Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
The landscape changed as they approached Missoula. Wilderness gave way to ranch fencing, then scattered houses, then the thickening sprawl of civilization.
Traffic appeared—other trucks, a school bus, a county plow scraping snow from the main road. The isolation that had kept them cocooned for the last eighteen hours fell away mile by mile, and with it, the fragile sense that they existed outside of time.
Reality was back. And it had teeth.
Mack talked her through what to expect. Claire would be at the field office.
Other agents—DEA now, too, because the undercover operative’s death had escalated the case beyond the FBI’s original scope.
The debrief would be recorded. They’d want her sketches of the men in the study, her written statement, and a detailed account of Blake’s phone call.
“They’ll ask you to repeat things,” he said.
“Go over the same details multiple times from different angles. It’s not because they don’t believe you.
It’s how they build a case. Stay with the facts.
Don’t speculate, don’t fill in gaps, and don’t volunteer information they haven’t asked for. If you don’t know something, say so.”
She nodded, committing it to memory. “What about Blake? Should I tell them about the money? Those texts?”
“They’ll ask what you saw at the party, what he said on the phone, and whether you can confirm his identity as someone present at the meeting.
” He paused. “They’ll also ask about your relationship with him.
History, recent contact, and whether you’ve had any indication of criminal activity. So yes, tell them what you told me.”
The six-month secret. Now she had to tell the FBI.
“I’ll tell them everything,” she said.
He glanced at her, respect in his eyes. “You’re going to do well.”
It came out so simple. His voice was so certain. It steadied her more than any reassurance could have.
She looked down at the sketchbook in her lap. Flipped past the drawing of Mack’s hand to the sketches she’d done earlier—Blake, Vega, Guerrero, the enforcer with the neck tattoos. Clean, precise, professionally rendered. The kind of work that would hold up in court.
This was what she did. And for the first time since the party, her skill didn’t feel like a liability that had put a target on her back.
It felt like a weapon she’d chosen to pick up.
They entered the outskirts of Missoula. Strip malls and gas stations, the parking lot of a Walmart, a coffee shop with a line of cars at the drive-through. Normal life was happening while she rode toward the most abnormal thing she’d ever done.
Mack was scanning harder now. His posture had changed—subtle, the way a guitar string was tightened a quarter turn, but she’d learned to read him over the last eighteen hours. The tender man from the shoulder of the road was gone. The operative was fully in control.
“How far?” she asked.
“Eight minutes.”
She watched him watch the road. His right hand rested near his thigh, close to where she knew his weapon was holstered. His left hand gripped the wheel, knuckles white over the scars.
“Mack.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for listening. For not—” She searched for the right words. “For not making it small. For not making me feel small.”
His jaw softened, just barely. “It wasn’t small, Lyssa.”
She nodded and returned her attention to the windshield and the street ahead.
Three blocks up, she could see what she assumed was their destination—a nondescript government building, beige and institutional, with a parking structure beside it.
The kind of building you’d drive past a hundred times without wondering what happened inside.
Mack signaled and turned toward the parking structure. The entrance was open, the lower level visible—concrete columns, fluorescent lighting, a handful of government vehicles in marked spaces.
He slowed as they approached, scanning the structure. “We’ll park on the lower level,” he said. “Stay in the vehicle until I come around to your side. We walk in together. You stay on my left, close enough to touch. Don’t stop for anything until we’re inside the building. Clear?”
“Yes.”
He pulled in. The light changed—daylight to LED, the shadows between the columns sharp and geometric. Their tires echoed on the concrete. He was rolling slowly, checking between parked cars, his head on a swivel.
She felt the shift in the air before she understood it.
A tension that had nothing to do with the conversation they’d just had and everything to do with the way Mack’s body went completely still—that preternatural, unnatural stillness she’d only seen in him a handful of times, and never in a context that turned out fine.
“Mack?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on something—a reflection, an angle, a shadow. Something she couldn’t see but he could, because he’d spent eight years learning to read environments the way she read faces.
Everything happened at once.
The windshield cracked—a sharp, splintering sound, a spiderweb of fractures blooming across the glass on the driver’s side. The world fractured.
“Get down!” Mack’s arm shot across her chest, shoving her below the dash. His voice was a bark—hard, commanding, a voice she’d never heard from him before. Her body obeyed before her mind caught up.
She was crumpled in the footwell, the sketchbook jammed against her ribs, her face pressed against the rough fabric of Mack’s jacket sleeve as he threw the SUV into reverse.
Tires screeched on concrete. A second impact—metal on metal, somewhere behind them—and the rear window shattered, glass raining into the back in a glittering cascade.
She heard Mack grunt. He drove with his left hand, his right arm tight against him. He reversed out of the parking structure at a speed that slammed her shoulder against the center console.
The SUV bounced over a curb, fishtailed on the icy street, and then they were moving forward—accelerating hard, weaving, and tossing her around. She peeked her head up.
“Stay down,” he ordered. His voice was still that other voice, the combat one, but she heard something underneath it now. A tightness. A control that was costing him something.
She crouched again and watched him from the footwell, her cheek against the seat, her hands braced on the floor. His jaw was set so hard she could see the muscles cording in his neck. His hand gripped the wheel. His right arm—
Blood.
A dark spreading stain on the upper arm of his left sleeve, just below the shoulder, unmistakable against the gray fabric. It spread and grew as she watched.
“Mack.” Her voice came out softer than she wanted. “You’re hit.”
“I know.” Two words. Clipped, efficient, no room for discussion. He checked the mirror, checked the road, and took a hard right down a side street. Then another.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“Functional.”
That was a soldier’s answer—it meant he could still operate, which was the only metric that mattered to him right now. It told her nothing about how deep the wound was, whether the bullet was still in his arm, or whether he was going to pass out behind the wheel.
She pulled herself up from the footwell. He shot her a look. “I said stay down.”
“The shooter’s behind us. You put blocks between us and the structure.” She settled into the seat and reached for his arm. “Let me see.”
“Lyssa—”
“Let me see, Mack.”
He exhaled through his nose—frustration, pain, something—but he didn’t pull away when she peeled away the torn material.
The bullet had carved a furrow along the outside of his upper arm, several inches long, deep enough to bleed freely but shallow enough that she could see it hadn’t hit anything critical. A graze. A bad one, but a graze.
Her hands were shaking. She pressed one flat against his arm, and the heat of his blood against her palms was so real, so immediate, that it cut through every layer of shock and adrenaline and deposited her firmly in the present.
He’s bleeding because of you. He’s bleeding because he chose you.
“It’s a graze,” she said, keeping her voice steady by sheer force of will. “You need pressure on it.”
“Grab my go-bag behind the seat. There’s a med kit.”
She twisted around, ignoring the broken glass, and found the bag. It was packed neatly with a medical kit that contained gauze, tape, and antiseptic.
Her hands were steadier now, the way they always got when she had a task. She wiped away the worst of the blood, packed the wound with gauze, and wrapped it tightly. He barely flinched.
He pulled into the drugstore parking lot and idled as he grabbed the sat phone. Teeth gritted, face grim, he dialed.
Alyssa heard it ring on the other end once before a woman answered. Had to be Claire Dawson. Alyssa was close enough to hear her voice. “Mack? What’s going on?”
“Shots were fired at the field office parking structure. Two rounds, high-caliber, long range. I’m hit. It’s a flesh wound, and I’m still mobile. Asset is secure.” He took a breath. “I need an alternate location. Now. And you’d better figure out how we were compromised.”
Asset. She was an asset now. A thing to be secured, transported, and protected. She should mind the word, but she didn’t—not right now, not while his blood was soaking through the gauze.
“Dammit,” Claire said. “Give me five minutes. I’ll call you back.”
He ended the call and killed the engine.
“Who just shot at us?” Alyssa asked, hating that her voice came out shaky. “The cartel?”
He nodded. “They knew we were coming. Someone gave us up.”
Alyssa pressed a hand to the bandage on his arm. He was alive and bleeding and looking at her with angry eyes that were already calculating the next move, the next plan, the next way to keep her safe.
“That shot,” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Distant. “It wasn’t aimed at me.”
He frowned. “What?”
“The angle.” She pointed to the spiderweb in the windshield on his side, not hers. The second bullet that hit the back of the SUV as he reversed, tracking his movement. Both shots had landed on the driver’s side. “They weren’t shooting at me. They were shooting at you.”
He said nothing, glancing at the windshield, the rear of the vehicle. A humorless laugh escaped his lips. “You’re right. Here I’m the sniper, and you’re the one figuring out shot angles.”
The pieces rearranged themselves in her mind with a clarity that felt almost violent.
“It’s not just about silencing me anymore, is it?
You were at the party. You saw the meeting.
You can corroborate my testimony. And you’re the one keeping me alive.
” She stared at him. “The cartels aren’t just hunting me. They’re hunting you, too.”
“Looks that way.”
“Because you chose me.” Her voice broke, a fracture she couldn’t control. “At the party. At the cabin. On this drive. Every time, you chose me, and now they’re trying to kill you for it.”
He pulled her hand away from his arm, gently, and held it. Her fingers were smeared with his blood. “I’d make the same choice again,” he said. “Every time.”
She looked at their joined hands—her blood-stained fingers wrapped in his damaged ones, both of them marked by the same man’s destruction—and something crystallized in her chest. Hard and bright and furious.
She’d spent her whole life defined by Blake and her father and let their decisions shape her world. When those decisions broke things, she’d been the one left holding the pieces while they walked away unscathed.
Not anymore.
Blake had put a target on Mack’s back by dragging the cartel into their lives. The cartel had put a bullet in his arm because he wouldn’t stop protecting her.
And now the man who’d always chosen her was bleeding in the driver’s seat of an SUV with a shattered windshield in a drugstore parking lot, and he was looking at her like she was the mission he’d die for.
No. You don’t get to die for me. Not today. Not ever.
She let go of his hand. Wiped the blood from her fingers onto her sweats—his sweatpants, borrowed, too big, rolled at the cuffs. She picked up the sketchbook from the footwell where it had fallen.
“Call Claire back,” she said. “Tell her we’re coming in. Wherever she wants us, whatever it takes. I’m giving my statement today.”
“Lyssa, we need to reassess—”
“I wasn’t asking permission.” She met his eyes and held them. “They just shot the man I l—” She caught herself.
Love. The unsaid word hung in the air between them as if something had just detonated.
She looked away, cleared her throat, and met his eyes again. “I’m done hiding. I’m done being scared. And I’m done letting Blake’s choices destroy the people I care about.”
Mack stared at her. He blinked as if he didn’t know what to say.
“Make the call,” she said.
He made the call.