3. No Good Option
No Good Option
IRIS
The door slams shut, sealing me inside a cage of leather and gun oil.
Before I can reach for the seatbelt, the truck lurches. Acceleration slams me back against the seat as the engine roars, a guttural, angry sound vibrating through the floorboards and up my spine.
A rough voice cuts through the chaos.
“Hold on.”
The command leaves no room for negotiation.
The stranger spins the wheel, his movements violent yet precise, a surgeon cutting through scar tissue.
The truck squeals, tires fighting for purchase on the smooth concrete of the garage exit before they bite deep.
We shoot forward, launching out of the shadows into the blinding glare of the streetlights.
I gasp, bracing my hands against the dashboard, fingers curling into the vinyl. My pulse slams a frantic, syncopated rhythm against my ribs, trying to escape the cage of bone. Outside, the world dissolves into a smear of neon and rain, moving too fast to track.
My throat burns as I try to shout over the mechanical roar.
“Where are we going?”
Silence meets the question.
He ignores me, his profile hewn from granite, lit by the strobing flicker of passing lights. Jaw locked, gaze narrowed, he’s pure focus, a machine running at maximum efficiency. He doesn’t look like a rescuer. He looks like a kidnapper with a badge.
I drag my gaze from his face to his hands. Scarred, steady, built for control. One locks the wheel; the other trembles against his thigh, contained violence inches from the gun in the center console.
Minutes ago, those hands held me down.
My pulse stutters. Not just fear. Something darker, sharper. A heat I don’t have time to examine. I brush the bruise rising on my upper arm where his grip caught me, and the pressure echoes through me, settling me in a way that makes no sense and too much sense at once.
The thought slips in uninvited, unwelcome, and impossible to dislodge.
Men like that are rare.
The ones who play at dominance, who talk about control like a costume they can put on and take off for a night. I’ve tested those edges in safe rooms with safe words. None of them ever sparked this instant, feral awareness born from a single uncompromising moment.
I force myself back into my body. Back into now.
The shattered glass in my hair is real.
The gunshot was real.
And so is the spark he lit that refuses to burn out.
I reach up and pull a shard of safety glass from my bangs. It glitters in the dashboard light, a tiny diamond of destruction, before I drop it. It tinks against the floor mat, a small sound made deafening in the cab.
“Who were they?”
My voice shakes less this time, anger burning through the icy shock.
We hit the highway on-ramp. He merges across three lanes with a recklessness that should terrify me, cutting off a semi that blasts its horn in protest. But the truck stays stable, anchored to the road by his will alone.
“People who erase mistakes, and right now, doctor, you are the mistake.”
The words come low and rough, gravel scraping my exposed nerves.
“I didn’t do anything.”
The protest sounds childish even to my own ears.
“You saw something you weren’t supposed to see. In their world, that’s a capital offense. Innocence is just a liability.”
He glances at the rearview to check for a tail, his gaze sliding to me for a fraction of a second. Dark and intense, he strips me bare, assessing damage, assessing value. Like I’m a piece of equipment that might be malfunctioning.
“You’re hyperventilating. Stop it. You’re going to pass out, and I can’t carry you and shoot at the same time.”
“I am not hyperventilating.”
I snap the words out. But I am. The edges of my vision whiten with static, my fingertips tingling with paresthesia, classic signs of hypocapnia.
“I’m having a rational physiological response to nearly being adjudicated by a death squad.”
“Breathe, Iris.”
My name on his lips hits harder than the g-force of the turn.
It sounds intimate. Possessive. When Mercer used it in the trauma bay, the sound slid over my skin like slime. Coming from this man, wrapped in that gravel-dark baritone, the syllables land like an anchor dropped through deep water.
I force a breath, pulling the scent of the cab into my lungs.
Sensory input to ground the rising terror.
It smells of him. Not just leather seats and CLP gun oil, but him.
A deep musk of male, sweat, and adrenaline.
Earthy and raw, the smell of scorched pine and char. Destruction and warmth at once.
The scent floods my lungs, displacing the sterile antiseptic of the hospital that clings to my clothes like a second skin. It’s intoxicating, a visceral overload that shorts out the panic loop in my brain.
I look at him again. Really look.
This man is a walking weapon in a leather jacket. Violence is his first language. He solves problems with bullets and bruises where I would use triage and compassion. He’s the antithesis of the safe, ordered world I live in.
I date oncologists who worry about their 401(k)s.
Men who wear cardigans and drive Volvos with five-star safety ratings to the farmers’ market.
Men who ask permission to hold my hand and unpack their feelings over ethically sourced coffee.
Safe men.
Thoughtful men.
Men who talk about control like an idea to be discussed in therapy.
I’ve always known what I want. I’ve never been confused about that. I’ve explored it, named it, tested the edges in rooms where everything is negotiated and nothing is real.
Pretend control.
Borrowed authority.
This man didn’t ask permission.
The tackle. The shove. The bruising grip. He commandeered my existence in three seconds flat. Pure instinct. Necessity. Truth.
And God help me, watching the corded sinew of his forearm flex as he shifts gears, something in me sparks, bright and electric and unmistakable, in recognition.
My body remembers the weight of him in the garage.
The crushing, undeniable reality of his chest against mine.
That heat didn’t just shield me. It answered something I’ve carried quietly for years.
It reached into the dark honest corner of my brain, the part that doesn’t want softness, discussion, or permission, and lit a firestorm.
I’ve always known this desire lived in me.
I just never believed I’d meet a man who wouldn’t have to pretend.
He eases off the gas, the truck settling into a steady seventy-five.
“We’re clear. They aren’t following. Not yet.”
“Who are you? You’re not the police. Police have protocols. You have efficiency.”
“Not police. US Marshal.”
A muscle works along his jaw.
“Technically. Name’s Vance. Boyd Vance.”
“Technically?”
“I’m on leave.”
“So you just happened to be in the parking garage. Lurking in the shadows like Batman.”
“I was waiting for you.”
The words hang in the air, heavy with implication. Waiting for you.
“Why?”
“Because my boss called me. He said you were a bleeding heart about to get yourself killed.” He runs another mirror check, and this time something else flickers in his gaze. Heat. A challenge. “He wasn’t wrong. You froze.”
“I was going to the police.” I cross my arms to hold myself together.
“The police would have put you in a holding cell, and you’d have hanged yourself with your own shoelaces before morning. That’s how Mercer works. He doesn’t leave loose ends. He ties them off.”
Mercer. The name lands heavy in the cab. The silver-haired man with the glacier eyes.
I turn to the window. The city lights fade behind us, a glowing dome of civilization receding in the side mirror. Ahead, the dark of the pines swallows the highway. We’re heading west, into the mountains. The darkness out there runs absolute.
“So where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“And then what?”
“And then we wait.”
“For what?”
“For you to testify. Or for them to try again.”
He reaches into his jacket. I flinch, instinct overriding logic, expecting a weapon.
He pulls out a secure sat-phone and tosses it onto the seat between us. It lands on the leather with a thud.
“Call your mother. Tell her you’re taking a double shift. Tell her your phone died. Do not say you’re with me. Do not say you’re in danger. You have thirty seconds.”
The request disorients me.
“My mother.”
“Hutchinson said you call her every night at ten. It’s ten fifteen. If you don’t call, she worries. She calls the hospital. The hospital tells her you left. She calls the cops. The cops put out a BOLO. Mercer finds us.”
No emotion in it. No judgment. Just facts, lined up end to end like dominoes he’s already tipped.
He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t need to.
He knows my schedule.
My habits.
The carefully constructed rhythm of a life built on predictability and control.
“You stalked me.”
The words come out flat. Observational. Not an accusation.
He keeps his gaze on the road.
“I did recon. Dial.”
One word. Absolute.
I don’t argue. I don’t bristle. I don’t push back the way I normally would when a man assumes authority over me outside of very specific, negotiated spaces.
I’m already moving.
The phone feels heavier than it should, solid and utilitarian, issued equipment rather than anything personal.
Only after do my hands stop shaking.
His presence fills the cab. Controlled. Certain. The kind of certainty that doesn’t demand obedience.
It simply expects it.
My body recognizes the difference before my mind does.
The leather of the steering wheel creaks under his grip.
He knows. He senses the look. The attraction. The pull. The rightness of it spirals between us like smoke in a burning building.
His voice drops an octave, vibrating in the small space.
“Make the call, Doc. Then put the phone away. We have a long drive.”
As the line rings, I study his profile in the dashboard glow.
The scar on his neck catches the light, a jagged white line running into his collar, a map of past violence.
An insane, irrational urge rises in me to touch it.
To learn whether the skin is smooth or rough.
To feel whether the pulse beneath it runs as steady as his hands.
I look at the dark road ahead. I look at the man beside me, the lone wolf who just saved me from a pack of killers only to carry me into his own den.
“Hello. Mom.”
My voice sounds like a stranger’s, hollow and thin.
I lie to her. I tell her I’m safe. I tell her I’m just working late.
And staring at the weapon on the seat, at the man driving us deeper into the dark, the truth lands hard. For the first time tonight, it isn’t entirely a lie.
I am working.
I’m working on staying alive, and he’s the only one qualified to make it happen.