Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Jessica didn't move for a long time. When she finally sat up, Dante was at the high window, his back to her. He had his phone in his hand. The screen threw a pale rectangle of light across his jaw and then he slid the phone into his pocket.
“Dante.”
He turned. “The police all followed Trent. He gave us a gap. We need to use it.”
Jessica stood on the concrete where the Ram had been idling an hour ago and looked at the empty space it had left. “If they find him, they'll come back here.”
“They'll find him. That's the point. We move now, before they start expanding the perimeter. West, along the dunes.”
“On foot?” She looked at the dark beyond the shed door, at the marsh grass moving in the wind. “We don't have a map. We don't know what's out there.”
“We have the coast,” he said. “We walk until we find somewhere to sit still until sunrise. Then we figure out the next piece.”
It wasn't a plan. It was barely a direction. But they'd run out of alternatives, and the only thing she had left that felt like solid ground was the fact that Dante was still standing in front of her, and he hadn't been wrong yet about what came next.
She followed him out.
The salt air hit her immediately, warm and thick, the marsh smell underneath it. Dante was already moving, three paces ahead, picking his way through the grass.
They cleared the marsh and hit the dunes, the sand soft and shifting underfoot. Jessica's shoes filled with it. She kept her eyes on Dante's back and tried not to think too hard about where they were going.
He had the phone out again, briefly. Just long enough to glance at it. Then it was back in his pocket again and he was walking, eyes forward, the black line of the Gulf ahead of them.
The West End was quieter than the rest of the island—darker, the road noise falling away behind them until there was only the sound of the sea and the wind moving through the sea oats.
The houses out here sat up on thick concrete pilings, cedar-sided, most of them dark, their big windows facing the water.
Every muscle in Jessica's legs screamed. The sand had been pulling at her boots for the better part of an hour, and she walked with her head down, watching the rhythmic swing of Dante's heels ahead of her, until he stopped.
“This one,” he said. “It looks empty. We can hole up in here.”
She looked up. The house was cedar and glass, sitting further back from the beach than its neighbors, flanked by a dense run of sea oats that gave it a thin screen of privacy. It was completely dark in a way that implied it hadn't seen anyone in weeks.
“Dante.” She kept her voice low. “Look at the gate.” A sleek keypad sat at the base of the stairs. “These places are wired. You touch a door and half of Galveston PD comes back around.”
He didn't answer right away. He circled the perimeter of the pilings, scanning the underside of the structure where the utility boxes were tucked. “Fancy houses have fancy problems,” he said when he returned. “They rely on tech, and tech relies on people who forget to change the defaults.”
He pointed up at a small white dome under the eave. “Camera's live. But look at the driveway.”
A plastic sign near the trash bins: Managed by Coastal Vibe Rentals.
“Airbnb,” he said. “Owner's not here. Management company is. And management companies don't want to drive out to the West End every time a guest forgets their code.”
He went to the heavy storage closet built into the pilings stocked with beach chairs, umbrella stands and felt along the top of the door frame. He brought down a small magnetic key box, opened it. It was empty. He turned it over. Sure enough, on the back, in faded marker was the number 0422.
He led her up the side stairs, away from the beach-facing windows, and punched the code into the deadbolt. The pad beeped—a small, cheerful sound entirely out of place in the night they'd had—and the lock turned.
Jessica held her breath.
The door swung open and the smell of the house came out to meet them—the cedar and lemon of fancy cleaners.
“Guest code disarms the internal sensors automatically,” Dante explained. “The system thinks it's a guest.”
They stepped inside. The wall facing the Gulf was almost entirely glass, and the moonlight came through it and lay across the concrete floors and the white linen furniture in long pale sheets. After the bait shop, after the marsh, after all of it, the cleanliness of the place felt faintly unreal.
Jessica stood just inside the door, not quite ready to touch anything.
“We're too visible,” she said. “All this glass.”
Dante had walked to the center of the room. He stood with his hand resting on the back of a chair, looking out at the ocean. “They're looking for us in ditches and dives,” he said. “Nobody's going to come knocking on a five-thousand-a-week rental tonight.”
He turned then, and she saw it: the fatigue, sitting deep around his eyes. He looked like a man who'd been running on something other than sleep for a long time and had just reached the far edge of it.
“Go get clean,” he said. “I'll keep watch.”
She looked at him for a moment. There was something she wanted to ask about tomorrow, about the next move. But all she did was nod and moved toward the hallway.
Behind her, she heard the soft sound of him lowering into a chair, facing the glass and the water. When she paused at the hallway entrance and looked back, the pale rectangle of his phone screen was there again in the dark, held low, its light catching the sharp line of his jaw.
Jessica stood under the oversized rainfall showerhead, her forehead pressed against the cool marble of the wall, and let the deluge hit the nape of her neck.
She had scrubbed her skin until it was raw. She’d used an exfoliating sponge she found in a silver basket, scouring away the grit of the Galveston marsh and the invisible, oily residue of the last forty-eight hours. She wanted to be clean, but more than that, she wanted to be new.
But as the steam rose, thick and white as a sea fog, the walls of the glass house seemed to dissolve.
She looked down at her hands. They were trembling, but not from the cold. She thought of the pier. She thought of the way the light had left Ferrera’s eyes. She thought of Trent, screaming into the night in a truck that was never meant to come back.
You can run, the voice in the back of her head whispered—the one that sounded like Ryan. But you can't hide.
She reached up and squeezed the water out of her hair. The pink dye ran in pale, rose-colored rivulets down her arms, swirling into the drain like fading memories. She was alive. Against the odds of the cartel, the cops, and the man who had betrayed her, she was still here.
The water began to cool, the high-capacity heater finally reaching its limit. Jessica reached out and turned the heavy chrome handle, cutting the flow.
The sudden silence was absolute. She stood in the center of the marble bathroom, the steam swirling around her ankles, and listened.
She heard a footfall in the hall outside the bathroom.
Dante sat on a white slipcovered armchair that felt like a cloud. He’d found a bottle of Macallan 18 in the wet bar. He didn’t use a glass. He took a long, burning pull straight from the bottle.
He watched the clock on the microwave across the kitchen, the green digits the only light in the room besides the stars and whatever was left of the moon. It had been twenty minutes since she'd gone upstairs. He heard the shower cut off. In the sudden absence of running water, he heard her exhale.
Something in his chest did what it had been threatening to do for three days.
He picked up the phone and set it on the kitchen counter, face-down, away from the chair.
Then he walked down the hall.
The bathroom door was ajar, a thin blade of light falling across the dark hallway floor. He could hear her on the other side of it.
He stopped outside the door. Put his hand flat against the wall beside the frame and stood there. Two years. For two years he'd kept her at arm's length, both physically and mentally. Standing here now, he couldn't remember a single reason why.
He pushed the door open.
The bathroom was all white tile and warm steam, a single vanity light burning above the mirror. She was standing at the sink, completely naked. She'd been looking at herself in the mirror—he could see it, the caught expression of someone interrupted mid-thought.
She didn't startle. She just looked at him in the mirror's reflection, her eyes finding his, and she didn't say anything. Neither did he.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
The air in the room didn't just feel thick; it felt pressurized. It was the same static that preceded a lightning strike, a physical weight that made it hard to draw a full breath.
The steam was still heavy in the air, warm against his face, carrying the smell of whatever soap the management company stocked, something clean and unisex, nothing like her, and yet here she was inside it.
He crossed the small room in two steps and stopped behind her, close enough that she would feel the heat of him, and looked at her in the mirror.
His gaze traveled over her with the hunger of a man who had been starving in a desert.
He saw the slope of her breasts, the dip of her waist, and the long, graceful line of her legs.
She had a scar he didn't remember, low on her left shoulder, pale and thin.
She had new lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there at twenty-two.
He'd spent thirteen years constructing a version of her from memory, and the real woman was both less and more than all of it in ways he didn't have language for.
She was perfect. She was his home. And she was a stranger.
“Dante.” His name in her mouth, barely above a whisper.
He brought his hand up and moved her hair off the back of her neck, slow and deliberate. He felt her breath change. He watched it in the mirror, the small shift in her breathing, the way her eyes went somewhere inside herself, like she was checking something before she let herself feel it.
He pressed his mouth to the back of her neck.
She made a sound, a low, involuntary exhale.
His hands found her waist, her ribs, and he took his time—not because he was careful by nature but because he didn't want to miss anything.
She turned in his grip and then she was facing him, her back against the sink's edge.
Dante’s hand slid down, his palm cupping the damp heat of her breast. He felt the flutter of her pulse, a frantic, rhythmic plea.
Every instinct he had—the gangster, the lover, the man—was screaming at him to pull her in, to bury his face in the crook of her neck and let the world outside burn to ash. He wanted to drown in her.
His fingers tightened slightly on her skin, his thumb brushing her nipple the way he knew she liked. Jessica made a small, soft sound—a broken note of surrender—and started to lean forward, her hands rising to find his chest.
Dante’s hand was a rough, calloused contrast to the heat of her skin.
When his thumb grazed her skin, the friction sent a jolt through her that grounded her more than the floor beneath her feet.
He didn't just look at her; he mapped her, his eyes searching for every change time had carved into her, and every part of her that still belonged to the girl he’d loved in Chicago.
Jessica reached out, her fingers catching in the coarse fabric of his shirt, pulling him in.
Her mouth found his with a desperate, jagged hunger.
It wasn't a soft kiss; it was a collision.
It tasted of the Macallan on his breath and the salt on his skin, a frantic exchange of breath that felt like they were trying to breathe for each other.
Dante groaned low in his throat, a sound of pure, unadulterated surrender. His arms wrapped around her, his hands splayed against the small of her back, crushing her against him.
He lifted her, her legs instinctively locking around his waist, and she felt the heavy thud of his boots as he backed her out of the steam-filled bathroom. He didn't take her to the bed. He pressed her against the cool, dark wood of the bedroom door, his weight pinning her there.
“Jessica,” he rasped against her neck. “Tell me to stop. If you don't… I’m never letting you go again.”
“Don't you dare stop,” she whispered, her hands tangling in his dark hair, pulling his face back to hers. “Don't you dare.”