Chapter Fifteen
~ Jai ~
The highway ate the miles in the dark, and Ashe drove like the speed limit was a suggestion that had personally offended him.
I sat in the back with Grace strapped in beside me, one hand resting on her car seat buckle, not because it helped anything, but because it gave my fingers something to do besides shake.
The engine hummed at a pitch that lived just below a growl, constant and low, the kind of sound that vibrated through the leather seats and worked its way into your bones.
Heated leather. Tension. The faint chemical smell of the air freshener Ashe had clipped to the vent, doing battle with the cherry blossom residue that clung to my skin no matter how many times I washed it.
I lost track of how long we’d been driving. The dashboard clock said forty-three minutes.
It felt longer.
Grace was quiet. Not the good kind of quiet. The kind that made my chest tighten every time I looked at her—small face pinched, brow furrowed, her tiny fingers curled into fists so tight the knuckles had gone white.
She’d cried for the first ten minutes after we left the garage, the full-volume, catastrophic wail of an infant who had opinions about SUVs and intended to express them at length, and then she’d gone silent. Just like that. Volume off.
Which was worse.
“You’re okay,” I murmured, my voice low enough that Ashe wouldn’t hear it over the engine.
“You’re fine. We’re going somewhere safe.
Braham’s coming. He’s coming, and he’s probably breaking every traffic law between here and Portland to do it, which is his problem, not ours.
His insurance premiums are definitely his problem. ”
Her eyes were open. Alert. Too alert for a two-week-old, tracking the red glow of the dashboard lights with the focused attention of someone conducting important research. She didn’t make a sound.
I kept talking. Nothing with meaning. Just sound.
Just the signal that I was there, that the world hadn’t ended, that the SUV was still moving and the road was still under us and somewhere ahead was a place with walls and locks and a man who wore custom suits and could probably bench-press this vehicle if the mood struck him.
I talked about the manuscript. About Petra’s inevitable semicolon rage. About the fact that Drew and Eli were now so transparently in love that the entire publishing industry was going to know exactly what had happened to me, and I was going to have to change my name and move to Argentina.
Ashe checked the rearview mirror. Once. Twice. Three times in the span of thirty seconds, his eyes cutting to the glass with the focused intensity of a man running calculations he hadn’t shared. Each time, his jaw tightened by a fraction I wouldn’t have caught if I hadn’t been watching for it.
“We clear?” I asked.
His eyes met mine in the mirror for half a second. Flat. Assessed. Then back to the road. “For now.”
Which meant no, and we both knew it.
The highway began to thin. City lights gave way to the particular darkness of rural Oregon—thick, close, the kind of dark that felt like it had weight.
Trees pressed in on both sides of the road, Douglas fir standing sentinel, their massive trunks catching the high beams in brief flashes of rough bark before swallowing the light whole.
The road narrowed. The surface changed from asphalt to something older, something that had been laid down before engineers decided every road in America needed to be perfectly smooth.
Then the gate lights appeared.
Amber pinpricks through the corridor of trees, warm and steady, cutting through the dark like landing lights. The Wolfe Estate. Fifty miles west of Portland, and the air had changed five miles back—heavier, damper, the pine resin and wet earth smell of old growth working its way through the vents.
The gravel drive opened ahead, wide and manicured, and the main house sat at the end of it like something that had grown there rather than been built.
I let out a slow breath. The kind you don’t realize you’ve been holding until your lungs finally decide to work again.
Portland felt like it had happened to someone else, in some other lifetime, to a version of me who hadn’t yet walked into an office with a cardboard box and a baby and a mouth that couldn’t shut up when it should.
“We have a problem,” Ashe said very quietly. The kind of quiet that doesn’t need volume because the words themselves are heavy enough.
The SUV slowed. Not a brake tap. A deliberate reduction in speed, the engine dropping a register, the tires rolling over gravel with a sound that suddenly felt too loud for the dark.
The high beams swept the road ahead, and the light caught him. Lean. Still. Standing in the center of the gravel road just short of the gate with his hands loose at his sides and his pale gray eyes catching the light the way a cat’s would—flat, reflective, patient.
Declan Morrow.
I’d never seen him before, but I didn’t need to. The way he stood said everything. The stillness of a man who had already decided he was the most dangerous thing in this scenario, and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
My eyes moved to the tree line. Left side: two shapes, barely visible, the darkness doing most of the work. Right side: another two, positioned at staggered intervals.
I assumed two more I couldn’t see, because assuming less than your worst-case scenario was how people ended up dead, and I had not survived seven years as an Army Ranger by being optimistic about hostile terrain.
I was already unbuckling my seatbelt.
“The back gate,” I said, leaning forward between the front seats. My voice came out level. Steadier than I felt. “Secondary access road, runs east of the main house, comes out behind the kitchen garden. Braham said it when he called. It’s not on the building plans.”
Ashe’s jaw tightened. I watched the muscle work below his ear, the particular tension of a man who had been given an order and didn’t like the variables.
“Get Grace to the house,” I said. “Don’t wait for me. Don’t circle back. Don’t stop. You hit that back road and you do not slow down until she’s inside with the door locked and someone standing between her and every window.”
Ashe looked at me in the mirror. The look carried several things, none of them approving—assessment, skepticism, and the frustration of a man who had spent his entire professional life protecting people who insisted on making his job harder.
Then he gave one short nod, tight and final because Braham’s standing order was Grace’s safety first, and we both knew it, and whatever Ashe thought about my decision-making capacity was irrelevant next to that.
I turned to Grace. Her small face was still pinched, her fists still curled, and the look in her eyes was too old for her body—alert, focused, the kind of awareness that had no business living in a creature who weighed less than a bag of groceries.
I leaned down and pressed my lips to the top of her head. Quick. Deliberate. Her skin was warm, and she smelled like milk and sleep and that faint, specific scent that was just her, and something in my chest did a thing I wasn’t prepared to name.
Her hand found my finger. One tiny fist wrapped around my index finger with a grip that had no right to be that strong, and she held on like she knew exactly what was about to happen.
I unhooked her gently. Finger by finger, careful, the way you’d handle something breakable that had decided it wasn’t breakable after all. “Stay with Ashe,” I murmured. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She made a sound, not a cry, but something smaller, wetter, the noise of a creature who had opinions and couldn’t articulate them yet. I tucked her hand back against her chest and reached for the door.
The cold hit me like a wall. Oregon night air, heavy with pine and damp earth, the temperature low enough that my breath came visible in the SUV’s interior light. Gravel under my boots.
The gate lights threw long amber shadows across the ground, turning everything the color of old honey, and the trees stood dark and silent on either side of the drive.
I closed the door. Didn’t look back.
The SUV reversed behind me. Gravel spat under the tires, the engine growled lower, and then Ashe swung the vehicle wide—a tight, practiced turn that sent the high beams sweeping across the tree line in a brief arc—and the taillights disappeared down the access road I’d pointed him toward.
The sound of the engine faded fast, swallowed by distance and trees, and then it was just the dark and the gravel and the amber gate lights and me.
Declan watched the SUV go. I watched him watch it. His head turned slightly, tracking the taillights until they vanished into the trees, and then those pale gray eyes came back to me.
The faint amusement on his face—the smirk, the curl at the corner of his mouth—sharpened into something more calculating. The look of a man who had just recalibrated his assessment of the situation, and found it interesting.
I closed my hand around the switchblade inside my jacket. The checkered grip was warm from my body heat, familiar in a way that nothing else in this scenario was, and I held onto it the way you hold onto the one thing you know won’t change.
The shapes in the tree line hadn’t moved.
Yet.
Declan stood in the center of the road and waited for me to come to him.
I obliged.
I crossed the distance between us with gravel crunching under my boots, each step deliberate, the gate lights throwing my shadow long and thin across the road.
Declan watched me come with the patient amusement of a man who had already decided he was the most dangerous thing in this scenario, and was willing to wait for me to figure that out on my own.
He didn’t move. Didn’t shift his weight. Didn’t do anything except stand there with his hands loose at his sides and those pale grey eyes tracking me with the focused attention of someone cataloguing details for later.
“You sent the baby away,” he said. Controlled. “That’s brave. Or stupid. I haven’t decided.”