We step onto the road. The asphalt is marginally warmer than the ground, but my feet are numb beyond feeling at this point. I've been running barefoot through winter woods for what feels like hours and is probably fifteen minutes, and the damage to my feet is something I'll deal with later, when later is a thing I'm confident exists.
Behind us, in the direction of the farmhouse, I hear vehicles starting and engines growling. They've found the body and they're mobilizing, widening the search radius.
Mateo takes my hand again. We run east along the county road, staying close to the shoulder where we can dive into the trees if headlights appear.
The stars wheel above us, indifferent, and the cold wind cuts through my clothes like they aren't there, and my feet are bleeding and my lungs are burning and the duffel bag feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.
But I'm alive. I'm alive and the case is on my shoulder and the man running beside me just killed a man to keep me breathing, and somewhere behind us the cartel is learning that Mateo Reyes is no longer their weapon.
He's mine.
The thought arrives without invitation and refuses to leave. It isn't possessive or romantic or anything as simple as those words suggest but something more fundamental, a recognition that whatever he is, whatever terrible things he has done and will answer for, in this moment he has chosen to point himself in my direction, and I have chosen to let him.
The gas station appears ahead, a single fluorescent island in the darkness, closed but with the exterior lights on and a bench against the side of the building, shielded from the road by a dumpster.
"Phone," I say to Mateo. He grabbed it during the escape, the same phone the cartel sent the photo to, the same phone I used to call Jon from the farmhouse.
He hands it over. There's one bar of signal, but it's enough.
I dial Jon's direct line. My fingers are so numb I can barely feel the screen.
He answers on the first ring.
"It's Sofia." My voice comes out ragged, shredded by cold and exertion. "I need extraction. I'm at a gas station on County Road 42, about two miles east of..." I look at Mateo.
"Brewster," he says.
"Two miles east of Brewster. Putnam County. There are armed cartel operatives in the area pursuing us. I have a cooperating witness and a full evidentiary package for the Vega cartel."
Jon doesn't waste time on questions. I hear him shift into operational mode, the clipped efficiency of a man who has donethis before. He barks orders to someone in the background. A vehicle is being dispatched.
"Forty minutes," he says. "Stay out of sight. Sofia, who's the cooperating witness?"
I look at Mateo. He's standing at the edge of the fluorescent light with the gun at his side and his eyes on the road, watching for headlights, watching for the men who want to kill us. His face is sharp-planed in the harsh light, all shadows and angles, and the scar along his jaw catches the fluorescence like a mark on a map.
"His name is Mateo Reyes," I say. "And he's going to need a very good lawyer."
I hang up and hand the phone back. Mateo looks at me.
"Forty minutes," I say.
He nods, takes off his jacket, and wraps it around my shoulders. It's warm from his body heat and it smells like him, like coffee and cold air and the woods we just ran through.
"Your feet," he says, looking down.
I look down too. In the fluorescent light, I can see the damage: cuts from branches and rocks, raw patches from the ground, blood that has smeared across the asphalt. I can't feel any of it.
"I'll deal with it later."
"You'll deal with it now." He picks me up, one arm under my knees and one behind my back, and carries me to the side of the building where there's a bench and a windbreak. He sets me down and kneels in front of me and examines my feet with the focused attention of a man who knows wounds intimately.
"You need a hospital," he says.
"I need forty minutes and an FBI extraction team. The hospital can wait."
He looks up at me from his knees. In this position, with the fluorescent light behind me and the darkness around us and hishands cradling my damaged feet, the tableau is so absurd, so impossibly wrong and impossibly right, that I almost laugh.
"Thank you," I say. "For getting me out."
