Chapter 24
Mia
The metal pressed against my skull.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The roof of the car had collapsed inward, crushing down on me inch by inch, and my legs were pinned beneath the crumpled dashboard. Blood ran warm down my face, pooling in the hollow of my throat.
But something was wrong.
Trees surrounded the car. Tall pines, their branches scraping against the shattered windows like skeletal fingers. This wasn’t the road outside Billings. This wasn’t black ice and January cold. This was a forest—Oliver’s forest—and somewhere beyond the broken glass, I could hear his voice.
“Ten… Nine… Eight…”
The counting echoed through the trees, calm and measured, the way he’d announced the hunt. The way he’d smiled when he said my name.
I tried to scream. My mouth opened, my throat strained, but no sound came out. Just silence where there should have been terror.
“Seven… Six… Five…”
The walls pressed closer. Metal groaned and shrieked as the car compressed around me, the space growing smaller with each number. I clawed at the door, at the window, at anything I could reach, but my arms wouldn’t work right. Too heavy. Too slow.
“Four… Three… Two…”
A face appeared at the shattered window. Pale eyes. That cultured smile that never reached them.
“Run, little prey.”
The car folded in on itself. Metal met metal, closing like a coffin, like a fist, like the closet at the compound where I’d screamed myself raw—
I woke up fighting.
My hands clawed at sheets instead of metal, my body jackknifing upward as a scream finally tore free from my throat. The sound was raw and broken, nothing like a voice, more like something being ripped out of me.
Arms wrapped around me. Strong and solid and warm.
“You’re safe.” Coop’s voice cut through the panic, low and steady. “You’re out. I’ve got you.”
I grabbed on to him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had liquefied.
My fingers twisted in his shirt, the fabric bunching in my fists as I pressed my face against his chest. His heart beat steadily beneath my ear—thump, thump, thump—a rhythm I could anchor myself to while my own pulse screamed chaos.
“Breathe,” he said. He moved his hand up and down my spine, slow and even. “Just breathe. You’re in my house. You’re safe. Oliver can’t touch you here.”
I tried. God, I tried. But my lungs wouldn’t cooperate, hitching and stuttering with each attempt. The phantom pressure of metal still pressed against my skull. I could still hear the counting, feel the walls closing in.
“Match me, Kitten.” His chest expanded against my cheek, slow and deliberate. “In…and out. That’s it. In…and out.”
Kitten. I latched on to the silly nickname that had always meant so much to me.
Minutes passed. Maybe longer. Time had gone slippery, the way it always did after the dreams. Eventually, my breathing steadied, syncing with his, my body remembering how to function without the adrenaline screaming through every cell.
Neither of us reached for the lamp.
The dark felt safer somehow. Softer. Like a blanket we could hide beneath while we said things that daylight would make too sharp.
“The nightmare’s changing,” I finally said, my voice still rough from the scream. “It used to just be the accident. The road, the ice, the car crushing in. But now…”
I trailed off, not sure how to explain it. How Oliver’s world had invaded my oldest nightmare, the two bleeding together until I couldn’t separate them. How Oliver’s face had replaced the anonymous darkness that used to wait outside the shattered windows of that car I’d been trapped in.
“Now I’m in it,” Coop said. Not a question.
“Not you exactly. Your world. The forest. The hunt. Oliver’s voice counting down.” I pulled back just enough to look at Coop, though I could barely make out his features. Only the shadow of his jaw, the glint of his eyes. “It’s like my nightmares have absorbed yours.”
His hand stilled on my back. I felt the weight of what I’d said settle between us—the way our damage had merged, tangled together until it was impossible to tell where mine ended and his began.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out heavy. “I brought him into your life. Into your head.”
“You did. I know that. But Oliver is the monster here, not you.” I pressed my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heart. Still steady. Still there. “You brought me into his world. But you also brought me out. I’m choosing to hold on to that.”
Silence stretched between us, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Just full. Full of everything we’d already said in stolen moments over the past couple weeks, full of confessions and explanations and the slow, painful work of understanding. Of growing together.
“I’m terrified,” I admitted. “Not just of Oliver. Not just of what happened. Not even of you going back undercover.”
“What else?”
I could have lied. Could have deflected, the way I’d learned to do in the years after he left. Build the walls higher. Don’t let anyone see the soft places.
But we were past that now.
“Of losing you again. Not physically, although yes, I’m terrified of something happening to you while you’re back under.
” The words scraped at my soul on the way out.
“But…of the fact that I let you back in. All the way in. You left me once because things got really hard and dark for you. I’m afraid of that happening again. ”
“Mia—”
“There’s more than one way of you not coming back to me.
When you were in the military, I always knew you might not come home.
I didn’t like to think about it, but I knew it was a possibility.
That I might get that call no loved one ever wants to get.
But then I discovered you might make it out alive and still not make it back to me. ”
His arms tightened around me. Not a flinch, not a retreat—just a pull, drawing me closer, as if he could absorb my fear through proximity.
“You’re right.”
“I know why you have to go tomorrow. I understand it. I’m not asking you to stay—I want Oliver permanently out of our lives too.” I lifted my head, trying to find his eyes. “But I’m terrified that one way or another, you might not make it all the way back to me.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough.
“I spent six years telling myself I did the right thing. Leaving you. Protecting you from what I’d become.” His hand came up to cup the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. “I knew it was a lie, but I told it anyway because the truth was worse.”
“What truth?”
“That I was a coward. That I was so afraid of you seeing me broken that I chose to break us instead.”
We’d talked about what had happened to him before.
In the car on the way to Oliver’s compound, in the cabin during stolen moments when the cameras weren’t watching.
I knew the story—the mission, his friends dying, Danny’s suicide, the spiral that followed.
I understood it now in a way I hadn’t been able to when it first happened, when all I knew was that the man I loved had vanished without a word.
But understanding didn’t erase the loss.
“I fell apart anyway,” I said quietly. “After you left. I fell apart, and I did it alone.”
The words hung between us, carrying the weight not just of four hours trapped in crushed metal, but of years building a life around the spaces where he should have been.
“I know.” His voice cracked on the words. “God, Mia, I know.”
“I’m not saying it to hurt you.” I shifted closer, pressing my forehead against his. “I’m saying it because…we could have fallen apart together. We could have been broken in the same room instead of in different parts of the country.”
“I should have stayed.” It wasn’t a defense. Wasn’t an explanation. Just acknowledgment, raw and unvarnished.
“Yes. You should have.”
We breathed together in the dark, the rhythm we’d found during my panic still holding.
“I can’t undo it,” he said. “Can’t give you back those years. Can’t un-break the things I broke.”
“I know.”
“But I can promise you I’m coming back.”
He brushed his thumbs across my cheekbones with a tenderness that made my chest ache.
“Don’t just come back. You technically came back from that last deployment.
” The words came out before I could second-guess them.
“I want you to promise me that whatever you have to become with Oliver, whatever you have to do to survive it—don’t disappear on me.
Don’t decide you’re protecting me by walking away. ”
“I won’t.” The fierceness in his voice stopped me short. “Mia, I swear to you. I’m coming back, completely and fully. And when this is over, I’m not leaving again. Not ever.”
I wanted to believe him. Wanted it so badly that the wanting was its own kind of ache.
So I chose to. Felt the decision settle into my bones like something clicking into place. Not blind faith—I’d learned better than that. But deliberate trust. The kind you offered someone with your eyes open, knowing they could hurt you, choosing to be vulnerable anyway.
He kissed me then. Soft at first, almost tentative, like he was asking permission. I answered by threading my fingers through his hair and pulling him closer.
The kiss deepened slowly. None of the desperation from before, none of the urgency that had driven us together in the cabin while the storm raged and the cameras were blind. This was something different. Something unhurried.
He moved his hands down my body, tracing the curve of my shoulder, the dip of my waist, the flare of my hip.
Every touch deliberate. Intentional. Like he was learning me all over again, cataloging each response—the hitch in my breath when his thumb brushed the sensitive skin below my ribs, the way I arched into him when his palm flattened against my lower back.
I pulled at his shirt and he helped me remove it, then did the same with mine. The rest followed. Skin against skin, warmth spreading everywhere we touched.