Chapter 24 #4
A brittle strip of flypaper sags above the register, fluttering with the bodies of summer long past. A heap of battered shopping baskets sits by the door, warped handles jutting out like broken bones.
I grab a basket and immediately regret it. It feels like a commitment.
Coffee. Eggs. Bread that looks homemade and suspiciously dense. I stare at the labels too long, reading ingredient lists like they’re mission briefs. Sodium levels. Expiration dates. What passes for risk now.
A bell jingles behind me, and the goat comes in.
The man follows, unbothered. He nods at me like this is normal. “He don’t like bein’ left alone,” he says, as if explaining himself to a jury.
“Know how he feels,” I say.
The goat blinks its rectangular pupils at me, slow and deliberate, like it's seen enough of people to know they don't change much.
At the counter, the cashier—late sixties, hair braided tight down her back—eyes me over half-moon glasses. She rings up the goat feed first, then my groceries, tapping the keys slow and deliberate.
“You the one up at the old cabin,” she says, not a question.
I don’t answer right away. Old habits die hard.
“That one with the crooked chimney,” she adds. “Used to smoke worse than it should.”
“Still does,” I say.
She nods, satisfied. “Means it’s still standin’.”
The cash register clatters with every button, a metered, stubborn rhythm that fills the gaps in conversation.
She slides my receipt across the counter and pauses, studying my face. “You hunt?”
“No.”
“Fish?”
“No.”
She frowns. “You from around here?”
“Not really.”
Another nod, like that explains everything. “Well. Church is Sundays. Snow comes early. Don’t trust the weather report. And don’t let Earl sell you honey unless you’ve tasted it first.”
“Why?”
She leans closer. “Bees eat wild onions.”
Chuckling, I thank her and carry my bag out, the paper cutting into my fingers. The goat watches me go, unimpressed.
Outside, the air feels cleaner. Thinner. Like it hasn’t been recycled through a dozen buildings before reaching my lungs. The mountains press in on all sides, tree-covered and quiet, the kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty—just uninterested.
This is what anonymity looks like.
Back at the cabin, I unload the groceries in silence. No radio. No phone. No voice in my ear telling me what comes next. Just wind in the trees and the low thud of my boots on warped floorboards.
I should feel relieved.
Instead, I feel unmoored.
My old life ran on structure—targets, timelines, contingencies. Even chaos had rules. This doesn’t. This asks me to choose how to spend an afternoon without anyone measuring the outcome.
I sit at the table and read the Bible I picked up on the way up here but still haven’t read.
I don’t open it right away. I stare at the cover, at the clean spine that hasn’t been broken in yet. New things make me uneasy. They come with expectations.
Control. Certainty. The belief that I could think my way out of anything.
I pick up the Bible and open it without a plan.
The pages fall where they want to, thin paper whispering under my thumb. I don’t flip away. I don’t second-guess it.
My eyes land on the words, clear and unassuming.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.
I read it once.
Then again.
Trust.
No more leaning on instinct alone. No more trusting my read of a room over everything else. No more believing that preparation and force can solve every problem.
I’ve trusted my body and my training my whole life. Now both have limits—and I’m being asked to trust Someone else instead.
I say it out loud, voice rough in the quiet cabin. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart…”
The words don’t promise safety. They don’t tell me what happens next. They don’t map out the path.
They ask me to walk it anyway.
Including the waiting.
Including the possibility that trusting God means losing Adena.
My old life was built on precision, violence, and control. This one starts with surrender—and for the first time, that surrender isn’t theoretical.
It looks like a quiet cabin.
An open Bible.
And a new life, even if she’s not here to share it with me.
Adena
The Harley growls beneath me, engine rumbling deep and steady as the road curls through the mountains like a ribbon someone dropped in a hurry—narrow, cracked, climbing higher with every switchback.
My hands grip the handlebars, leather gloves worn soft from years of rides like this—away from everything, toward nothing but silence and sky.
No cell towers. No traffic. No billboards promising casino buffets or twenty-dollar oil changes. Just endless ridgelines stretching blue-green into the distance, the wind sharp and clean against my face, and the throb of the engine cutting through the kind of quiet that swallows sound whole.
Green Bank.
The National Radio Quiet Zone.
A dead zone for every signal that could be traced, triangulated, scraped, or weaponized. Perfect for scientists searching the cosmos. Perfect for people whose lives just exploded across federal servers and cartel networks in the span of a week.
I throttle down as the grade steepens, the bike leaning into the curve. Cool mountain air rushes past, smelling like pine resin, wet earth, and cold stone. It's peaceful in a way that shouldn't feel real—not after everything.
The road levels out, and ahead, the cabin comes into view—dark wood weathered silver in places, wide porch sagging slightly on one side, chimney leaning like it's considering retirement. Remote but not abandoned.
I pull off the throttle and coast the last hundred yards, gravel crunching under the tires. The engine's rumble fades to a purr, then silence as I kill it. For a moment, I just sit there, helmet still on, hands resting on the bars, letting the quiet settle over me as I try to still my nerves.
I swing my leg over the bike and pull off my helmet, shaking out my hair. The wind catches it immediately, cool fingers combing through the tangles.
The porch steps creak beneath my boots. The railing is sun-warmed under my palm, wood smooth and solid. I rest my hand there and breathe deeply, letting the mountain air fill my lungs—pine, earth, stone, sky.
The path curves past a stack of cordwood taller than I am, neatly split and stacked against the cabin's north wall. And there, in a clearing ringed by stumps and sawdust, is my husband.
He's dressed like a lumberjack, hair chopped to above his chin, a beard covering half his face, plaid shirt hiding his ink.
But it's his hands that stop me cold. They're shaking as he works a maul against another log, splitting it with methodical, almost violent precision.
Split. Stack. Repeat. Like he's been doing this for hours without stopping.
His footprints are worn into the earth around the woodpile—a circular, anxious path.
When he finally sees me, he freezes. The maul hangs at his side. For a long moment, he just stares, and I watch him try to reconstruct whatever walls he's been tearing down all week.
There's no hesitation in his expression, no question. Just relief so raw it makes my throat tight—like seeing me here just answered something he's been asking himself since we were ripped apart in Vegas.
"You came," he says. His voice cracks slightly. He clears his throat, trying again. "You came."
I try for a casual shrug, but I can't quite make it work. "Someone has to watch your back," I say.
He sets down the maul with deliberate care, like his hands need something to do besides reach for me. "You refused to sign the annulment papers." It's not a question. He's been waiting for this conversation since Ben called him with the news. "Why?"
I pull the unsigned papers from my jacket pocket and hold them out. They flutter slightly in the mountain breeze.
"Because the moment I walk away, you disappear," I say quietly.
He stares at the papers like they're a bomb that might detonate if he touches them. His jaw works. "You don't understand what you're—"
"I understand perfectly." I fold the papers back up and pull out a lighter and walk past him toward the cabin's outdoor fire pit. He moves to stop me, but he doesn't. Not quite. Just follows like a man watching the last part of himself burn.
I light the papers. They catch immediately, orange flames eating through the words that would have freed me. We watch them blacken and curl, turning to ash that the wind scatters across the clearing.
When they're gone, he turns away. His shoulders heave once, sharp and brutal.
"Don't do this," he says, his voice rough as gravel. "Don't do this to yourself, Tiger. I'm not worth the trouble."
"You still don't get it, do you?" I ask quietly.
He turns back to face me, and the look in his eyes is devastating—anger and desperation and something that looks a lot like shame all tangled together.
"The cartel knows your name. They know we're married.
If you stay, you're not just marrying me—you're tying yourself to a man who could bring that door down at any second, and when it happens, you could die because of me.
Do you understand that? Do you actually comprehend what it means to love someone like me? "
My throat tightens, but I don't look away. "I'm tying myself to you, Jagger—all of you. I'm choosing that over simplicity, over a normal life, over safety. But I'm choosing it awake. I'm choosing it deliberately. And I won't let you talk me out of it."
For a moment, he doesn't move. Then he comes toward me like a man crossing a minefield, each step careful and controlled. He's trying to rebuild the walls even as I'm tearing them down, but I can see them crumbling faster than he can construct them.
He drags a hand over his face, then pulls me into his chest like he's afraid I'll vanish if he loosens his grip. Like he still doesn't believe I'm real.
His voice comes out a growl against the top of my head. "I don't know what I did to have you in my corner, but—" He swallows hard, and I feel his hands shake against my back. "I'm going to learn to be the man you deserve instead of the man I am. That's what I'm promising you."
I don't try to be tough. I don't try to wipe my tears away when they come. I just let his embrace engulf me, and I feel the tension in his body slowly, incrementally ease—like he's finally allowing himself to believe I'm not going to change my mind.
A sound carries on the wind then, distant but distinct. An engine. Both of us freeze simultaneously. His hand moves instinctively to protect my head, pressing me against his chest as his eyes scan the tree line.
The engine sound fades, disappearing down a distant road. Not heading toward us.
Not this time.
When I look up at him, he's already looking at me. His eyes are still dark, still haunted, but there's something else there now too—a kind of steady resolve that wasn't there before.
We stand for a long moment in the mountain clearing, surrounded by split wood and sawdust and the weight of every choice we've made.
I'm tying myself to a man whose name is burned in federal files and cartel networks. Whose past is written in bodies and blood. I'm choosing him—and everything that comes with him—over safety, over simplicity, over the reasonable, rational life I could have had.
I don’t know what the future holds.
But I know this: Jagger Rourke may not be who anyone else would have chosen for me—but, for better or worse, he is the man God chose.
And when the reckoning comes—and it will come—we’ll face it together.
Till death do we part.