Chapter Thirty-One
Hailey
I wake to the sound of static.
The television screen flashes to life, and Marlena’s face appears before I’ve even fully opened my eyes. She looks like she’s
been waiting for this moment, like Christmas morning came early and she’s about to unwrap her favorite gift.
“Merry Christmas Eve.” Her smile is a wound. “Have you made your decision?”
I scramble upright. The guys are already awake—Knox on his feet, Liam sitting on the edge of the couch, his face unreadable
in the gray morning light. We fell asleep scattered across the living room after the fight, after the revelations, after everything.
My back aches from sleeping on the floor. My heart aches from everything else.
Knox steps toward the screen. “You’re early. We have until midnight.”
“You’ve had ten days. I’m impatient.” She adjusts something off-camera, nails clicking. “Besides, I wanted to give you ample
time to say your goodbyes if necessary.”
“Then you’ll have to kill us.” Knox’s voice doesn’t waver. “Because we’re not telling you anything.”
Marlena’s smile widens. There’s something wrong about it. Something that makes my stomach drop.
“How noble. But I don’t think you understand the stakes.”
The cabin door unlocks.
I didn’t even hear anyone approach. No crunch of footsteps, no engine. But the door swings open and two guards step inside—different ones than before, bigger, armed with weapons I don’t recognize. Their faces are covered. Their movements are synchronized.
They go straight for Liam.
He fights. Of course he fights. Liam has never gone down without a struggle in his life, and he’s not about to start now.
He gets an elbow into one guard’s throat, twists away from the other’s grip, nearly makes it to his feet—
A third guard appears in the doorway. He has a gun pressed to my temple before I can even process that he’s moved.
“No!” Knox freezes mid-step, hands going up. His eyes are wild, darting between me and Liam and the barrel against my skull.
“Don’t. Don’t hurt her.”
Liam stops fighting.
The guards drag him backward toward the door. The split on his lip has reopened, blood fresh on his chin. He’s breathing hard,
his eyes locked on mine.
“Let’s try this differently.” Marlena’s voice cuts through the chaos, calm as ever. “Mr. Calloway comes with me. You two have
until midnight tonight. Tell me where the diamond is, or I kill him.” She pauses, letting it land. “Your choice.”
The door slams shut.
The lock engages.
And then it’s just me and Knox, standing in the middle of a cabin that suddenly feels impossibly empty.
The screen goes dark.
“She won’t really kill him.” Knox’s words come out rough, like he doesn’t quite believe them. He’s pacing now, that restless
energy he gets when there’s nothing to hit. “This is pressure. Psychological warfare. She wants us scared.”
“It’s working.”
“Hailey—”
“She’s been hunting us for five years, Knox. Five years of resources and obsession and dead ends. You think she’s bluffing?” I sink onto the couch, suddenly exhausted. “She absolutely will kill him if we don’t give her what she wants.”
“But if we do, she kills all three of us anyway. We know her face. We know her operation. We’re loose ends.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. There’s no scenario where Marlena lets us walk away from this, not really. The moment she has
the diamond, we become liabilities. Problems to be solved.
And yet.
“It could still be part of his plan,” Knox says. He’s stopped pacing, standing by the window now, staring at nothing. “Liam.
He set this up once. Maybe he’s got another angle. Maybe he’s working Marlena from the inside—”
“No.”
The word comes out harder than I intend. Knox turns to look at me.
“I know Liam,” I say. “Better than anyone. He’s a con man and a thief and apparently willing to sell me out to get us both
off Kedrov’s radar, but the look on his face when they grabbed him? That wasn’t part of a plan. That was fear. Real fear.”
Knox doesn’t argue. Maybe because he saw it too.
“So what do we do?” he asks.
“We stick to the plan.”
Knox stares at me. “Liam’s gone, Hailey. She took him. The plan was built for three people.”
“The plan was built around me having information Marlena needs. That hasn’t changed.” I’m already pacing, which is what I
do when my brain is running faster than my mouth. Old habit from job days. Liam used to call it my scheming walk. “She took
Liam to force my hand. Fine. Let her think it worked.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when she comes back on that screen, I break. I give her the location. Every detail, every landmark, every turn in
the trail. I make it so thorough she’ll have no reason to doubt me.” I stop pacing and look at him. “And I leave out the safe
code.”
Knox is quiet for a beat, processing. “She’ll verify the location first. Send a team.”
“Good. That takes time. A day, maybe more. And when her team finds the safe and can’t open it, she needs me again. She needs
me alive, and she needs me cooperative. Which means she needs you and Liam alive too, because she’s smart enough to know I
won’t give her a damn thing if either of you are dead.”
“And then what? She drags us out there to open it?”
“That’s exactly what she does. And that’s when we’re outside this cabin for the first time in ten days.” I let that land.
“We’ve got the fire extinguisher. We’ve got the bleach and ammonia. Knox, we talked about this. Transport is our opening.”
He runs a hand over his face. I can see him turning it over, testing it for holes, doing that tactical calculation he does
where he weighs every variable against every risk.
“She’ll have armed guards.”
“She will.”
“Multiple vehicles, probably. Maybe air transport.”
“Probably.”
“The odds are garbage.”
“The odds have been garbage since day one. But out there we’ve got space to move, weapons she doesn’t know about, and a woman
too busy drooling over a twenty-million-dollar diamond to watch our hands. I’ll take that over sitting in this cabin waiting
to die.”
He’s quiet again. “We need to figure out what we can smuggle out of here without the cameras catching it.”
“See, this is why I keep you around.”
We spend the next hour going through it. Quiet, methodical, backs to the cameras whenever we need to discuss details. The
fire extinguisher is too big to hide, but Knox thinks he can rig a smaller container with the ammonia and bleach that would
fit inside a coat pocket. The steak knives are obvious but effective. We talk about positioning, about how many guards she’s
likely to bring, about what terrain we might be dealing with around the mine.
There are holes. Plenty of them. But standing around cataloging reasons it won’t work hasn’t kept anyone alive, and I didn’t survive five years on the run by waiting for a sure thing.
Knox sits across from me at the table, his lip still swollen from yesterday’s fight with Liam, a bruise darkening along his
jaw. He looks like he’s been through a war.
I probably look worse.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I blink. “For what?”
“For not seeing who you really are.” He shakes his head. “I kept following you around, watching over you, like you couldn’t
handle yourself. But you can. You’ve been handling yourself since long before I came along.”
“Knox—”
“You don’t need a bodyguard, Hailey. You never did. I just couldn’t get out of my own head long enough to realize it.”
“You were both right,” I say eventually. “You and Liam. About each other. He made deals behind my back and got us kidnapped.
You tracked my movements like I was a target instead of a person. You both made choices for me without ever asking what I
wanted.”
Knox tenses, but he doesn’t look away.
“But I also made choices.” I gesture around the cabin, at the mess we’ve made of everything. “I came here. I stayed. I . . .”
I think about the past ten days. The fighting. The fucking. The way we fell into each other like it was inevitable, like gravity
had been pulling us together since the beginning.
“This,” I finish.
“Do you regret it?”
“No.”
The word surprises me with how easily it comes out. But it’s true. Despite everything—the danger, the betrayal, the fact that
we might all die before midnight—I don’t regret any of it. Not Knox. Not Liam. Not the complicated, messy, impossible thing
the three of us have become.
“I don’t regret you,” I say. “Either of you. Even if we all went about it the wrong way.”
Knox crosses the space between us. His hand cups my face, rough and gentle at the same time. He doesn’t kiss me. He just holds
me there, forehead pressed to mine, breathing the same air.
I close my eyes. “I love him too, you know. Liam. Flaws and all.”
“I know.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “So do I.”
His arms come around me, and I let myself be held. Let myself pretend, for a moment, that this is enough. That love is enough
to keep us alive. Thirty seconds. That’s what I give myself. Thirty seconds of this before I go back to being the woman with
the plan.
Outside, the sun moves across the sky.
We don’t let go.
By evening, I’m ready.
I’ve been here before. Not the captivity part, but the hours before a job, when the fear gets put in a drawer and the only
thing left is what comes next. My body knows this rhythm even if the stakes have never been this high.
Marlena is going to come back on that screen. She’s going to threaten Liam’s life. And I’m going to give her exactly what
she wants, minus the one piece she can’t get without me standing in front of that safe.
Knox and I go over it one more time. What we’re bringing. Where we’ll hide it. What signals we’ll use when we can’t talk.
He’s good at this, better than me in some ways. The military trained him to plan for chaos. I was trained to plan for greed.
Between us, we’ve got enough covered to be dangerous and not enough to be comfortable, which is pretty much how every job
I’ve ever pulled has started.
The screen pops back on.
Marlena appears with Liam beside her, his hands bound in front of him. He looks roughed up—there’s dried blood at his hairline,