Chapter Seventeen
Knox
Cold wakes me first. Wind cuts across my face, bitter and sharp. Then comes the vibration—motor underneath me, world bouncing
and jostling. I’m on a snowmobile, slumped against someone’s back, my wrists bound with zip ties. I keep my eyes closed and
focus on steady breathing. Let them think I’m still out.
We’re climbing. I can feel the angle of the terrain, the machine straining against the incline. Through barely open lids I
catch glimpses of trees everywhere, dense forest, old growth—wilderness that swallows people and never spits them back out.
We’re heading away from the resort, deeper into nothing.
Twenty minutes pass. Twenty-five. I try to track direction but the sky is flat gray and gives me nothing useful. Even if I
got free right now, I’d have no idea which way to run.
The machine slows and stops.
Hands haul me off and I go limp, making myself dead weight, forcing them to work for it. Two of them drag me through knee-deep
snow until a door opens and warmth hits my face.
They shove me forward, slam the door, locking it behind them.
I catch myself on bound hands, already scanning as I stumble. Wood floors. Stone fireplace. Windows showing nothing but white.
And Hailey.
She spins from where she’s standing by the windows, and for a second neither of us moves. She’s alive. She’s here, she’s standing,
she’s looking at me with those dark eyes gone wide and her lips parted like she’s forgotten how to speak.
Thank god. Thank god. Thank god.
“Knox?!”
She’s crossing the room before I can get my feet under me, dropping to her knees beside me, her hands on my face, my shoulders,
running over me like she’s checking for damage. I’m doing the same thing—scanning her for injuries, for bruises, for any sign
that someone’s hurt her. She looks exhausted and scared but intact. Whole.
“You’re okay,” I manage. The words scrape out of me. “Jesus, Hailey, you’re okay.”
“What are you doing here? How did you—”
“Doesn’t matter.” I reach up with my bound hands and cup her face, just for a second, just to feel her skin under my palms
and know this is real. “Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”
“No, I’m fine, I’m— Knox, how did you find me?”
“Later.” I pull myself up to sitting, and the room tilts. Whatever they gave me is still sludging through my bloodstream,
making everything soft at the edges. “How long have you been here? Who took you?”
“There’s a lot I need to tell you. There’s—” She stops. “Hold on. Let me get those off you. There’s a knife in the kitchen.”
She’s back in seconds, sawing through the zip tie. The plastic falls away and I rub my wrists, feeling blood flow return to
my fingers.
“Knox, there’s something you need to know.” Her eyes flick to something behind me.
That’s when I see him.
There’s a man standing by the fireplace. Something about his posture tugs at the back of my brain—the way he holds himself,
weight on one hip, like he’s ready to move in any direction.
I blink. The drugs are still messing with my head, because for a second I think I’m looking at a ghost. Someone from another
lifetime, someone who shouldn’t be here, someone who—
No.
I blink again, harder, trying to clear the haze. But his face doesn’t change. The jaw is the same. The eyes are the same, dark and quick and seeing everything. There are tattoos crawling up his neck now that weren’t there before, but the rest of him—
The rest of him is exactly how I remember. How I’ve been trying not to remember.
“Liam?”
It comes out like a question because it can’t be right. It can’t be him. Liam Calloway is somewhere else, anywhere else, living
some other life that doesn’t intersect with mine. We haven’t spoken in twelve years. He doesn’t know Hailey. He has no reason
to be standing in a cabin in the Canadian wilderness looking at me like—
Like he’s not surprised to see me at all.
“Knox.” He says my name the same way he used to, that low familiar warmth in his voice. “Been a while.”
I’m still on my knees. I should get up, but my legs aren’t cooperating, and my brain is moving too slow, trying to fit pieces
together that don’t make sense. Liam is here. Hailey is here. Liam and Hailey are both here, in the same room, looking at
each other like—
And suddenly I know exactly why the man outside Hailey’s apartment seemed so familiar. Why I couldn’t place him no matter
how many times I ran through old contacts in my head. I was looking in the wrong decade.
“You’re the one who’s been following her.” My voice sounds strange in my own ears. “The one I kept seeing outside her building.
That was you.”
“Yes.”
“You two know each other?” Hailey’s gaze ping-pongs between us.
“We served together,” Liam says.
“He was in my unit,” I say at the same time.
The words are true but they don’t begin to cover it. They don’t explain the way Liam used to find excuses to sit next to me
in the mess hall, or the night we got drunk and he told me things he said he’d never told anyone, or the moment in the motor
pool when we were alone and he looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us moved because we both knew what would happen
if we did.
His mouth had been three inches from mine. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, feel the heat coming off his body. One of us would have had to close that gap. Neither of us did.
We never talked about it. Not once. And then he was gone.
“Someone want to tell me what the hell is going on?” I finally get my feet under me and stand, ignoring the way the room sways.
“Because I’ve been tracking Hailey for twelve hours trying to figure out why she disappeared, and now I’m in a cabin in the
middle of nowhere with her and a guy I haven’t seen since Afghanistan. So I’d really appreciate some context.”
They exchange a glance that feels like shorthand.
“It’s complicated,” Hailey says.
“Then uncomplicate it.”
She takes a breath. “Liam is my ex. We were together for three years, before I moved to New York. Before I started working
for Sloane.”
I look at Liam. He meets my stare with that lazy confidence I remember, like nothing ever rattled him. Liam Calloway always
looks like he knows something you don’t.
Right now, looking at him feels like pressing on a bruise I forgot I had.
“Small world,” I say.
“Getting smaller all the time.”
“That doesn’t explain why you’re both locked in a cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere. Or why armed men just drugged me
and dragged me up a mountain.” I hold up my wrists, the marks from the zip ties still visible. “Start talking.”
Another look between them, something passing I’m not part of.
“I’m not who you think I am, Knox.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means . . .” She stops. Starts again. “Before I was a jewelry designer, before Sloane, before any of the life you know—I
was a thief. Liam and I both were. We stole things. Jewelry, art, anything valuable enough to be worth the risk. We were good
at it.”
I wait for the words to make sense. They don’t. I’m looking at Hailey—the woman who hums while she works, who wears the same boots every day, who fell asleep in my arms—and I’m trying to reconcile her with what she’s telling me.
“A thief.”
“Yes.”
“You.”
“Yes.”
I look at Liam. “And you.”
“Also yes.”
The Hailey I know makes jewelry. She drinks too much coffee and gets paint under her fingernails and blushes when I catch
her staring. She’s not a criminal. She can’t be. Except she’s standing here telling me she is, and there’s no hesitation in
her voice, no uncertainty. She’s not lying now. She’s been lying—to me, to Sloane, to everyone—but right now, in this moment,
she’s finally telling the truth.
“What did you steal?”
Hailey doesn’t flinch. “A lot of things. But the one that matters right now is a diamond. The Snowflake Diamond. Twenty-three
carats, flawless, worth about twenty million dollars. We took it from a Russian tech billionaire named Viktor Kedrov five
years ago. I hid it. I’m the only one who knows where it is.”
“And this Kedrov wants it back.”
“He’s been hunting us ever since we took it. That’s why Liam contacted me. To warn me they were closing in.”
Ice slides through my gut. “Contacted you how?”
“He showed up at my apartment,” Hailey says. “A few days ago. Told me Kedrov’s people had found me, that we needed to move
fast. Get the diamond, return it anonymously, make the whole thing go away.”
“And you just went with him.” I’m not looking at her anymore. I’m looking at Liam. “He shows up after five years and says
jump, and you book a flight to Canada.”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“So he dragged you here.” The cold in my gut is turning hot, spreading through my chest. “Into the middle of nowhere. With a Russian billionaire hunting you. And now we’re all locked in a cabin because his brilliant plan went sideways.”
“Knox—”
“Who grabbed you? Kedrov’s people?”
“No.” Liam pushes off from the fireplace. “Marlena Kade. She’s a collector. Art, jewelry, rare experiences. She’s been tracking
the Snowflake for years, and when she found out we were coming to retrieve it, she grabbed us. She wants the diamond for herself,
and she’s not letting us go until we tell her where it is.”
“So not only did you drag Hailey into the path of a Russian billionaire, you also managed to get her grabbed by some psychotic
collector.” I take a step toward him. “That about cover it?”
Liam doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, just watches me with those dark eyes that used to make me forget my own name. Right now
they make me want to break his nose. “She was already in danger. Kedrov was coming for her whether I showed up or not. I gave
her a chance to get ahead of it.”
“Some chance.” Another step. We’re close now, close enough that I can see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes, the small
scar on his chin that wasn’t there before. “She had a life. A real life. She got out. And you showed up and burned it down.”
“I saved her life.”
“You put her in a cage.”
“Knox.” Hailey’s hand is on my arm, but I shake it off.
“This is what you did after you got out?” The anger is pouring out now, hot and bitter. “After everything we went through