Chapter 6 #4
“What happens when we reach the plane?” Lawson asked.
Callum parted a screen of brush and waited for Lawson to come through before answering. “We disappear.”
Lawson snorted faintly. “That’s not an answer. That’s branding.”
“In New Hampshire there’s a place,” Callum said. “Remote. Off the main roads. We get there first. We keep our heads down. We let the SEC chew through your father’s empire while everyone else decides whether chasing us is still worth the trouble.”
“And Andrew?”
“By noon he’ll have federal attention all over the villa if Benny’s freeze does what it should.” Callum stepped over a drainage ditch and reached back without thinking. Lawson took his forearm and crossed after him. “Men like your father believe money can solve timing. Today it buys him nothing.”
“And the man in the suit?”
Callum knew at once whom Lawson meant. The emissary with the blank face and contract-killer patience Andrew kept in reserve for problems that required a body rather than a signature.
“He’ll still be dangerous,” Callum said. “But men like that don’t work for loyalty. They work for terms. If the terms crack, they recalculate.”
Lawson was quiet for a few steps. Then, very low, “And what about you?”
Callum looked ahead at the emerging line of the hangar roof. “I already did.”
Lawson said nothing after that, but his hand tightened once at Callum’s belt before loosening again.
A gull screamed overhead. Somewhere out past the reeds a boat engine carried over the water, thin and far off. Callum catalogued both sounds, dismissed them, kept scanning.
His training did not disappear because he had chosen a side. If anything, it sharpened. He counted possible approach routes. Noted a security light still burning near the far fence. Measured the distance between a stack of old fuel drums and the nearest personnel door.
A broken camera arm hung near the corner of the hangar, angled uselessly at the ground. Lucas, perhaps. Or weather and neglect. He would take the gift without asking.
The apron came into view in sections. First cracked concrete under brush. Then a clear expanse slick with last night’s rain. Then the hangar itself, a long corrugated shell with flaking paint and broad sliding doors shut against the morning. No movement outside. No truck. No visible guard.
That meant nothing.
Callum raised a hand and stopped them both at the edge of the scrub. Lawson nearly walked into him, then checked himself and stayed close at his back.
“Listen,” Callum murmured.
They stood in wet grass and listened.
Wind moved across the open concrete. Water tapped somewhere in a gutter. Farther off, from inside the hangar or beyond it, came a metallic knock followed by silence.
Lawson leaned in enough that Callum felt the brush of his breath at his collar. “That seems bad.”
“It’s not good.”
“Useful distinction.”
Callum looked down at the hand still fixed to the back of his belt. “You can stay here while I clear the door.”
Lawson made a disgusted sound. “No.”
Callum almost smiled. “All right.”
That, more than anything else this morning, marked the change. Not the bag. Not the papers. Not even Lawson in his arms by the creek. This. The simple refusal to be left behind while danger stood ahead on open ground.
Callum had spent months arranging himself between Lawson and every threat in the world, and now Lawson was telling him, in the blunt language he trusted most, that partnership meant shared risk too.
They moved.
The last yards out of the marsh clung hardest, as if the earth resented being left.
Mud peeled from their boots in thick strips when they hit concrete.
Callum felt the shift through his whole body.
Marsh softness gone. Surface hard, exposed, unforgiving.
Every footstep now could carry. Every angle could reveal them.
He should have felt cleaner on the concrete.
He felt the opposite.
In the mud, the lie had died. The cultivated polish, the expensive control, the fantasy that he could keep emotion separate from assignment. The marsh had taken it all and left him with cold skin, filthy hands, and a man at his side who knew too much and had stayed anyway.
He glanced down and saw Lawson watching him.
Not his weapon hand. Not the nearest door. Him.
Callum thought of the unsigned line. The bag now slung across Lawson’s shoulder. The future reduced to miles, cash, fake names, and whatever courage they could keep lit long enough to cross a state line. He had built his life around exits. Solo ones. Clean ones. Temporary ones.
This was different.
Lawson slid his hand from Callum’s belt to his palm. Their fingers closed together without discussion, muddy and cold and sure.
The contact nearly staggered him more than the marsh had.
He did not look away from the hangar. He did not loosen his grip either.
The fixer was gone. In his place stood a man on wet concrete at dawn with ruin behind him and one clear choice ahead. For the first time in longer than he could name, the choice did not feel like loss alone.
They crossed the apron together.