Her throat closed around something sharp as she remembered what he looked like before Bobby whisked her away. “That sounds like him.”
“He keeps asking about you,” Bobby told her as he picked up a strip of bacon. He chuckled as he shook his head. “Hawk says he does it in harsh whispers, as if the walls have ears and he’s afraid of giving anything away.”
Her hand tightened around her coffee mug. “I should’ve stayed. It’s all my fault he got hurt in the first place.”
Bobby shook his head as he rested his forearms on the edge of the table. “No. You shouldn’t have.”
She glanced over at him. “I’m responsible for him. He’s my partner. Would you have run off on yours?”
“I get it, but you getting grabbed in that hallway or in your room or even in the bathroom where I’m sure you wouldn’t let me follow wouldn’t have helped him, and you know it.”
She swallowed, sliding her fork into her eggs with irritation. “I still feel like I ran out on him.”
He reached for his mug. “You survived. That’s what you did.”
The words landed heavier than he probably intended, but she felt them all the same.
She stared out the window toward the tree line, seeing the woods wrapped in the pale morning fog. Every relocation feltlike this. A reset. A rupture. A reminder that safety was always temporary and always conditional.
Blaze’s name lit up Bobby’s phone just as Delaney opened her mouth to speak. He glanced at the screen, already feeling the shift in the air, then he set it on the table and pressed the speaker button as he stepped away from the table.
“You’re on speaker. What do you got?”
Blaze didn’t waste time with greetings. “We picked up movement just before dawn. Leon cleared Biloxi around five-thirty using a rental SUV, heading east. I lost him outside of Mobile, but not before he bounced signals off three shell nodes. Serrano’s widening the net even more, and it looks like he figured out which direction you actually went, though I don’t believe he knows where you ended up.”
Delaney felt the words settle into her chest like cold stones as she wrapped her arms around herself, staring at the floorboards, her breakfast forgotten.
Bobby closed his eyes briefly, jaw tightening as he absorbed the news. “That’s not what I really wanted to hear. I was hoping we had bought ourselves some more time.”
“Well, we still have several decoys that went east but in various directions,” Blaze said. “So you still might have plenty of time. He’s careful, though. Whoever set this up knows how to stay just ahead of the trail.”
Delaney lifted her eyes then, watching Bobby as he turned toward the window, his posture shifting into something harder, quieter. Protective in a way that didn’t need words. She could almost feel him mapping the trees beyond the glass.
Elvis dragged a hand down his face and stared out the cabin window, eyes tracking the tree line automatically. “Thanks. I need to figure out our next move. Go ahead and send me what you’ve got.”
“Already uploading.”
Bobby ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket. Silence rushed back into the room, heavier than before.
Delaney didn’t speak right away.
Neither did Bobby.
She sat there, listening to the other men out on the porch, each sharing war stories and bragging about scars.
Serrano had determined to keep chasing her, she assumed. She knew that now in her bones.
Her hands trembled, and she wrapped them together in her lap, breathing through the familiar spiral, the one that always came when movement happened too fast and patterns began repeating themselves.
“I hate this part,” she admitted, glancing down at the uneaten portion of her breakfast. “The waiting. The wondering. Serrano believes he still owns pieces of me, that he can use me to get to my mother.”
Bobby sat back down, grabbing his cup once more. He didn’t rush her, letting her talk it out. He never rushed her, even back then.
She pushed back from the table and walked toward the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. “This feels like the beginning again.”
His voice came from behind her, low and steady. “Tell me about it.”
“You’ve already heard all this.”
