Page 9

"The car won't start. Just died, no warning." I gesture at the open hood, still useless. "I don't know what's wrong with it."

He crosses to the engine and doesn't take long to find it, crouching by something near the base that I couldn't have identified if my life depended on it, which, I'm starting to realize, it might have. "Someone cut the connection here," he says, voice low. "Deliberately. This isn't a mechanical failure."

The fear I've been holding back since the dashboard wouldn't light up finally breaks loose. "Someone was here. At the overlook. While I was sitting right there."

"Looks that way." He straightens, and whatever tension existed between us last night seems to fall away entirely, replaced by something focused and immediate. "We're not staying to find out if they're still close. Truck's parked down the road, engine won't turn over here either, best guess. We walk."

We move fast through the darkening woods, Kellan setting a pace just shy of a jog, checking behind us more than once without saying why. I don't ask. I already know why, and saying it out loud feels like it might make it more real than I can handle right now.

About a mile in, my foot catches a root I don't see in the fading light, and I go down hard enough to scrape my palm raw against a rock. Kellan's there before I can even process the fall, hand under my elbow, checking me over with quick, efficient hands that somehow don't feel clinical at all.

"I'm fine," I say, though my voice shakes more than I want it to. "Just clumsy."

"You're not clumsy. You're exhausted and scared, and both of those things make people trip." He doesn't let go of my arm right away. "We can slow down."

"No. I want to keep moving."

He nods, understanding without needing more explanation, and we keep walking, though he stays close enough now that our shoulders brush every few steps. I don't mind it. I think I might actually need it.

"Can I tell you something," I say eventually, when the silence starts feeling too big to hold by myself. "About the attack. The real version, not the one that made it into the press."

"You don't have to."

"I know. I want to." I focus on the path instead of his face, easier to say this way. "The official story is that a fan got backstage and security handled it fast. That's technically true. What it leaves out is that he had almost four minutes alone with me before anyone came. Four minutes where he had my wrist twisted behind my back and kept telling me I belonged to him, that the songs were messages meant only for him, that I'd finally understand once we were alone."

"I've done interviews since. Talked about resilience, about healing, all the things my team wanted me to say. But I never told anyone that I still hear his voice sometimes. That I check locks four and five times before I can sleep. That I stopped trusting bodyguards because the one standing closest to that door didn't notice anything wrong until I was already screaming." My voice catches, and I let it, too tired to keep performing composure I don't actually feel. "I came here because I didn't know how else to feel safe again."

He stops walking, turning to face me fully in the near-dark, and his expression has gone entirely still and serious. "Nobody touches you again while you're with me," he says, quiet but absolute, no room for doubt in it. "I mean that."

"You can't promise that. Nobody can."

"I can promise I won't let it happen without everything I have standing between you and whoever tries." He says it simply, like it's not even a question, like the certainty of it is just fact. "That's not nothing."

Something in my chest loosens at the conviction in his voice, a feeling I haven't let myself trust in quite a while. "Why do you care this much?" I ask. "You barely know me."

"I know enough." He starts walking again, though slower now, closer. "I know you didn't fall apart back there. You catalogued what you knew and started planning instead of panicking. I know you've spent a week doing everything I've taught you without complaint, even when your hands were bleeding blisters by the second day. And I know that whatever's happening between us, whatever I keep trying to talk myself out of, isn't going away just because I step back a few feet on a hillside."

We walk the rest of the way like that, hand in hand through the dark, and by the time the cabin's lights come into view I've stopped being afraid of the woods around us. I'm more afraid of what I'm starting to feel for the man walking beside me, and how much it's going to hurt if he decides to step back again.

But for tonight, at least, he doesn't let go.

8

KELLAN

The cut wire on Zoey's SUV sends me back out at first light, working a wider grid than I've bothered with before, and by midmorning I've found three more cameras I missed the first two sweeps. All professional grade. All positioned with a kind of precision that tells me whoever set them up studied the terrain before ever setting foot on it.

I photograph each one and mark the locations on the topo map I keep in the truck, and the pattern that emerges makes my stomach turn. These aren't casual placements. They form a net, angled to catch every route in and out of the cabin, every trail Zoey's likely to use, every window with a clear line of sight. Someone spent real time and real money building this.

A lone obsessed fan doesn't have this kind of budget. Doesn't have this kind of patience, either. Whoever's behind this has resources, and resources this deliberate don't usually belong to someone acting alone.

I bring the map to Yvonne that afternoon, laying it out on her kitchen table while she studies the marked positions with an expression that gets grimmer by the second.

"This isn't someone hoping to get a picture of a pop star," she says finally. "This is surveillance. Real surveillance."

"That's what I think too."

"Then she can't stay in that cabin without someone there full time." Yvonne looks up at me, and there's no room for argument in her tone. "You should move in. The guest room's small, but it'll do, and it puts you close enough to actually do something if this escalates."