She grabbed her phone and sent him a text he wouldn’t get until he returned.
4592.
“I love you too,” she whispered, and her heart wobbled. Her stomach did too, and not only with fear.
That tracker felt like a rock inside her stomach even though it was tiny.
The sleepy little town announced itself slowly. The highway bled into two lanes with the trees closing in on either side until the sky was just a strip of deep gray above her.
The address took her off the main road onto a gravel track that wound through old, unpruned trees. The house sat at the end of it like it had always been there and always would be—twostories of white clapboard gone gray with age and a porch that sagged on one side.
A family home. It looked like somebody’s grandmother’s house.
Itwasa grandmother’s house—Cipher’s.
She sat in the car for a moment with the engine off and just stared at the place.
Somewhere out there, Angelo was being brave. She could be brave too.
She got out of the car.
The gravel was loud under her feet. She moved to the porch and tested the first step. It was solid enough.
She stopped with her hand on the doorframe. The door was at an odd angle, hanging off one hinge.
It might just be age and weather. But her senses whispered this was a trap.
Not an oversight but an invitation.
She stood there for a full ten seconds and let herself feel how wrong this decision was. Let the part of her brain that was not running on adrenaline and desperation have its say.Turn around. Get in the car. Wait for the team.
She thought about Angelo walking into danger every single day because someone had to.
She thought about Cipher escalating, the money moving, the clock ticking, and the team heading in the wrong direction.
She thought about her brother, who might be inside this house right now.
She went in.
She pushed the door open and stood there, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The house smelled like dust and a place shut against the world for a long time.
She tiptoed through each room, finding nothing of interest. When she stepped into the hallway, she felt it before she heard it—the displacement of air behind her.
The half-second warning her body gave her that she was not alone.
She started to turn, but a cloth came down over her nose and mouth.
Terror slammed into her heart along with a massive flood of adrenaline in her veins.
She grabbed at the arm behind her head, fingers clawing and her feet kicking. She held her breath for three seconds…four seconds—oh, why did she have to count everything?—her vision already closing in at the edges into a tunnel that she refused to travel down.
Her body made the decision her mind refused to.
She couldn’t hold her breath forever.
She gulped for air and the tunnel snapped into blackness.
The first thing she noticed when she came to was that her neck hurt. Her head was bent forward at a sharp angle. When she lifted it, the tendons in her neck wrenched.
