding proximity of sharing small spaces with a man who takes up too much room in every one of them.
I'm running out of cigarettes, despite the fact he’s bought me two packs. I'm running out of clothes. I'm running out of whatever fuel Charlotte Richardson runs on, the cold, clean reserves of composure I've been rationing since the night Claudio put me in that car and drove me into the dark.
The farmhouse is better than anything we've had so far.
It sits at the end of a dirt road in the mountains, surrounded by pine trees and silence. No neighbors for miles. Pineridge Resort, it’s called. The nearest town is thirty minutes south, a gas station and a general store and a church with a crooked steeple. Claudio says it belongs to someone who owes Carmelo a debt, and the way he says it tells me I don't want to know what kind of debt buys you a house in the mountains that no one asks questions about.
Inside: wood floors, a kitchen with a gas stove, a living room with a fireplace that's been converted to a wood-burning insert. One bedroom. One bathroom. Running water that comes out brown for the first thirty seconds and then clears to something drinkable. The fridge is stocked with the basics, which means someone came here before us and prepared.
