Chapter 18 #3
Trent hit the concrete hard. The gun skittered from his grip and spun beneath the nearest car. For a second, there was nothing but the echo of the impact and the sound of Trent's ragged breathing.
Dante stepped in and kicked the gun further out of reach, then grabbed Trent by the front of his shirt and hauled him up just enough to make him listen.
“You don't get to come here and play hero,” he growled. “You sold her out. You know it, and now she knows it. And if I ever see you near her again, we're going to have a very different conversation.”
Trent blinked up at him, dazed, blood running from his nose.
Dante held his gaze for one more second, then dropped him.
He turned back to Jessica.
“Get in,” he said.
“Dante, he's—”
“He'll live.” He pulled door open. “We won't if we stay here.”
She got in.
The sound of the engine roared through the enclosed space. Dante threw the car into reverse and backed out hard, tires squealing against the concrete, and Jessica watched Trent in the side mirror until the ramp curved and he was out of sight.
She didn't look back again.
The rain came in hard as they reached the Seawall, blowing across the Gulf and slamming sideways into the car until the world beyond them dissolved into streaks of grey.
Jessica pulled her t-shirt tighter around herself, and watched the wipers lose their fight with the downpour.
Dante didn't ease off the speed. He leaned forward over the wheel, his focus locked on the narrow strip of road ahead, his jaw set in a way that hadn't changed since the garage.
She lowered her gaze to her hands in her lap. They were trembling. She watched them like they belonged to someone else.
“He gave them my name,” she said.
The words came out flat, like she was testing whether saying it aloud would make it feel real. It didn't. Not yet.
Dante's hands shifted on the wheel but he didn't speak.
“I lived with him,” she said. “For a year. I slept next to him. And the whole time he was— what? Gambling? Owing money to people who—” She stopped, because the sentence kept branching into places she wasn't ready to follow. “How long did he know?”
Dante was quiet for a moment. “I don't think he planned it,” he said. “I think he got in over his head and gave you up to save himself. Then he tried to pretend it didn't happen.”
“That's worse.”
“I know.”
A gust of wind shoved against the car, rattling it enough to make her grip the edge of the seat.
“And then he shows up in Galveston and tells me he's trying to protect me.” She shook her head slowly. “He believed it, too. You could see it in his face. He really thought he was the hero.”
“He wasn’t thinking about you,” Dante said. “He was thinking about losing you. Believe it or not, I actually know how that feels.”
Jessica turned her head and looked at him—the hard line of his profile, the tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes never stopped moving between the road and the mirrors.
“He said he was in contact with a woman,” she said. “Do you think she's working with Ferrera?”
“Yeah. And if he's been in contact with her, it means they know we're in Galveston. They might not know exactly where, but the radius just got a lot smaller.”
“Because of Trent.”
“Because Trent thinks he's smarter than he is, and the people he's talking to are going to pull everything he knows out of him whether he means to give it up or not.” He checked the rearview.
“He found us in a parking garage. He'll have told them about the car, the direction, maybe the waterfront.
Whether he told them before or after we left doesn't matter much.”
Jessica absorbed that in silence. The rain hammered against the roof, filling the spaces between them.
“I almost went to him,” she said quietly.
Dante didn't react. But she saw his knuckles tighten on the wheel, and she knew he'd felt it in the garage too—the moment her hand had slipped off the car door.
“For about two seconds, I thought maybe he was right. That I could just step out of this. Go back to the duplex, go back to the routine, and pretend none of it was real.”
She let the words sit, then shook her head.
“But that whole life was a lie. And the man offering to take me home is the reason I can't go back.” A small, bleak sound escaped her that wasn't quite a laugh. “There's a version of me that would've gotten in his truck, Dante. A week ago, I would have.”
“But you didn't,” he said.
“No.” She looked down at her hands. They'd stopped shaking. “I didn't.”
They drove on. The storm pressed in on all sides, the world narrowing to the reach of the headlights and the rhythm of the road.
The houses began to thin, giving way to stretches of open land where the water crept closer to the asphalt and the structures that remained stood elevated on narrow stilts, their shapes dark against the grey.
Jessica watched them pass, one after another, each more isolated than the last. The landscape felt like a physical expression of what was happening to her life, everything she'd known falling away, the spaces between growing wider, until all that was left was whatever she was driving toward.