Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
The alarm on Dante’s watch didn’t make a sound; it vibrated, a low, insistent pulse against his wrist that pulled him awake all at once.
He didn’t move immediately. He lay on the edge of the mattress, eyes fixed on the thin seam of light pressing through the gap in the curtains, watching as the last traces of neon green faded into the washed-out grey of early morning.
The room felt colder than it had a few hours ago, the window unit rattling softly as it pushed out stale, overworked air.
Beside him, Jessica shifted.
The mattress dipped slightly, just enough that her warmth brushed against his arm before she settled again, and the contact lingered longer than it should have.
Dante pushed himself upright, his joints protesting as he reached for the pistol on the nightstand and checked it by feel. The familiar weight grounded him “Time to go,” he said.
Jessica didn’t startle. She opened her eyes slowly, already alert, already watching him in a way that told him she hadn’t really been asleep at all.
She sat up, the oversized shirt slipping slightly off one shoulder, and the ruby ring caught the first clean line of daylight as it edged into the room.
The lie from last night hadn’t gone anywhere. It still sat right there between them.
“Did you sleep at all?” she asked, brushing her hair back from her face. There was something unguarded in the question, something that hadn’t quite made it back behind whatever walls she’d rebuilt overnight.
“Enough,” Dante said, because anything else would invite a conversation he didn’t trust himself to finish.
He stood, pulling on his boots, glad they gave himself something to do that didn’t involve looking at her for too long.
“We need to be on the I-45 corridor before the morning traffic builds,” he added. “If we time it right, we disappear into it.”
Jessica slid off the bed and crossed the room. She moved toward the bathroom, then slowed as she passed him, stopping just within his space without quite touching him.
“Last night…” she said.
Dante didn’t let her finish. “Last night was a mistake.” The words came out steady. “We were tired,” he continued, still not looking at her. “Adrenaline does that. It makes things feel bigger than they are.” He tightened the laces on his boots. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Silence stretched for a moment, full of everything neither of them was willing to say.
Jessica didn’t move away immediately. He could feel her still there, close enough that it would have taken almost nothing to close the distance, to undo everything he’d just said.
But he didn’t.
“Right,” she said quietly.
Dante straightened and finally looked at her. “Get dressed. We’ve got a lot of miles to cover.”
Jessica held his gaze for a beat longer than she should have, then turned and disappeared into the bathroom. The door closed with a soft click.
Dante eased the 'Cuda toward the far pump at the Buck-O's, his eyes moving between the mirrors and the empty road behind them.
The station sat right on the county line.
It felt like the kind of place that existed solely to serve people passing through and forget them immediately after. Safe enough for a pit stop, then.
He killed the headlights but left the engine running. He didn't look at Jessica, but he was aware of her in his periphery.
He stepped out before she could say anything. The humidity wrapped around him instantly, thick and damp. He moved toward the pump, right hand hovering near his side out of habit more than intent.
The card reader lagged. AUTHORIZING blinked on the screen like it had all the time in the world.
Dante leaned back against the rear quarter panel and scanned the lot instead of watching the gas pump numbers crawl.
A semi sat off to the side near the air compressors, engine idling low and heavy. The cab windows were dark, with no driver in sight and no movement around it.
Jessica's door opened.
He glanced over as she stepped out. The t-shirt covered her, barely, and the sequins of her dress underneath still caught the light. It was a shimmer that didn't belong anywhere near a place like this. Her pink hair made it worse. She was impossible to miss, and that was exactly the problem.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“Water. Caffeine. Soap,” she tossed back, already walking.
“Don't go wandering off,” he said.
“I can handle a gas station, Dante.”
Dante swore under his breath but didn't follow. He was tethered to the pump, forced to stand there while she crossed the lot and disappeared through the glass doors of the convenience store.
His attention went back to the semi. Still idling.
A muddy sedan pulled in near the storefront, its engine rattling before it cut out. A man in a camo hat climbed out and stretched like he had nowhere to be. Harmless, probably. But Dante didn't put much stock in 'probably'.
The pump clicked off. He capped the tank and looked up just as Jessica came into view inside the store—not heading for the door but standing at the counter, leaning in, talking to the kid behind the register.
Dante stilled.
She said something. The kid looked past her, out through the window toward the lot. Toward the car.
Jessica turned, following his gaze, and her hand came up in an absent gesture, indicating something behind her.
The 'Cuda.
Something cold settled in Dante's chest.
She pushed through the door a moment later, plastic bag in hand.
He closed the distance in two strides and took the bag from her. “Get in.”
“What is it?” she asked quietly. “Did you see something?”
“The truck,” he said, already moving around to the driver's side. “And you, pointing a stranger at the most recognizable car in the county.”
Her expression flickered. “He just asked about the car. I told him it was your midlife crisis.”
Any other morning, he might have almost smiled at that. Not this one. “Get in the car, Jessica.”
She got in.
Dante pulled the door shut, his eyes already on the mirrors. The semi had shifted position— angled now, like it was preparing to move. The engine note had changed. It wasn't idling anymore.
He turned the key and the 'Cuda came alive, the roar tearing through the quiet morning loud enough to turn heads. He didn't care.
He pulled out hard, tires biting against stained concrete, and cut toward the on-ramp without slowing.
The highway opened ahead of them. In the rearview, the semi rolled out behind them, headlights catching the rise of the road as it merged. It didn't surge forward but didn't fall back either. It just held there, maintaining a distance that could have been coincidence but felt like intent.
Dante pressed down on the accelerator and the engine responded, the car surging forward as the gap widened. Not enough. He pressed harder.
“Keep your head down,” he said, his voice quieter now. “And from here on, you don't talk to anyone about us. Not the car, not where we're going, not what I look like. We're nobody.”
Jessica didn't answer, but he saw her hand tighten on the dash, and he knew she understood, not just the instruction, but the thing underneath it. That the world they were moving through now didn't forgive small mistakes, and the conversation at the counter might have been one.
The Corpus Christi police station carried the restless energy of a shift change—voices overlapping, phones ringing, the smell of fresh coffee brewing. None of it reached Trent.
His world had narrowed to a single monitor in the corner of the Real-Time Crime Center.
He'd been there for nearly three hours, leaning on a fabricated report about a possible domestic abduction to justify the access.
No one had questioned it. He was still a cop, still trusted, at least on paper, and the thing about being trusted was that people stopped looking at you closely enough to see what you were actually doing.
On screen, the highway feeds cycled in a steady loop—gray asphalt, passing vehicles, time codes and camera IDs stamped across each frame. The images were grainy, but good enough.
His eyes burned from the strain. The burner phone sat on the desk beside him, silent and waiting. He tried not to look at it.
Come on, Jess. Don't be with him.
The feeds rolled. Traffic thickened, thinned. Sedans, trucks, a line of early commuters heading toward the coast.
Camera 402. I-45 southbound, just past the marshland stretch near La Marque.
The 'Cuda cut through the frame—a flash of red so out of place it might as well have been on fire. Even through the distortion, Trent recognized it instantly. Recognized the way it moved, fast and aggressive, threading through traffic like everything else on the road was in its way.
He leaned forward and rewound the feed.
The image stuttered backward, frames collapsing into one another until the car vanished.
He hit play and watched it re-enter, slower this time, tracking every detail: the angle of the hood, the slight drift between lanes, the confidence in it.
He rewound again. And again. Each pass slower, the motion breaking down into fragments, until he found what he was looking for.
He froze the frame.
It was grainy, distorted, and barely more than a suggestion, but she was there. A shape in the passenger seat. Pink hair. The tilt of her head toward the window.
Jessica.
His hand tightened on the edge of the desk.
She was with him. She was in that car, in that passenger seat, leaning her head against the window the way she used to lean against Trent's truck on long drives, and the intimacy of the posture, the comfort of it, hit him harder than the fact of her being gone.
He stared at the frozen image until it stopped being just information and became something personal, something that burned.
Then he pushed back from the desk, the chair scraping against the floor. A couple of officers glanced over, then away.
Trent didn't log out of the system. He didn't close the report, didn't tell anyone where he was going.
He was thinking now, really thinking, for the first time since this started, and what he was thinking was this: if he called the burner number and handed over the location, Jessica was dead.
Not rescued, not recovered. Dead. Whatever these people wanted with Dante, Jessica was a loose end, and loose ends didn't survive contact with people like them.
He'd known it since that woman had stood in his kitchen, and he'd been pretending he didn't.
But if he got there first, if he intercepted them himself, with a badge and sirens and the full authority of the uniform, he could pull her out clean.
Protective custody. Official channels. She'd be angry, she'd fight him, but she'd be alive, and she'd be away from Castano.
And eventually she'd understand that Trent was the one who'd come for her when it mattered.
The story was already writing itself, and in this version, Trent was the hero.
He walked out of the building, through the lobby, into the parking lot. The morning air hit his lungs, sharp and clarifying.
He knew those roads. He knew the choke points, the speed traps, the stretches where a cruiser could sit unnoticed until the right car passed. He could get ahead of them. He could make it look routine.
The burner phone vibrated in his pocket.
He stopped, hand halfway to the truck door. For a second he considered ignoring it. Then he pulled it out.
STATUS?
A thin line of sweat traced down his spine. They weren't waiting for him to report in. They were checking on him, the way you'd check on a dog you weren't sure would stay where you put it.
His thumbs hovered over the screen.
If he told them, she was dead. If he didn't, he was next.
He typed: No visual yet. Checking secondary routes.
He sent it before he could reconsider, then dropped the phone into the glove box and shut it hard, as if distance from the lie might make it less dangerous.
Trent started the engine. The siren came on a second later, cutting through the morning, and he pulled out of the lot and accelerated toward the highway.
He wasn't handing her over, and he wasn't calling it in. He was going to find her himself, and when he did, she was going to see him the way she used to—as someone who showed up, someone who mattered, someone she chose.
The fact that she'd stopped choosing him months ago was not something Trent was prepared to examine at seventy miles an hour. So he didn't.