Chapter 30
Maybe Is Not a Plan
NICK
The sound climbed through the floorboards in a low, uneven vibration and settled behind my ribs. Diesel. Cold metal. Morning air not yet warmed by the sun. The kind of hour when the reserve held its breath before the birds started lying to everyone about a fresh start.
I sat against the headboard with my left leg bent, my right stretched out, and my forearm bandaged from wrist to elbow.
The gauze pulled every time I flexed my hand.
Dried antiseptic tightened the skin beneath it.
My shirt hung over the chair by the foot of the bed where I had dropped it sometime after Juliette had stopped shaking and started sleeping.
She lay on her side beside me, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, hair loose across the pillow, the sheet pulled high over one shoulder.
The gray light softened nothing about her.
Even asleep, Juliette Wilder looked like someone who had negotiated with exhaustion and allowed it temporary access under strict conditions.
The radio sat on the small table near the bed. Silent for now.
Below, the engine turned over again.
I knew the schedule. First vehicle staged at 0530. Second at 0545. Front escort through the south road, rear escort staggered by three minutes. Bags checked before loading. Manifest confirmed against departure order. Gate opened only after Daniel cleared the bend beyond the low causeway.
Juliette was on the first vehicle.
My call.
My lie dressed well enough to pass inspection.
The mattress shifted beside me. Juliette’s breathing changed before she moved, that small catch between sleep and awareness. Her fingers curled against the pillow. Then her eyes opened.
She did not startle. Of course she didn’t. She looked at me, then the door, then the radio, then my bare chest and the bandage. Her mouth tightened by a fraction.
“You should sleep,” she said.
My throat had gone rough from disuse. “So should you.”
Her gaze held mine. “That is not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
The corner of her mouth moved, without becoming a smile. “Efficient. Unsatisfying.”
“Consistent.”
Static broke from the table.
I did not look at it.
“Base to Mercer,” Sarah said. “First vehicle is staged.”
Juliette went still.
Outside, someone shut a vehicle door. A low voice carried across the courtyard, too muffled to distinguish words. The lodge had begun moving again. Staff on half sleep. Guests managed into polite alarm. Rangers pretending fatigue was a scheduling issue.
The radio clicked once more. “Mercer, do you copy?”
My shirt waited on the chair, charcoal and folded over itself, civilized enough to make the morning look manageable.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood. The floor was cold beneath my feet, my shoulder burned where I had taken too much impact the night before, and the cut on my arm pulsed under the bandage with a dull insistence that made every ordinary movement feel borrowed.
The engine kept running below.
I reached for the shirt.
My hand stopped before I touched the fabric.
Juliette sat up behind me. The sheet rustled against her skin.
The command was simple. Shirt on. Radio up. Vehicle out.
My hand stayed where it was.
“Nick.”
One word. No pressure. No rescue. Bloody inconvenient woman.
I picked up the radio.
“Hold the vehicle,” I said.
A brief silence answered.
Sarah’s voice came back flatter than before. “For how long?”
I looked at the window, where dawn pressed pale and thin against the glass. “Ten minutes.”
“Copy.”
The radio went dead.
Behind me, Juliette drew the sheet higher under her arms. “That will start gossip.”
“Sarah already knows.”
“Sarah knows everything.”
“Sarah suspects everything. Different skill set.”
“Useful one.”
I turned. Juliette sat in my bed with a bruise darkening near her collarbone, her hair in wild disarray, and her expression locked down so tightly it made my hands ache. She looked like she could leave bleeding and make it look like a calendar item.
I had made a profession of getting people out safely.
This morning, safety looked too much like cowardice.
“I put you on the first vehicle.”
Her fingers tightened once in the sheet. Nothing else moved.
“I know.”
“It was the clean version.”
“Of what?” she asked.
I looked toward the window. The engine kept running below.
“Leaving before I had to ask for anything.”
Her fingers loosened against the sheet, then tightened again.
“I’m still getting in that vehicle, Nick.”
“I know.”
“And this still does not solve anything.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes searched my face with the sort of attention that made a man want legal representation.
“And?” she asked.
I exhaled through my nose. The room smelled of her skin, my soap, old smoke from the lodge fire, and the metallic edge of dried blood trapped beneath fresh gauze.
“I can get you out clean,” I said. “That part I know.”
The line of her throat shifted when she swallowed.
“And the part you don’t?”
My hand curled around the radio until the plastic casing pressed into my palm.
“Letting you leave without making it my idea.”
The room gave us one thin second of quiet.
Then, outside, the engine revved again.
Juliette nodded once, as if I had given her a fact she could file. Her face did not soften. That would have been easier to survive.
“Then stop making it your idea,” she said.
I almost laughed. It died before it became sound.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Careful.”
“There she is.”
A breath moved out of her, close enough to amusement to be dangerous. “Don't disappear into the job the second I’m gone.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Try harder.” She pushed the sheet aside and reached for the clothes folded over the bench. “And Nick?”
I paused.
“Don’t give people maybe when you already know the answer.”
My fingers tightened on the radio again.
Below us, another vehicle door shut.
I put on the shirt.
The act did not make me Mercer. It made me dressed.
Ten minutes later, I walked Juliette through the side corridor toward the staging courtyard, past the closed office door, the stacked linen carts, and the service corridor where staff moved quietly around one another with the careful speed of people who had learned that panic wasted oxygen.
The lodge smelled of coffee, damp canvas, and floor polish applied too early by someone trying to scrub yesterday out of the boards.
Staff moved through the service corridor with quiet purpose, one carrying duffel bags, another balancing a tray of travel mugs, all of them speaking in low voices because volume made fear contagious.
Sarah stood beside the lead vehicle with a clipboard, her hair twisted back, her face arranged into the sort of neutrality that guaranteed she had missed nothing.
Naomi sat inside the vehicle already, sunglasses on despite the weak light. Victor stood near the steps, muttering into his phone about “assurances.” His cufflinks had survived the security breach. Fucking tragic.
Juliette’s suitcase sat in the rear compartment beneath two other bags. On top of her tote, The Crimson Crown rested spine-up, cracked and absurd and somehow more intimate than anything else she owned.
I checked the rear latch myself. Then the tires. Then the driver’s radio. Then the escort position at the gate.
Juliette watched me from beside the open door.
“You know,” she said, “some people say goodbye with words.”
“Some people don’t inspect vehicles properly.”
“That will be beautiful on a throw pillow.”
I looked at her then.
The courtyard noise thinned. Staff. Engines. Birds starting up in the fever trees beyond the lodge. Her face held steady, but her mouth had gone pale at the edges.
“Text me when you reach the airstrip,” I said.
“I will.”
“And Johannesburg.”
“Yes.”
“And when—”
“Nick.”
I stopped.
Her eyes held mine. “Don't turn concern into command because it feels safer.”
Behind my ribs, something shifted against bone.
Naomi’s sunglasses angled toward us. Sarah became intensely interested in the clipboard. The driver stared straight ahead with the survival instinct of a married man.
I stepped closer to the open door. Not enough to touch her. Enough that her next breath crossed the front of my shirt.
“I’ll stop pretending I’m glad you’re leaving,” I said.
Juliette’s breath caught. Once.
Then she climbed into the vehicle.
I shut the door myself.
The convoy rolled out at 0544. Front escort through the gate. Transfer vehicle behind. Rear escort following with three minutes between them. Proper spacing. Clear sightlines. No unnecessary exposure.
I stood in the courtyard until the taillights disappeared beyond the lower bend.
This time, it did not feel like success.
By 0610, the operations room had filled with bad coffee, dirty boots, and people trying to make yesterday’s breach fit into language small enough to manage.
It didn’t.
Daniel had the eastern fence photos spread across the table.
Sarah had the departure manifests and staff rotation sheets.
Armand Venter, the regional operations director ownership had sent in before midnight, stood near the wall with his phone in one hand and the posture of a man trying to keep an expensive problem from becoming a public one.
Regional operations. Pressed shirt. Clean boots. No mud on the hem.
Useful indoors, then.
The anti-poaching unit contact joined by video from Hoedspruit, his signal glitching every few seconds. Local police had been sent the incident packet, the photo trail, the login records, and enough footage to make them annoyed at us for being thorough.
“Old contractor access,” Sarah said, tapping the printed report. “Credentials were never killed after the camera upgrade last year. IT locked it down at 0315. Every dormant user has been disabled.”
I looked at Armand.
His jaw worked once. “The lodge changed vendors twice during the camera upgrade. There were gaps.”
“No more gaps,” I said. “If a contractor leaves, their login dies before their vehicle reaches the gate.”