Chapter 15 Bounties & Breakfast #2
“Option two,” another security specialist chimes in.
I think his name is Orion. “You move. Full ghost. No more comfort, no more internet drops, no more coordinated check-ins. You go dark, live like ghosts for a while. Upside: harder to hit a moving target. Downside: harder for us to help if something goes sideways. And if you trip one of Luka’s people offline, we might not know until it’s too late. ”
They look at me.
Like I’m the one who gets to make the call.
Like I’m not currently held together with tape and Lark’s hands.
“Can we outrun this?” I ask. “Realistically.”
Dean is quiet for a moment. Then: “No. Not permanently.”
Not what I wanted to hear.
“But you can pick the terrain,” he adds.
“You can decide whether they come at you in a forest we control eyes on, or in a city where any car could be theirs. My recommendation? You stay put for the next forty-eight. Let us see who moves where when the bounty jump hits wider channels. If we’re lucky, the worst of them will get scooped on other jobs or spooked by the chatter. ”
“And if we’re not lucky?” I ask.
“Then we adjust,” he says. “Fast.”
Arrow’s gaze softens just a fraction. “We’re not leaving you out there, man,” he says. “You and Lark helped save River. You helped Juno. You helped half the people on our current client list without asking for anything back. We’re in this with you. You’re not soloing the boss level.”
“Great,” I say. “Then let me be honest about how this feels.”
Ozzy lifts his mug. “By all means. Honest Knight is my favorite Knight.”
“This feels like we’re bait,” I say. “Dangling in front of every shark who’s ever wanted to take a bite at Mask and whoever’s stupid enough to stand next to him.”
“Not bait,” Dean says. “But yes, visible. And sometimes visibility is leverage. Luka can’t resist flexing. If he moves too aggressively, we tag more of his people. More operations. More shell companies. He’s pissed enough at you two to make mistakes.”
“He already made one,” Arrow adds. “He tied his Helios identity too close to this run. We’ve got enough now that when we do move? It’ll hurt.”
What he’s leaving unsaid is if you survive long enough for that to matter.
I drag a hand down my face.
There’s movement in the doorway behind the tablet.
I glance back.
Lark stands there in my t-shirt and shorts, hair up in a messy knot, mug cradled in both hands. Her eyes are huge.
She heard enough.
Of course she did.
I mute my mic.
“Eavesdropping?” I ask, trying for light and landing somewhere near strained.
She lifts one shoulder. “Doors in this cabin are made of tissue paper.”
Fair.
I tilt the screen so she can see. “You’re on with Arrow, Dean, and everyone else.”
“Hey, Lark,” Arrow says. “Love what you’ve done with the safe house.”
“Hi, Lark,” Ozzy adds. “Just so you know, we’re strongly against you getting murdered. Official team stance.”
Lark musters a small, crooked smile. “Good to be wanted. In a non-murder way.”
“How you holding up?” Gage asks, his voice pitched low.
Lark shrugs. “I’m good. Promise.”
Dean inclines his head. “Ms. Dawson.”
She shifts closer, hip brushing my shoulder as she leans in.
“I take it our vibes are not immaculate?” she says.
“Depends on how you feel about being slightly more popular on the dark web than you were yesterday,” Ozzy says.
She looks at me, silently asking.
I don’t sugarcoat. “Luka doubled the bounty,” I say. “More people looking. Worse people.”
Her fingers tighten around the mug. There’s a flicker of fear in her eyes. Also something else.
Anger.
“So what?” she says after a beat. “We run? Hide until he gets bored? Hope he cancels the listing because we’re not fun anymore?”
“Nobody here is suggesting waiting for Luka to get bored,” Dean says. “We’re working angles. We just need you to be alive long enough to cash in on them.”
“Recommend you both stay put for now,” Ranger adds. “We’ve got better sight lines on you here. You move, we lose control.”
Lark nods slowly, absorbing it. “So we’re… what, exactly?” she asks. “Sitting ducks with no Wi-Fi?”
“Ducks with teeth,” I say.
She snorts. “That’s not how ducks work.”
“It is in my metaphor.”
She looks at the screen again. “What can we do on our end?” she asks. “Besides panic and make out?”
Arrow chokes on nothing. Ozzy grins. Dean’s eyebrows go up a hair. And Gage just stares, blinking. He hisses low and deep.
“You better not be making out with my sister,” he growls.
I want to tell him I’m not, but I also don’t want to lie to him. Thankfully, Dean interjects.
He clears his throat, dragging the conversation back on track by sheer force of will.
“You can do three things,” he says. “One: stay alert. Knight knows the drill—perimeter checks, sight lines, no predictable routines. Two: dig. The more you two can uncover about Luka’s local footprint from that side, the better.
There’s only so much we can see from here.
Three: rest when you can. You’re no good to anyone burnt out. ”
“Copy that,” Lark says. She looks at me then. Really looks.
I see the fear in the tightness of her mouth. The determination in the line of her shoulders. And under it all, the same stubborn streak I’ve always loved and always cursed. “Are you okay staying here?” I ask her quietly, forgetting for a second that a bunch of sets of eyes are still on us.
She thinks. “I’m not okay anywhere someone wants me dead,” she says honestly. “But if the choice is running blind or hunkering down where we at least have eyes, I vote hunker.”
“You sure?” I press.
“Knight.” She nudges my leg with her knee. “I’m scared. That doesn’t mean I want to bolt. You don’t get to lock me in the metaphorical car now.”
Arrow smirks. “She got you there.”
“Shut up,” I tell him.
Dean steps back into frame. “We’ll update you the second we have anything actionable,” he says. “Until then, you have your parameters. You’re not alone in this, Knight. Remember that.”
I nod once.
We sign off.
The connection drops with a little click that sounds louder than it should.
Silence settles over the room.
Lark exhales, shoulders slumping. “Sixty Bitcoin,” she says, staring at the dead screen. “That’s like… what? A billion dollars?”
“Not quite,” I say. “But enough to motivate people who shouldn’t be motivated.”
She walks around the crate to sit on the edge of the bed, mug cupped in both hands, staring at the floor.
For once, she’s not cracking jokes.
I sit beside her, close enough that our knees touch. My brain runs laps.
Stay.
Run.
Stay and maybe get pinned.
Run and maybe walk into something worse.
Neither option feels good.
Both feel better than being apart.
“What are you thinking?” she asks quietly.
“Honestly?” I blow out a breath. “I’m thinking about the difference between being hunted and being on a hunt.”
She tilts her head.
“I don’t like feeling like prey,” I say. “That’s not how we built this thing. We go after people. We set traps. We bait. We don’t wait around hoping not to get shot.”
“We don’t usually have our faces on a hit list while we do it, either,” she points out.
“Minor detail.”
She bumps her shoulder against mine. “You want to run,” she guesses. “Change locations. Make them work for it.”
“I want options,” I say. “Right now we have exactly two and both suck.”
She studies me for a long moment. “I’ll go where you go,” she says simply. “If you think staying is best, we stay. If you think running gives us a better chance, we run. I’ll bitch about the lack of showers either way, but I’m in.”
It hits me harder than any vow she could’ve made.
“I don’t want you to just follow my lead because you love me,” I say. The word still feels new in my mouth—awkward and precious. “I want you to push back if you think I’m wrong.”
“Oh, trust me,” she says dryly. “I will. But right now? I don’t know enough about the world these people operate in to make a better call than Dean and Arrow. If they say stay, I say stay. And if it starts feeling too much like ‘bait’ instead of ‘position,’ we re-evaluate. Together.”
Together.
The word settles something in me.
I wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her in. She comes willingly, tucking herself against my side, head resting on my shoulder. Her hair brushes my jaw; she smells like coffee and sleep and the faint floral of whatever soap the cabin came stocked with.
“I hate this,” she says into my shirt. “I hate that someone is out there raising my price like I’m some limited-edition Funko Pop.”
“They picked the wrong girl to commodify,” I say.
“Damn right.” Her hand finds mine, fingers weaving. “Hey, Knight?” she murmurs after a beat.
“Yeah?”
“Promise me something.”
“Careful,” I say. “You’re going to end up with a contract.”
She elbows me lightly. “Promise me that if this gets worse—like, really worse—you won’t try to shove me out of the way and go lone wolf,” she says.
“I know your type. You’ll decide the noble thing is to sacrifice yourself and ‘take them down from the inside’ or some bullshit.
And I’ll be here, furious and useless and planning suboptimal revenge. ”
Part of me wants to give her a clean promise.
The other part knows what I’m capable of when people I love are in danger.
“I’ll promise you this,” I say instead. “I will not make any big, stupid, martyrdom-level decisions without talking to you first. No disappearing, no ‘for your own good’ vanish, no solo ops. If I do something idiotic, you’ll be cc’d.”
She considers that. “Not perfect,” she says. “But better than what I expected. I’ll take it.” She squeezes my hand.
“And you promise me something,” I add.
“What?”
“If it comes to a moment where it’s you or me,” I say quietly, “you pick you. Every time. No arguments. No cinematic ‘we go together’ bullshit. You run. You live. You build something new. You piss on Luka’s grave when they finally put him in one.”
Her head snaps up. “Wow,” she says. “Hate that. Absolutely do not accept. Try again.”
“Lark—”
“Nope.” She twists, sliding one leg across my lap so she’s straddling me, hands braced on my shoulders. Her eyes are fierce now. “We’re not doing the ‘if I die, live a beautiful life without me’ script. I want the ‘we both live, make them regret ever breathing our names, and get a dog’ script.”
Despite the pounding in my chest, I feel my mouth twitch.
“A dog, huh?” I ask.
“Don’t dodge,” she warns. “Promise me you won’t throw yourself on any metaphoric grenades without at least letting me help redirect the shrapnel.”
“You have a very specific fantasy life,” I say.
“Knight.”
She’s not letting this go.
I’m not sure I want her to.
“Fine,” I say. “I promise… to try very hard not to go full sacrificial idiot. I promise to remember that my life is not some disposable asset. And I promise to factor in the part where you will absolutely haunt me if I screw this up.”
Her expression softens. “That’s all I ask,” she says. She leans in and kisses me, slow and sure.
For a moment, the bounty, the mob boss, the hitmen— all of it recedes.
It’s just her.
It’s always just her.
When she pulls back, she rests her forehead against mine. “We stay,” she says softly. “We work. We wait. We trust the people who’ve never let us down yet. And when this is over, we make Luka regret ever typing your alias into his little murder board.”
“Helios,” I mutter. “That pretentious prick.”