Grace
The world comes back in pieces, and none of them fit right. Sound first: an engine, big and steady, moving fast. Then light behind my eyes, thin and gray. Then the ache above my ear, sharp enough that I fight down a groan.
I take stock. My hands move. My feet move. Nothing’s tied down.
I touch my head, and my fingers come back dark and wet.
The dumpster. That’s the last clear thing. The steel edge of it coming at me, then nothing.
Before that: two men in a lane, talking like my life was paperwork. Nothing personal, one of them said, like that made it a kindness. Liability. Different word. Same outcome. I remember the stillness right before his hand went for his jacket.
Then the gap between the buildings tore open, and something came out of it that put him on the ground before I understood what I was watching.
Grace. I’m here to help.
I remember that too. I remember not believing it. Running from him the same as I ran from the rest of it, because by then everything with a face was something to get away from.
I look at the driver.
Decker.
The supply room comes back whole. Three feet of space that didn’t feel like three feet. My name in his mouth like he meant to keep track of it. I told myself that day it was nothing. Big men are common at Aurora. My body doesn’t usually have opinions about them.
It had one about him.
Something inside me leans toward him now, warm and unwelcome, and I want to shove it down. My body doesn’t get a vote on this. Not after what just happened.
How did he see me?
I guess it doesn’t matter, because he’s got me now. He’d been watching. Those times we met weren’t accidents. He was surveilling me. I just didn’t know to be afraid of it yet.
He’s Aurora’s tracker. The rumor Nadia never quite finished saying out loud, in a hallway I wasn’t supposed to be in. Someone new, kept off the roster, digging into something for months. I didn’t have a face for it then.
I got one in the supply room, the day he asked about a clean count, and I understood—clipboard still in my hand—that he hadn’t come in for an airway kit at all.
Whatever he’s been building, I’m the answer to it. He wasn’t standing behind that hardware store by accident today, and I don’t think anything since has been an accident either.
He’s taking me back to answer for it.
“You have to stop the truck.” My voice comes out steady, which has always been my one useful trick. “Please. You don’t understand what’s happening.”
He doesn’t look over. “Then tell me.”
I don’t.
Because the rest of that sentence is Serenity, and Serenity is the reason I’ve spent months being someone I don’t recognize. If Aurora finds out what I did, I’m done. And if the Syndicate finds out Aurora knows, Serenity’s done too.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Then I can’t either.” He says it like a fact that doesn’t need his opinion attached to it. And that’s when whatever’s been holding me together since the alley gives out.
“You don’t get it.” My voice climbs, and I let it climb. “There’s no time. You can’t just take me from there. I have to go back. Please. You have to let me go back—”
He glances at me, then puts his eyes back on the road. “You want to go back there? To them?”
“Yes!”
“Not happening. I’m taking you back to Aurora.”
“I can’t!” It comes out close to a scream.
“I can’t go back there.” My hands won’t stay still—the belt, the door, the belt again, useless, everywhere at once.
A truck passes going the other way and something in me lunges for it without permission, twisting toward the window, banging a flat hand against the glass hard enough to sting.
The truck doesn’t slow. Nobody looks over.
I go for the handle next. I get half an inch of give before the central locks drop under his thumb—one flat sound—and the handle stops moving.
So I hit the glass instead. Both fists. I’ve stopped forming words, just noise, enough of it that anyone with working ears should have to notice.
A sedan goes by on the other side of the road and doesn’t slow.
A truck behind it does the same. I keep hitting the window like the tenth time will do what the first nine didn’t.
“I’ll go out the window,” I say, and I mean every word of it. “The next one that comes, I’m opening it. I don’t care what speed we’re at.”
He pulls over.
For one full breath, I think I’ve won. I think he’s letting me go, and my shoulders come down from around my ears—
He kills the engine and gets out.
By the time he’s around to my side, there’s a length of rope in his hand that wasn’t there a second ago.
He doesn’t ask for my wrists. He takes them—one of his hands closes around both of mine like they’re nothing to hold onto, which apparently they are—and wraps the rope twice, one knot, while I twist against a grip that doesn’t register the effort.
Then he reaches in, gets an arm behind my knees, and hauls me straight up and over his shoulder like a roll of carpet he’s been told to move.
“No!” I fight—a knee into him, an elbow—and none of it lands anywhere that matters. My own voice sounds far away, screaming at a man who’s carrying me like I weigh nothing at all.
“You keep trying to hurt yourself,” he says, not even breathing hard, “you don’t leave me another option.”
He said he’d help. In the alley, he said he was there to help.
This isn’t what I thought that word meant.
He sets me down in the truck bed, cold metal and grit under me. A tarp comes out of the corner, and he shakes it open.
“Please don’t,” I say, and it’s the smallest my voice has been since I woke up.
He lays it over me anyway. The light goes. The tailgate slams. The engine turns over, and we’re moving again.
I work the rope in the dark, and it doesn’t give an inch. He’s left just enough room for blood, nothing more. He clearly knows how to tie someone up.
I’m not getting out of this.
That thought finally breaks something loose in me, lying in the dark with my wrists bound. The one time I was ever truly caught, I got myself out. Back at that research facility, a guard looked away at the wrong moment, and I got up and walked out.
A small part of my brain that had locked it all away is coming back to life.
The months we’d been stuck there. Clinging to each other, until they took her away.
I got out of there without her. A stroke of sheer luck that gave me an open door and a chance to use my glamour on the men who worked around us. I told myself I’d see her again.
I have spent every day since telling myself I would be the one who found her. I never once pictured ending up like this—wrists bound, a tarp over my face, heading back to certain imprisonment.
And the way he tied that knot—the way carrying me registered as nothing at all—I understand something now I didn’t back in that lane.
The first time, Aurora found me already free. Survivor. Someone worth being gentle with. That’s the woman Kaylin knows. That’s the woman Jericho nods to when he passes in the hall.
I’m not walking in as that woman this time. I’m walking in as a traitor, and there’s no version of that where anyone goes looking for my sister.
Getting free of him isn’t going to work the way getting free of the facility did. Throwing myself out of a speeding truck isn’t going to get me anywhere but dead. I’m going back there. They’re going to lock me up.
And if I’m locked up, who’s going to save Serenity?