Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE MOMENT SHE DECIDED to resurface as Julia Moretti once more, she could feel the shift in the air inside the cabin.
No one else noticed it, of course, at least not that she could tell, but she felt it.
Deep inside something shifted, almost as if for the first time since she left Tupelo fifteen years ago.
They had erased her overnight, deleting school records and any mention of her earlier achievements.
Blending into the background, she had turned invisibility into a craft, perfecting it until she could build a successful business with no one knowing it was actually her behind the scenes pulling all the strings.
Now she was about to undo everything they had crammed into her to teach her to survive.
Corey Masterson, the one Bobby kept calling Blaze, sat across from her at the dining table, three laptops open and cables snaking across the wood surface like veins.
He worked the keyboard with quiet confidence, building a new digital skeleton of Julia Moretti’s return, one that looked as if she had never disappeared, merely hid for a while.
“You understand,” the younger man said without looking up, “once I put this out there, there’s no reining it back in like it never happened. We can’t undo this.”
“That’s the point,” she told him.
Bobby stood near the window, watching the tree line. He hadn’t said a word since she told him she was ready to do this. Hadn’t even tried to talk her out of it, which she thought for sure he would do.
She appreciated that, because if he had, she probably wouldn’t have gone through with it, and she knew she needed to do this to end it.
Blaze rotated a computer screen toward her. “This will look like a consulting bid request tied to a shell entity in Savannah. We’ve set you up as if you’ve been using another name as the front of the company, keeping your real name off all forms. But this will look too big to keep it that way.”
She inhaled, placing her arms over her chest. “And this won’t touch Obsidian?”
He shook his head. “Won’t even come close.
I made it look like Delaney Rhodes and Julia Moretti are two different people with completely different backgrounds, showing that your family moved to Savannah when you were sixteen.
” He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms out at his sides before clasping his hands together and placing them behind his head.
“I made a light trail from Tupelo to Savannah, making it look like you had slipped up here and there but not blatantly. It won’t look like it suddenly appeared, but more like it was overlooked. ”
She nodded as she looked across the room to Bobby. “Let’s do it,” she said, determination in each word.
Blaze pressed the key with a quick nod.
She wasn’t sure what she expected. Some sort of dramatic flash, a drum riff, some ominous musical score to accent the moment as the lights flashed on and off. But none of that happened. It was just a line of code disappearing into the World Wide Web.
And hopefully, if it worked, Matteo would notice, ready to track her down.
She blew out a breath as she stood straighter, her hands to her lower back as she stretched a little. “Well, I guess we need to get to Savannah if this is going to work.”
Bobby nodded, his face unreadable. He pushed himself off the wall and headed to the room. “I’ll get us loaded up.”
Blaze glanced over to Abe. “Looks like you get your solitude back.”
“Well, this was uneventful,” the other man said with a chuckle, and then he glanced at Delaney. “For which I’m glad. You got good people around you. They’ll have your back. No worries there.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing. Instead, she headed to the bedroom to pack what little she had so they could get going. Marshal Ashland was doing the same thing in the front room, along with Blaze.
Thirty minutes later, they were out on the front porch, saying goodbye to Abe and loading the SUVs.
Blaze was going with them, so Deke would ride with him, leaving her alone with Bobby for the three-hour drive to Savannah.
That was a lot of time to fill, but then again, they still had a lot to talk out.
She just wasn’t sure she was up for it right then.
Deke stepped up to her, his hands on his hips, his posture rigid. “You understand what this means, right? If you follow through with this, you’re leaving the protection of the marshals.”
She adjusted her purse strap. “I know. But if I want to end this and get my real life back, I have to do this..”
The marshal exhaled through his nose as Bobby eased closer to her.
“You sure about all this?” Abe asked Bobby as they stood on the front porch.
Bobby clasped the man’s hand, giving it a firm shake. “We’ve got it. Thanks for letting us crash your party.”
They stepped off the porch and moved to the SUV, Abe following her as Elvis moved to the driver’s side of the vehicle. Abe wished them safe travels as he closed Delaney’s door for her and stood off to the side, watching as they departed.
“I like him,” she said, staring into the vehicle’s side mirror as they pulled away.
Bobby glanced in the rearview mirror, making a slow bob of his head. “Abe’s good people. His entire team is. I’ve met a few of them, and I’d have any of them at my back in a fight.”
As they slipped into traffic on I-10, Delaney’s phone rang.
A quick glance made her stomach churn. “Well, this can’t be good.” She held the phone so that Bobby could see the screen. “Director Boudreaux. Why would he be calling me?”
Bobby gave a soft laugh. “Answer it and let’s find out. Put it on speaker.”
She gave a curt nod and then swiped her phone. “Director Boudreaux, how can I help you?”
“Dane Garrison called about that Leon fellow,” the man’s voice carried through the speaker. “Thought you’d want to know that when he left, he wasn’t alone.”
“Any idea who was with him?” Bobby asked, and she saw him tighten his grip on the steering wheel.
“As it turns out, yeah,” the director said. “We have facial rec software on our casino cameras so people we’ve banned can’t sneak back in. It flagged the guys with your Leon fella as two of Matteo Serrano’s scouts.”
She felt her brow pinch. “They thought I was still at the hotel? After that big show we made of me leaving?”
“We didn’t make a big show,” Bobby said as he shot her a quick glance. “We sneaked you out the back and changed vehicles to keep anyone from knowing you went anywhere or from following you. Seems we got lucky and fooled the man.”
“Well, he’s not fooled anymore,” the man said into the phone. “They just left, and it looked like they were in a hurry.”
She glanced over at Bobby, but he held his hand up for her not to ask what she was about to ask. He pointed to the phone and then made a slicing motion with his hand.
End the call. She nodded, turning back to the phone in her hand.
“Look, Director Boudreaux, once again I’m sorry about what happened this weekend,” she said. “I’ll send what we found in a report as soon as I get back to Obsidian, but I think you already know where you need to tighten up your security.”
“You keep your report. And stay out of my casino.”
And then the call ended.
“Well, he won’t be hiring us again,” she said with a sigh as she set the phone in the center console. She turned to Bobby, placing her back against the door. “You think what Blaze did caused them to leave the casino?”
He nodded. “It’s quick, but then again, they’d have people monitoring your names now, I’m sure. Stands to reason they’re on their way to Savannah as well.”
Bobby’s phone pinged, and she watched as he glanced at it before dropping it back into his lap.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
He smiled over at her. “Just Dane checking in. Blaze filled him in on the plan.”
“What does he think?”
“Dane?” Bobby shrugged, focusing back on the road ahead. “He thinks you’ve got guts. He’s not one to tell people they shouldn’t do what they feel they need to do.”
“And what do you think?” He had said he supported her, but that differed from agreeing with her.
He glanced over at her, his expression softening. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“That’s not an answer. Do you think I’m being reckless… stupid?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. You have a solid plan and the right people behind you to make it work. Looks to me like you’ve got everything in place.”
“That still doesn’t answer the question.”
He glanced over at her again, reaching out and taking her hand in his, clasping it.
“Taking your life back is never a terrible choice. Never stupid. You can’t live your life in fear.
Ever. But you also can’t risk it for no reason.
I don’t think that’s what you’re doing. You seem to have it all under control.
And like I said, between the marshal and my team, you have the people behind you to get it done and come out the other side safely. ”
She nodded as she glanced back out the windshield, her heart hammering in her chest. It wasn’t fear making it race, but rather the knowing that the bad guys were coming.
As soon as Blaze had hit the button, bringing Julia Moretti back to life, they knew, the Serranos knew, and they were sending their men to take her and get what information they could out of her.
She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth.
She clasped her hands together, resting them in her lap as she tried to steady her nerves.
Now that everything was done, and they were in the SUV heading to Savannah, there wasn’t anything else for her to do but wait.
Suddenly, the adrenaline had nowhere to go.
Bobby squeezed her hand once more, drawing her attention to him as she opened her eyes. “You all right?”
She smiled at him, pushing her head back into the seat. “I am, actually.” And it surprised her she meant it. What she had set into motion should scare the hell out of her, but she wasn’t. Not at all. And it was because she was no longer running. No longer looking over her shoulder.
The highway unfurled ahead of them in long, gray stretches, the late afternoon sun lowering behind scattered clouds, throwing thin gold light across the marshland. The trees blurred past her window, mile markers slipping by in steady increments that felt both too slow and too fast at the same time.
She swallowed and turned her attention back to Bobby. “How do you think they’ll do it?” she asked, breaking the silence that had stretched too long between them. “Come for me, that is.”
Bobby didn’t look at her immediately, keeping his eyes on the road, his posture relaxed. One hand rested high on the steering wheel, the other loose but ready near the gearshift. “They’re too far away to do anything before we hit Savannah. So we’re safe for now.”
Her fingers tightened against her thigh. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
He glanced over at her then, brief but assessing. “They’re not hunting you for sport. You knew that, though. They want something.”
She nodded. “Access to my mother.”
He didn’t deny it. “They want leverage against her, and you’re the leverage.”
She stared out the windshield, the word leverage bouncing around in her head.
She hadn’t thought that part all the way through. If this went wrong and they got a hold of her, she would put her mother at risk. Her entire family, for that matter. Anna and the kids as well.
He squeezed her hand once more. “They’ll test the leak first before they do anything. See if it’s real, if it leads somewhere solid. They’ll have to make sure it’s not a trap, but don’t worry, Blaze is damn good at what he does. Even if he’s rather on the young side.”
“And when they believe it?”
He took a slow breath. “Then they’ll make their move and come for you.
They’ll watch for a bit, I would think, before they act, try to learn your patterns and routines, see who you talk to and where you go the most. They’ll want to make sure you feel safe, not looking over your shoulder all the time. ”
The word safe lodged in her chest like something foreign. “Safe isn’t something I feel right now.”
He looked at her again, this time longer, a soft smile slipping across his face. “Good.”
“Good?” she repeated with a frown.
He gave a quick nod. “You don’t get complacent when you don’t feel safe. And complacency is what gets people taken. Or killed.”
The trees along the highway thickened, shadows stretching across the road as the sun dropped lower. The car’s interior felt smaller now, more contained.
Silence fell again, but this time it wasn’t empty. It hummed between them.
“They took everything from us once,” she said after a while. “My house. My name. You.”
He shook his head. “They didn’t take me. You just weren’t allowed to keep me.”
The distinction made her chest ache. She turned in her seat slightly, studying him. “You ever wonder who you would’ve been if I hadn’t disappeared?”
“Every damn year.”
“And?”
“I wouldn’t have learned how to move through the dark the way I do now.”
She watched the road reflect in the windshield. “And maybe I wouldn’t have learned how to survive it.”
The sky ahead deepened toward evening, Savannah still a couple of hours away. And ahead of them, around the curve of the interstate, men were chasing them. She felt it in her bones.
“They’re chasing me,” she whispered. “Just like back in school.”
He squeezed her hand once more. “They think they’re chasing you. We know the truth, though.”
This time, she didn’t correct him because she wasn’t really sure anymore whether she was the hunter or the hunted. All she really knew was that this road was leading somewhere neither of them could turn back from, and she was all right with that.