Chapter 18 Cash Only
EIGHTEEN
CASH ONLY
LARK
We roll into the kind of roadside hotel that looks like it’s seen three divorces, a meth bust, and at least one ghost who refuses to move on out of spite.
Perfect.
Knight kills the engine two blocks away and makes us walk the rest of the distance, hood up, hats low, duffel heavy on my shoulder. The car’s too recognizable now. Too loud. Too us.
We’re not us tonight.
Tonight we’re two tired strangers with a single bag and the kind of paranoia that makes your bones buzz.
The neon sign outside flickers between VACANCY and VAC_NCY, like even the electricity is exhausted.
Knight ventures in alone first. Because of course he does. Because in every crisis, his default setting is shield her, even when I’m the one who bashes skulls with a bat and knows Krav Maga.
I wait by the soda machine that survived the Reagan administration, pretending to scroll on a dead phone while my eyes track every car that rolls through the lot.
A minivan. A delivery truck. A guy in pajama pants smoking like he’s mad at the air.
No one looks twice at me. But I feel like a target anyway.
I’m still hearing the cabin crash in my head. The splintered door. The muzzle flash. The moment we stopped being hidden and became hunted.
Knight reappears with a key card and a receipt. “Room 112,” he says low. “Cash. No IDs. One night.”
“Bless the morally flexible,” I murmur.
His mouth twitches, but his eyes stay sharp.
We move fast.
Room 112 is on the ground floor, which I hate, but Knight insisted on it because he wants sight lines and quick exits. He checks the curtain gap before we even step inside, then makes me stand behind him while he sweeps the room.
Bathroom. Closet. Under the bed. Like hitmen are going to be folded up in the mattress like fitted sheets.
Still.
I let him do it.
Sometimes love looks like letting a man pretend he can control the uncontrollable.
“Clear,” he says.
I close the door behind us, double-lock it, and slide the chain across with a soft metallic click.
The silence that follows is brutal.
The room is dim and stale, decorated in aggressive beige. The bedspread smells like industrial detergent and regret. The air conditioner rattles like it’s trying to disassemble itself.
I drop the duffel on the second bed and exhale.
Knight reaches up and peels off his hat, then runs a hand down his face like he’s trying to reset his nervous system manually.
“Okay,” I say quietly.
He looks at me. “What?” he asks.
“We’re alive,” I say. “That’s something.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t sound convinced.
I cross the space and hook my fingers into his hoodie, tugging him closer. “You did good,” I say.
His brow furrows. “We’re in a random hotel with a bounty that just escalated and two guys back at the cabin who’ll probably never walk again.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I say, pressing my forehead to his chest. “You got us out. You didn’t freeze. You didn’t go full martyr. You didn’t try to be a lone-wolf tragedy.”
His arms come around me, slow and tight, like he’s reminding himself I’m real. “Don’t give me credit for basic survival,” he mutters.
“Too late.”
He exhales against my hair. “We need Arrow,” he says.
“I know.”
We can’t use our usual encrypted channels without risking a trace from this location. So Knight pulls a cheap burner out of the duffel—one we bought three towns back at a gas station with a “no refunds” sign and a clerk who looked like he’d seen the end of the world and yawned.
Knight pops the battery in, thumbs flying. “Signal’s weak,” he murmurs.
“Welcome to murder-budget hospitality.”
He snorts, then dials.
One ring.
Two.
A coded tone.
Arrow picks up instantly. “Hey, you alive?” he asks.
His voice is calm, but I can hear the tension underneath it. Arrow calm is the kind that comes with a locked jaw and a plan already halfway to execution.
“We got hit,” Knight says.
A pause.
“What? How?”
“Four inside, at least a few outside,” Knight replies. “Suppressors. They knew the layout. Called me Hayes. We evacuated. Cabin’s compromised.”
“And now?”
Knight’s gaze flicks to me.
I give him a small nod.
“Temporary safe stop,” he says carefully. “Not staying past sunrise. We’re a moving target.”
Arrow exhales. “Fuck. You injured?”
“Bruised. Lark’s clean.”
“I’m not ‘clean,’” I mutter. “I’m furious.”
Knight’s mouth twitches.
Arrow must hear it because his voice softens a fraction.
“Good. Stay that way. It keeps you sharp.”
Knight pulls the phone a little closer. “There’s something else,” he says.
“What?”
We exchanged this information in the car—half shouted over engine noise and adrenaline—so now Knight delivers it cleanly.
“We overheard a name in the cabin,” he says. “Not Luka’s. Not Helios. A woman. Serafina.”
Silence.
So immediate and heavy it makes my spine tighten.
“What did you say?” Arrow asks.
“Serafina,” Knight repeats. “And a tag: NS-11.”
I glance at Knight.
His expression is unreadable.
But the tension in his shoulders says he feels it too—the moment you say something that changes the game.
Arrow doesn’t answer right away.
Instead, I hear movement on his end. A chair scrape. The soft murmur of voices.
Then Arrow says, “I’m patching Dean in.”
A beat later, a new voice joins the call.
“Knight,” Dean Maddox says. “Lark.”
“Dean,” Knight replies.
My mouth goes dry.
I’ve met Dean, technically. At Gage and River’s chaos-HEA era. But hearing him now—like this—makes him feel less like a legend and more like a man about to decide whether we’re a problem or an asset.
“Tell me exactly what you heard,” Dean says.
Knight repeats it. Slow. Precise.
“Serafina. NS-11.”
Another pause.
Then Dean says the words that make the hotel room feel colder:
“Northstar.”
“What the hell is Northstar?” Knight asks.
Dean doesn’t answer in one clean sentence. He answers like this is an old wound he keeps a bandage on because looking at it hurts. “Northstar was an operation that went south years ago,” Dean says. “Black-ops-adjacent. The kind of work that gets buried under paperwork and deniability.”
Arrow adds quietly, “The kind of work that creates enemies who don’t stop.”
“Serafina was tied to it?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dean says. “She believes I’m responsible for what she lost. Some of that is true. Some of it… isn’t that simple.”
“That’s a very dramatic non-answer,” I mutter.
Knight squeezes my shoulder like he approves.
Dean doesn’t sound offended. He sounds tired. “She’s out for payback,” he says plainly. “And if you heard her name attached to your hit, it means she’s either collaborating with Luka’s network or piggybacking on it.”
Knight’s eyes narrow. “Why would she care about us?”
“Because you’re part of the ecosystem,” Arrow says. “You’re connected to us. You were in the River op. The Juno op. You’ve destabilized a lot of bad systems. That gets noticed.”
“And because Serafina doesn’t just want me,” Dean adds. “She wants to dismantle what I protect.”
My stomach flips.
I hate that I understand that kind of revenge.
It’s not rational.
It’s emotional math.
Hurt me by hurting everything I love.
Knight shifts, one hand still around me, the other braced on the nightstand like he’s anchoring himself.
“She attacked Rae, River’s friend,” I say, because Arrow hinted at it earlier in the group channel before we went fully dark.
“Correct,” Dean says.
My heart tightens.
Rae Diaz is the kind of woman I’d trust with my life in a burning building and still expect her to make a joke about my exit strategy.
“She was on vacation,” Arrow adds. “Low profile. Supposed to be safe.”
“Serafina found her anyway,” Dean says. “Rae got out—barely. Holden was with her.”
“Holden?” I repeat.
“New brAVO addition,” Dean replies. “Ex-military. Good instincts. Fast hands. He helped Rae extract.”
Knight goes quiet in that way he does when he’s processing threat models in real time. “So this isn’t just a Luka bounty,” he says slowly. “It’s a… layered hit.”
“Yes,” Dean says.
“And Northstar is the reason?”
“It’s one reason,” Dean corrects. “Serafina is a catalyst. Luka is an opportunist. And you two are high-value because you’ve become visible.”
I feel Knight’s jaw clench.
I can almost see the gears turning.
“Okay,” Knight says. “What do you need from us?”
Dean doesn’t hesitate. “Move,” he says. “Not to another random hotel. To a controlled node.”
“Meaning brAVO safehouse?” Knight asks.
“Meaning a place we can secure without putting you on a parade float,” Arrow says. “We’ll send a drop route. You’ll get it in pieces. No single message holds the full location.”
“That’s insane,” I say.
“That’s survival,” Dean replies.
I exhale shakily. “Dean,” I say, “if Serafina is targeting you and your network, why would she loop into Luka’s bounty board instead of just hitting you directly?”
“Because she wants a narrative,” Dean says. “Not just an outcome. She wants chaos. Distrust. Public spectacle. Fear.”
Knight lets out a low breath. “Classic villain PR strategy.”
“Don’t joke,” I say automatically.
He tilts his head toward me. “I’m not joking,” he says. “I’m naming the pattern so we can break it.”
That’s the Knight I know.
The man who turns emotion into strategy.
Then he looks down at the burner.
“Arrow,” he says, “get us that route. We’ll be outta here within the hour.”
“You got it.”
Dean’s voice softens just a fraction. “You two did well surviving the initial contact,” he says. “But don’t mistake that for momentum. If Serafina is involved, this isn’t going to stay small.”
“Understood,” Knight says.
“Lark,” Dean adds.
“Yeah?”
“Trust your instincts,” he says. “You’re alive because you do.”
I swallow. “Okay.”
The call ends with a clean click.
Knight sets the burner down like it weighs fifty pounds.
For a second we just stand there in this ugly hotel room, breathing the same air, hearing the same hum of the air conditioner, feeling the shape of our world tilt.
“Northstar,” I murmur.
He nods once. “Bigger board,” he says.
“Bigger monsters.”
He turns to me fully, hands sliding to my hips, steadying me. “We’re going to be okay,” he says.
I lift a brow. “That sounded like you trying to convince yourself.”
“Maybe.” His mouth twitches. “But I’m also very good at being right.”
I laugh once, short and shaky. “Do you think Gage knows about… any of this?”
“Gage knows enough to be dangerous,” Knight says. “Not enough to connect this thread yet.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. “Because if Serafina is hunting Dean—”
“Then everyone connected to Dean is a chess piece,” Knight finishes.
“And Luka just put a price tag on the board.”
He nods. Then his expression shifts—sharpens. He reaches for the duffel again, methodical now. “Okay,” he says. “We’ve got maybe forty minutes before we move. We need a faster exit plan than the front door. We need fresh clothes. We need to kill any pattern.”
I stare. “How do you get so calm so fast?”
He pauses. “Because you’re watching me,” he says simply. “And I refuse to be the man you regret trusting.”
My chest tightens. “Knight—”
He steps closer. His voice drops. “Listen to me, Birdie. Northstar, Serafina, Luka—whatever name they want to wrap around this—none of it changes the core truth.”
“What truth?”
He cups my face with both hands, steady and warm. “That you’re not prey,” he says. “And I’m not done building a future with you.”
I swallow. My throat is too full of feelings for words. So I do the only thing that makes sense.
I kiss him. It’s a kiss that says we’re still here.
He kisses me back with that same desperate certainty, like he can lock us together hard enough to keep the world out.
When we break apart, he rests his forehead against mine. “Okay,” he murmurs. “We run smart now.”
“Together,” I say.
“Always.” He grabs the burner again.
I grab the bat.
And the two of us start packing our survival into one bag like this is just another night. Like hit lists and ancient ops and revenge ghosts are problems we can solve. Maybe that’s delusional. Maybe it’s the only reason we’re still breathing.
Either way—
We’re done hiding.
We’re going to end this.
Before Northstar turns our love story into a body count.