Chapter 5
FIVE
Wren
The motorcycle screams between cars like a bullet through tissue paper, and I'm going to die clinging to a stranger's back with my laptop bag cutting into my ribs.
Kade leans hard into a turn that defies physics, and my thighs burn from gripping the bike. The wind steals my breath, my screams, everything except the raw terror of moving too fast through a world that's just tried to kill me.
A car cuts into our lane. Deliberate. Not careless.
Kade's body goes rigid beneath my arms, every muscle coiling at once. He downshifts—engine snarling—and threads the needle between the aggressor and a delivery truck. My knee barely misses the truck's bumper as we pass, so close I could read the plate if my eyes weren't squeezed shut.
"Hold on." He shouts it over his shoulder.
I want to laugh. What else would I be doing? My hands are locked around his waist like rigor mortis; my body molded to his back like we're one organism fleeing extinction.
Red light ahead.
He doesn't slow.
We blow through the intersection in a symphony of horns and squealing brakes. A sedan misses us by inches; the driver's face a pale blur through glass. My stomach drops as we go briefly airborne over a speed bump, landing hard enough to click my teeth together.
In the side mirror, I catch it: black SUV, tinted windows, keeping pace three cars back. It's been there since we left my apartment. Since we left the man zip-tied on my hallway floor. Since my life became a John Wick movie, and I am very much not John Wick.
Kade takes an off-ramp at the last possible second, tires shrieking. The SUV tries to follow but gets caught by a semi during the merge. That won't hold them long.
He hammers the off-ramp, cuts across three lanes, and ducks onto a service road I didn't even see.
Under an overpass, double back, weaving through an industrial district of loading docks and blurred warehouse walls.
Left, right, right again—turns that follow no logic I can parse.
He's not just evading. He's laying false trails.
Another check in the mirror. No SUV.
Kade doesn't relax.
We emerge onto a different highway, run it two exits in the wrong direction, and cut across to a parallel road. Ten minutes of this before he finally pulls into a gas station—circling it once, scanning sight lines—before tucking the bike behind the building near the dumpsters.
The sudden stillness after all that motion makes my ears ring.
My legs shake so badly when I try to dismount that he has to catch me, hands finding my hips before I hit the ground.
"Bathroom," I manage, and stumble toward the door marked CUSTOMERS ONLY.
The mirror shows me a stranger. Hair wild.
Eyes too wide. Yesterday's makeup smeared into something between a walk of shame and war paint.
There's blood on my sweater sleeve. Not mine.
His, or the other man's—I don't know, and I can't think about it right now.
I splash cold water on my face with shaking hands, trying to locate the woman who danced with complete abandon twelve hours ago.
She's gone.
In her place is someone who now knows what a professional killer's eyes look like up close.
When I come out, Kade's at the counter. Water bottles, protein bars, and three prepaid phones still in packaging.
He pays cash from a roll thick enough to choke someone.
The clerk doesn't look at us twice—the practiced blindness of someone who works graveyard shifts and has decided that not seeing things is a survival strategy.
Outside, he tears open a phone package with his teeth, spits the plastic, and his fingers move over the screen with the efficiency of someone who has done this exact thing many times before.
"Frost, it's Bishop." His voice drops into something clipped and professional, so different from how it sounded in the dark that I almost don't recognize it. "I need intel on Black Helix and a UX freelancer named Wren Calloway."
My name in his mouth, spoken to someone else, lands like a small shock.
He glances at me. Something apologetic moves through his expression.
"Yeah, the bar wasn't exactly empty." A pause. "It got complicated."
He ends the call and pockets the phone.
"What do you mean 'complicated'?" I push off the wall. "That's what I am? A complication from a bar—"
"That's not what I said." He runs a hand through his hair and looks at me—really looks—for the first time since we fled. Whatever he sees makes his expression shift. "Frost needs to understand what Black Helix wants with you. The more we know, the better I can protect you."
"Who's Frost? Who are you?" The questions pile up faster than I can sort them. "I heard you say Kade at the apartment. Is that even real?"
"Kade Bishop." He mounts the bike and offers me his hand. "Guardian HRS calls me Bishop."
I take his hand, swing my leg over despite every rational instinct screaming at me not to. "Like the chess piece."
"Like the chess piece." He starts the engine, raises his voice over the rumble.
"In Afghanistan, I identified an approach vector on a target—a physical position and angle of attack that every other operator on the ground had looked at and dismissed as impossible.
Wrong elevation, wrong geometry, too many obstacles in the sightline.
I spent six hours finding the one line through it that actually worked.
" A beat. "Took the shot. After that, the callsign stuck.
Bishop. The piece that moves at angles. Finds lines nobody else sees. "
He says it flat. Factual. No performance behind it. He's not trying to impress me—he's explaining the name, and the absence of ego in it makes the story land harder than any bragging would.
"Am I the king in this metaphor?"
He looks back at me, and something in his eyes makes my chest do something I don't have the bandwidth to examine right now.
"You're the whole fucking board, little bird."
Then we're moving again, but different. Surface streets, measured turns, mirrors checked with the regularity of breathing. The city thins and then drops away entirely as the road starts to climb, and my ears pop with the first real altitude change.
The mountains rise around us.
And something cold moves through me that has nothing to do with the temperature drop.
I know this part of the range. The specific angle of these ridgelines, the way the road curves left before a long straight climb, the smell of pine and cold granite mixing at exactly this elevation.
My grandmother used to drive me up through here when I was small—Sunday mornings, thermos of coffee for her, hot chocolate for me, no real destination.
Just the mountains and the quiet and her hand on the gear shift.
I haven't been back in years. Haven't had a reason.
The familiarity feels wrong now. Like standing in a house after a break-in—everything in its place, nothing safe.
I press closer to Kade's back and watch the tree line blur past.
The temperature drops with each switchback. My fingers go numb around his waist and he takes a brief stop to navigate a fallen branch across the trail, prying my cramped hands loose one finger at a time, working feeling back into them with a gentleness that doesn't fit the rest of this night.
"Almost there," he says.
I nod like I know where there is. Like I haven't handed my life to someone I know only through violence, orgasms, and forty miles of mountain road.
A cabin materializes from the forest like a held breath finally released—dark windows, weathered wood, alone enough out here that no one would hear anything at all. He parks the bike under a tarp lean-to that's invisible until you're already on top of it.
When he cuts the engine, the silence is absolute. Wind in the pines. A distant bird. My heartbeat.
He helps me off the bike. My legs hold, barely.
"My brother's place." He retrieves a key from under a rock that looks identical to every other rock. "He lets me use it during hunting season."
"It's May."
"Different kind of hunting season."
The key turns in the lock with a sound like something final, and as I follow him toward the dark doorway, a thought arrives with the force of something I should have had much earlier: I'm in the middle of nowhere with a man I barely know.
A man who neutralized a professional killer in my hallway with his bare hands.
A man who made me come four times, but whose last name I only just learned.
The sex was extraordinary. World-tilting. The kind that recalibrates you.
Ted Bundy was reportedly charming, too.
When Kade turns in the doorway, face unreadable in the dying light, shadows sharpening the line of his jaw, his eyes dark and unreadable—he's between me and the only exit. We both know I couldn't outrun him even if my legs were working at full capacity.
"Coming?" The word hangs in the air between us, carrying more weight than it should.
I look at him. Really look. The blood on his knuckles. The coiled readiness he carries in his body, even standing still. The gun barely concealed under his shirt. He saved my life—that's real. He also represents something that reached through my front door at five in the morning—that's real, too.
The forest presses in on all sides, dark and enormous.
Behind me: forty miles of mountain road back to a city where people are actively trying to kill me.
In front of me: a stranger who moves through violence the way other people move through traffic, offering shelter that could be safety or could be something else.
"Wren." His voice drops. Softer. The way it sounded last night when it was just the two of us and nothing else existed yet. "Your call."
Maybe that's what decides me. The fact that he says it like it's actually my call.
Or maybe I'm just too exhausted to run anymore.
I take a step toward him. Toward the dark doorway. Toward whatever comes next with this beautiful, dangerous man who found a line through the impossible and is currently the only thing standing between people who want me permanently silent and me.
"Yeah," I say, and follow him inside.
The door closes behind us with a sound like finality.
I can't shake the feeling that I've just made either the best or the last decision of my life.
Probably both.