Chapter 11 #2
Oh, I want to kiss him, but he gets away before I can.
Shoot. Next time.
BECKETT
I should leave him.
The thought arrives fully formed—no preamble, no moral handwringing. Just the clean, cold calculation of a man who has ceiling-crawled, been betrayed, closeted, and chased. And the math is suddenly very simple:
Leave Cole at a junction. Walk away. The thugs find him. They get what they came for. I get to the electronics store, get back to Everly, and we’re done. Problem solved. Everyone gets what they’ve earned.
It’s not a villainous thought. It’s an exhausted one. The thought of a man who’s been running on adrenaline for six hours. The filter is gone. This man destroyed your career, framed you, locked you in a closet, and the people hunting him are not your problem.
The thought isn’t fleeting. It sits. It’s comfortable. It makes perfect, defensible, rational sense. C’mon, you’re with me, right?
Cole walks behind me, his steps loud and clunky.
“Keep it down,” I turn and hiss.
Cole’s eyes meet mine with a cold, withering glare. But his footsteps soften.
I turn back. Keep walking.
The concourse stretches ahead—long shadows, grated storefronts standing like sentinels. The dead-end hall to the electronics store is thirty feet out. A straight shot through the dead zone.
I kill my flashlight and step into the dark.
We navigate on instinct, fingertips trailing the walls.
I’m fifteen feet from the hallway when I hear it.
Footsteps.
Not mine. Not Cole’s. Heavy. Methodical. Echoing out ahead.
I dart toward the nearest doorway, one of the few with real doors, and press my back flat against the icy glass. I reach over, looking for Cole.
Nothing.
I reach again. Wall. Door. Empty air. He’s not here. Across the dead zone—twelve feet of total blackness—I hear breathing. Ragged. Too fast. Coming from the wrong side of the corridor entirely.
That idiot went the other way.
The thug’s footsteps turn the corner.
Through the black, his flashlight sweeps in a systematic arc, low to high.
His arc carries the beam left.
Toward Cole.
I can’t see Cole from here, but I know he’s running out of time. The thug is six feet from the doorway, five, his flashlight pouring through the next window over, lazy, unhurried. In complete contrast to my racing heart.
And in that moment, the thought arrives again:
I don’t have to do anything. The thug’s already looking that direction.
One sound—one—and it’s over. Cole gets found.
I stay flat against this door until they’ve got him and they’re gone, and then I get to Everly and we hide out until morning, walk out of this building, and my name stays clean.
Six months of watching my career burn while this man smiled at press conferences gets balanced out in about thirty seconds.
I don’t even have to choose it. I just have to stop choosing against it.
The thug’s flashlight is getting closer. And I don’t have to see Cole to know what’s going through his head. He’s telling himself to run.
A terrible idea.
My hand finds my jacket pocket. The keychain. The tiny flashlight I carried earlier, before Everly and I raided the hardware store. I wrap my hand around it, pull it out.
I don’t think.
My mind’s already made up, a split-second decision born from years of reading the play.
I throw it.
Down the corridor. Hard. Left-handed, sidearm, low to the ground—the keychain skips off tile with a sharp metallic tick and skitters away into the dark.
It’s a small sound. Tiny, really.
The thug stops.
Turns.
His flashlight swings east—toward the sound, away from Cole—and he takes three steps down the corridor, beam searching the tile. Three more steps.
I don’t wait. I step out of my hiding place, placing my trust in the dark.
Four seconds. Maybe five.
I cross the open concourse, my heartbeat ringing in my ears, and reach into the dark until my hand finds Cole’s sleeve. I yank him out of the doorway, and we’re moving, fast and low, toward the dead-end hall.
We clear the corner.
Press flat against the wall. Both of us. Cole’s shoulder jammed against mine, his breathing ragged and loud, my heart sprinting as if it’s trying to leave my chest.
From the concourse, the thug’s footsteps stop. A beam of light paints the hall where we’d just been.
And then they resume, different direction, moving away, back toward the service corridor.
Gone.
The silence that follows is enormous.
Cole exhales, his body sliding down the wall slightly before he catches himself. I’m right there with him, hands on my knees, drinking in greedy breaths to drown out the adrenaline coursing through me.
I threw it. My chance at…what? Redemption. No. Retribution. Much different, isn’t it?
And the jerk has no idea the choice that just got made.
“Come on,” I say quietly. “Store’s up this way.”
We find the charger in the hardware store, and then I deploy my mental drawing of Everly’s map and head for Basecamp Outfitters, portable charger in hand, without further run-ins.
The gate is frozen at chest height, as expected.
Inside are racks of parkas, walls of hiking boots, and a staged “Minnesota Winter Experience” featuring a Polaris snowmobile that has never touched snow, fake pine trees, and a life-size fiberglass polar bear with glass eyes fixed in permanent mild bewilderment.
I respect the polar bear. We’ve probably had similar experiences.
I keep quiet, listening for any sign of Everly.
Silence.
“Let’s keep going,” Cole says, apparently sensing my apprehension. “If she were caught, we would have heard something.”
I try to take comfort from that. Really, I do.
We work our way to the back corner of the store, and I let out a sigh of relief. A small camp of ice-fishing tents sits around a plastic campfire, a flashlight leans against the flames, bringing them to life, and there, seated cross-legged on a sleeping bag, is Everly.
Her gaze finds me and stops me in my tracks. Those green eyes catch the light—and hold it.
It takes everything I have not to run to her. To play it cool.
“You made it,” I say instead. Very nonchalant. Very chill.
Everly smiles. “So did you.”
Something passes between us. Mutual relief. Maybe even mutual agreement not to let on how worried we were for each other.
Cole crawls into the large tent and into a sleeping bag with the boneless surrender of a man whose body has been running on fumes. His eyes stay open—glassy, fixed on the tent ceiling with a thousand-yard stare.
I hand over the power bank, and Everly pulls out her laptop. A minute passes. And then the screen awakens abruptly, casting a white light over the faux camp.
“We’ve got power,” she says, straightening up.
“Best news I’ve heard all night.” I sit down beside her, watching her work.
Her fingers move across the trackpad. The LTE icon spins. Searching. Reaching for a signal through concrete and steel and blizzard.
I watch the hope. Then the waiting. Then the slow erosion as the icon keeps spinning and the signal doesn’t catch.
A small “x” appears where the signal bars should be. No connection.
She tries again. Moves the laptop closer to the gate. The skylight above sheds just enough gray moonlight to work by. She holds it higher. Tilts the screen. Nothing.
She closes the laptop. The click is quiet—deliberate, controlled. But I see her shoulders drop. Just a fraction. The woman who’s been holding everyone together all night just watched her last plan fail.
She doesn’t say anything, just opens her laptop bag. Puts the laptop inside. Zips it shut.
“It’s almost midnight. Why don’t you get some rest?” I say, snatching up one of the sleeping bags strapped to a backpack and propped decoratively against the tent. I pull it from the straps and hand it over to her. “I’ll keep watch.”
Hesitation paints the lines of her face, but it’s been a long night, and I know the hours are wearing on her.
“It’s all right. I’ll wake Cole up for a shift in a little while.”
“Cole? I’d rather have Grizzly here watching over us.”
“That’s a polar bear.”
She gives me a look. “Wake me up when you get tired.” She picks up the sleeping bag. “And that doesn’t mean tomorrow morning.”
Whatever. But I nod.
Soon, the camp is filled with the sound of sleeping breaths, even and peaceful. I stare into the dark, feeling the weight of the day settle over me. Outside, the wind terrorizes the building, creaking and scraping over the old bones of the mall.
Truthfully, I’m about to nod off when a zipper slices through the quiet and Cole crawls out. Maybe he heard us, I dunno, but the guy hunkers down beside me.
“’Sup?” I say.
“I gotta know why.”
We all do, pal, but I’m game. “Why what?”
“You could have left earlier. Why didn’t you?”
No point in lying. “I thought about it,” I say. “Seemed like a pretty easy way to solve all of my problems.”
“So why didn’t you?”
I turn my head to look at him, the lines on his face deep in the flashlight glow. “Because I know what it’s like to need help, and I know what it’s like to have regrets. And I’m not going to leave a teammate who needs me.”
He frowns, then scrubs his hands over his face—a system rebooting after a crash.