CHAPTER 10 Declan
I keep the stolen SUV at exactly seven miles over the speed limit. Fast enough to put distance between us and the downtown grid, slow enough to avoid drawing the attention of the state troopers currently swarming the financial district behind us.
The interior of the vehicle is silent, save for the rhythmic thump-thump of the windshield wipers pushing the slush away.
I check the rearview mirror. No headlights are holding a consistent distance. The tail is clean.
I shift my gaze to the passenger seat.
Maeve hasn't moved in twenty minutes. She is staring straight ahead at the dark highway, her hands resting palm-up in her lap. The knuckles of her right hand are smeared with drying blood. The dark, rust-colored stain stands out violently against her pale skin.
A sharp, jagged ache pulses in my left shoulder where the 9mm round grazed the muscle, but I barely register the pain.
What I register is the bruising already blooming along the delicate column of her throat.
Dark purple and angry red marks, perfectly shaped like the fingers of the man I failed to kill before he reached her.
I grip the steering wheel tighter. The leather creaks under the pressure.
I told her I would protect her. I told her I would be the one to walk through the door and kill everything inside. And then I shoved her into a stairwell and let a cartel operative put his hands on her.
It is a catastrophic operational failure. It is the exact reason I do not take assets into the field.
But looking at the blood on her hands, the failure feels entirely personal. It feels like a physical weight crushing the air out of my lungs.
"We are going to a secondary safe house," I say, breaking the silence. My voice is low, carefully modulated to avoid startling her. "It's a two-hour drive. We will switch vehicles there and arrange transport back to Colorado."
Maeve doesn't look at me. She blinks slowly, her eyes remaining fixed on the road.
"Did you kill the other one?" she asks. Her voice is completely flat. Stripped of the chaotic energy, stripped of the sarcasm. It sounds dead.
"Yes."
"So that's three."
I glance at her. "Three?"
"Three people dead tonight," she clarifies, her fingers curling slightly inward, hiding the bloodstains against the fabric of her tactical jacket. "You killed one in the hallway. You killed the other one behind the desk. And I killed the one on the stairs."
"You defended yourself against an active threat."
"I drove a piece of metal into his neck and watched him bleed out on the concrete," she corrects, her tone eerily clinical. "That isn't a defense, Declan. That's a casualty."
I hit the indicator and take the exit ramp toward a rural county road. The streetlights vanish, leaving us in the heavy, isolating darkness of the Illinois countryside.
"You did what was necessary to survive," I tell her, keeping my eyes on the road. "If you hadn't used the glass-breaker, he would have crushed your trachea. You balanced the equation."
"Stop saying that," she snaps. The sudden burst of anger is a relief. It’s better than the hollow, empty tone she was using a second ago. She turns her head, glaring at me. "Stop talking about it like it's a spreadsheet. It isn't math. It's a person. It was a person, and I killed him."
"He was a cartel operative who was paid to execute you," I reply, my voice hardening slightly. "He forfeited his right to be treated like a person the second he put his hands on your throat."
Maeve lets out a shaky breath, turning her face back toward the window. She presses her forehead against the cold glass.
"I can't get the blood off," she whispers.
I look at her hands again. The blood is dry. It isn't going anywhere without soap and hot water.
I pull the SUV over onto the gravel shoulder of the empty road. I shift the transmission into park and kill the headlights, plunging the cabin into near total darkness, illuminated only by the faint green glow of the dashboard.
"What are you doing?" she asks, her posture stiffening.
I don't answer. I unbuckle my seatbelt, reach into the center console, and pull out a small, sealed first-aid kit. I pop the plastic latch, bypass the gauze and the antiseptic powder, and pull out a package of sterile saline wipes.
I turn in my seat, fully facing her.
"Give me your hands," I say.
She hesitates. She looks at the small silver packet in my hand, then up at my face. The shadows hide my expression, but she must see something in the rigid set of my jaw, because she slowly lifts her hands off her lap and offers them to me.
I take her right hand. Her skin is freezing.
I tear open the packet with my teeth, spitting the foil onto the floorboard. I pull out the thick, wet cloth.
I don't rush. I wrap my left hand around her wrist, securing her arm, and begin to wipe the dried blood from her knuckles. The saline is cold, but the friction of my thumb pressing the cloth against her skin creates a small, localized heat.
The silence in the car is absolute. The only sound is the soft, rhythmic scrape of the fabric against her skin and the heavy patter of sleet on the roof.
I clean the blood from her knuckles. I clean the blood from the webbing between her fingers. I turn her hand over and wipe away a dark smear near the base of her thumb.
She watches my hands. She doesn't pull away. The chaotic, defensive woman who argued with me over coffee this morning is entirely absent. Right now, she is just exhausted, traumatized, and allowing me to strip away the physical evidence of what she had to do to survive.
"It wasn't your fault," I murmur, my voice dropping to a register meant only for her. I move to her left hand, repeating the process. "The failure was mine. I should not have let him reach the stairwell."
"You were busy getting shot," she points out softly.
I pause, my thumb resting over her pulse point. "You noticed that."
"It's hard to miss the blood on your shirt, Declan. You're bleeding on the leather seats."
I look down at my shoulder. The black henley is torn, the fabric stiff with my own dried blood. The graze is superficial—it didn't hit the bone or the artery—but it looks messy.
"It's a graze," I say, dismissing it. I finish cleaning her left hand, tossing the ruined wipe onto the floorboard.
I don't let go of her hand.
I hold it resting on my thigh. The contrast between her pale, clean fingers and the dark fabric of my tactical pants is stark.
"Does your throat hurt?" I ask, my eyes moving up to the dark bruising on her neck.
Maeve swallows. The movement clearly causes her pain, because a faint wince crosses her features. "It hurts to swallow. But I can breathe."
I reach up slowly. I don't want to startle her. I telegraph the movement, giving her three full seconds to pull away if she wants to. She doesn't.
I brush the tips of my fingers against the edge of the darkest bruise. My touch is feather-light, completely devoid of the pressure the other man used.
Her breath catches. Her eyes flutter shut for a fraction of a second, leaning imperceptibly into the warmth of my hand.
The surge of possessive, violent rage that hits my chest is staggering. I want to turn the car around. I want to drive back to Chicago, find the men who sent that operative, and dismantle their entire organization piece by piece.
I force the anger down, burying it behind the clinical discipline I need to keep her safe.
"We need to keep moving," I say, my voice rougher than I intended. I drop my hand from her neck and release her fingers.
The sudden loss of contact leaves the air in the car feeling hollow.
Maeve opens her eyes. She looks at her clean hands, then looks at my torn shoulder.
"You need to clean that," she says, gesturing to the wound.
"I will handle it at the safe house."
"You're driving. If you lose mobility in your arm, you're going to crash this stolen car into a ditch." She reaches into the open first-aid kit sitting on the console. She pulls out a bottle of antiseptic and a square of sterile gauze. "Take the shirt off."
I stare at her. The demand is so completely out of character for the traumatized woman I was just comforting that it takes my brain a second to catch up.
"I am perfectly capable of operating a vehicle with a minor laceration," I state.
"Take the shirt off, Declan, or I will pour this entire bottle of rubbing alcohol directly onto the fabric and let it soak in."
She holds the plastic bottle up, her dark eyes narrowing. The spark is back. The trauma hasn't broken her; it just forced her to adapt. She needs to fix something. She needs to exert control over a situation she has absolutely no power over.
I look at the bottle. I look at the stubborn set of her jaw.
I reach down, grab the hem of the black henley, and pull it over my head in one motion.
The cold air of the cabin hits my bare skin. I toss the ruined shirt into the backseat.
Maeve freezes.
She is sitting three feet away from me in the dark cabin, holding a piece of gauze. Her eyes drop from my face to my chest, tracking the heavy, defined lines of my musculature, the faint, silver scars from old operations, and finally landing on the bloody graze across my left deltoid.
I watch the exact moment her breathing changes. The shallow, panicked rhythm of the trauma response is replaced by something slower. Something heavier.
She swallows, her gaze flicking back up to my eyes.
"It's just a graze," she repeats my earlier words, though her voice is noticeably unsteady.
"Yes."
She leans across the center console. The space in the front seat is entirely too small for this. Her knee brushes against my thigh. The scent of her—vanilla, plaster dust, and cold rain—completely fills my lungs.
She uncaps the antiseptic, pours a generous amount onto the gauze, and presses it against my shoulder.
I don't flinch. The chemical burn is sharp, biting into the torn flesh, but the pain is entirely secondary to the sensation of her fingers resting against my bare skin. Her touch is careful, focused, her brow furrowing in concentration as she cleans the dried blood away from the edges of the wound.
"You should have let me stay in the hallway," she says quietly, her eyes fixed on my shoulder.
"No."
"You told me to never leave your sight. And then you pushed me away."
"I pushed you out of the line of fire."
"You took a bullet for me." She stops wiping the wound. She leaves her hand resting flat against my collarbone, her thumb pressing lightly into the hollow of my throat. She finally looks up, meeting my eyes. "Why?"
It is the same question she asked over the chessboard. But this time, she isn't asking about the contract. She is asking about the mechanics of my obsession.
I look at her. At the dark bruises on her neck. At the fierce, demanding intelligence in her eyes.
"Because you are the only thing in this world I cannot afford to lose," I say.
The absolute honesty of the statement hangs in the cold air between us. It isn't a romantic declaration. It is a terrifying, possessive truth. If she dies, the carefully constructed architecture of my life collapses.
Maeve stares at me, her lips parting slightly. She doesn't pull her hand away from my chest. She doesn't call me a monster.
She leans in.
It isn't a fast movement. It is slow, deliberate, giving me every opportunity to pull back.
I don't pull back.
Her mouth brushes against mine.
The contact is electric. It is a spark hitting a powder keg. For a fraction of a second, the kiss is hesitant, testing the boundary of the violence we just survived.
Then, my discipline shatters.
I reach up, my right hand tangling in the dark, messy hair at the back of her head. I pull her across the console, closing the remaining distance, and kiss her with a desperate, bruising intensity.
Maeve gasps against my mouth, her hands sliding up my chest to grip my shoulders. She kisses me back with the same chaotic, frantic energy. It isn't gentle. It tastes like adrenaline, cold rain, and the bitter edge of survival.
She opens her mouth, letting me deepen the kiss, her fingers digging into the muscles of my back. I angle her head, my thumb pressing against her jawline, carefully avoiding the bruises while demanding absolute surrender.
She gives it to me. She melts against my chest, the soft weight of her body pressing into my bare skin, anchoring me to the present moment.
For the first time in my life, the control I value above everything else is completely gone. And I don't care. I want to consume her. I want to pull her so deeply into my world that she forgets how to find her way out.
A heavy, metallic thud echoes from the back of the SUV.
I freeze.
I break the kiss instantly, my hand dropping from her hair to the grip of my weapon in the center console.
Maeve pulls back, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and dilated. "What was that?"
I don't answer. I turn my head, looking into the dark, empty space of the cargo area.
The sound wasn't outside the vehicle. It was inside.
I raise the Glock, pointing it over the backseat. "Show yourself."
Silence.
Then, a low, wet cough.
A figure slowly sits up from the floorboards of the cargo area, pushing the heavy canvas cargo cover aside.
The ambient green light from the dashboard catches the face of the man.
It isn't a cartel hitman.
It’s Richard Evans.
He is wearing a torn, expensive suit. His face is pale, slick with sweat, and he is pressing a bloody hand against his lower abdomen.
"You... you shot me in my own lobby," Evans wheezes, his eyes darting between me and Maeve. He lets out a wet, rattling laugh. "I hid in the back of your stolen car... while you were busy playing hero on the stairs."
Maeve stops breathing. She stares at the man who ruined her life, the man who framed her, currently bleeding out in the back of our vehicle.
Evans looks at her, a cruel, desperate smile twisting his lips.
"You think you won, Maeve?" he coughs, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "I triggered the failsafe before you wiped the server. The cartel doesn't just have your name anymore. They have your face. They have your location. And they know exactly who the traitor is."
He looks at me, his eyes locking onto mine.
"They're coming for both of you."