“We need to keep moving,” she said. “Dom’s working on a plan.”
He nodded.
“I’m not going to be able to go home now, am I?” His voice was quiet. He already knew the answer.
“Not until we know how deep this goes,” she said. “They found us once. And your family has already been targeted. The safest thing for us to do is to keep moving.”
“I was afraid of that. They’ll be worried.”
“Dom will get word to them,” she said. “Something vague. Enough to keep them from filing a missing person’s report. But not enough to make them targets.”
She’d expected him to fall apart. That was the typical civilian response in a crisis. The spiral of denial and fear and desperate scrambling for control. He was scared, she could see it in the tension in his shoulders. But he wasn’t breaking.
“We should go,” she said again. “Put more distance between us and the ambush location before dark. Good job cleaning up the bandages and blood. Best not to leave any evidence behind.”
He nodded and stood, following her back to the SUV without another word. They got inside and she pulled out of the trailhead and back onto the forest road, heading deeper into the mountains.
Chapter
Nine
Reed grippedthe grab handle above the door as Siren drove down the bumpy road deep in the mountains. As the sun faded toward the west, she parked at the dead end of what looked like it had once been a logging staging area, surrounded by dense forest.
“We’ll camp here tonight,” she said.
Reed nodded. He’d been quiet since patching up her wounds, still processing everything that had happened since he’d walked into Steel Protection that morning. The ambush. The bodies. His bear bursting out of him without permission. Her calm competence through all of it.
Siren got out and walked the perimeter, checking for something he didn’t understand. He climbed out, shoving his hands in his pockets and waited by the cargo hatch.
She returned and hit the lock on the key fob, before opening it up. She explained the camping equipment she had. He pulled it out while she scouted a flat area to set up the tent.
It was the type of small two-person backpacking shelter he’d used many times before. And she left him to set it up while she set up the rest of the camp.
She opened a small camping stove and placed it on a metal stand, explaining she didn’t want to start a fire. Even out here, she didn’t want to draw any attention to their location.
Once he’d finished setting up the tent, he laid down sleeping pads and sleeping bags while she started a pot of boiling water on the stove.
She’d unfolded two small camping chairs and had unpacked a variety of packaged camping foods. The final shreds of daylight were sinking behind the mountain as she filled two cup of noodles with boiling water from the kettle.
The only light was from a small LED lamp and the butane flame from the stove. He watched her as he ate his noodles, crickets humming in the trees.
“Have you ever lost control of your shift like that before,” she asked.
“It only happens when I’m really scared,” he said, dipping his fork into his cup of noodles.
She handed him a protein bar and a packet of dried fruit, then leaned back in her chair, gazing up at the night sky.
“When did it start,” she asked, her voice low.
“The first time I remembered was when I was about thirteen. There were these boys from school. They used to bully the younger kids. That always really bothered me. You know? I hated to see people acting like that.”
He drank the last of the broth in his cup and then opened the protein bar. Siren was slowly eating the fruit from her packet, watching him with those penetrating blue eyes.
“There was this one day after school. I was walking by the park on the way to Fate Mountain Diner to meet up with one of my dad’s old friends. Shane Keenan owns the place, and I used to hang out there after school some days.” He took a bite of the protein bar, thinking of Shane’s history with his own bear.
“I saw these boys picking on this fourth grader. We were in seventh grade, and I couldn’t understand why they’d do that.”
Her eyes never left him.
