13. Nick
NICK
The diner smells like burned coffee and bacon grease, and I’ve never been happier to see a plate of eggs in my life.
We’ve been on the road since before eight o’clock, and it’s now past noon.
Neither of us ate much this morning beyond the gas station protein bars from last night.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay in that car without something to break things up.
She hasn’t brought up Vincenzo since our conversation earlier, but I can see her chewing on it.
Literally. She’s been grinding her teeth on and off for the last hour.
The diner is a roadside place off the highway, the kind with vinyl booths and a bell that jingles when you open the door.
We took a booth near the back, where she can see the entrance and I have a clear line of sight to the kitchen.
Neither of us discussed this. We just did it.
Muscle memory from two people who’ve spent too much time watching doors.
She’s digging into her own eggs, bacon, and heavily buttered grits. If I wasn’t so hungry myself, I might pay closer attention to the way she eats. In a hurry, like there’s no time to savor a single bite. She looks like a woman with other things to do, which she is. Not that I’m much more relaxed.
I’m halfway through my eggs when she goes completely still. Not the normal kind, like she’s quiet and thinking. Instead, it’s the kind where every muscle in her body locks into place and her eyes fix on a single point. She’s locked in on a target.
I take a sip from my coffee, which I can no longer taste. “What?” I ask in a low voice.
“Don’t look at the door.”
Of course, the first thing I want to do is look at the door. I don’t. Instead, I keep my eyes on my plate and pick up a piece of toast. “Tell me.”
“A pair of men just walked in. One of them has a double-headed eagle tattoo on his neck.”
The toast folds in the fist my hand has tightened into around it. “Russo ink?”
“It’s the symbol of Vincenzo’s personal guard. Every one of them gets that tattoo when they’re inducted. It’s not something you’d get on a whim at a parlor. Custom work, always done by the same artist.”
She picks up her coffee and takes a sip while tracking movement over the rim of her cup. “They haven’t spotted us yet. They’re scanning the room.”
“How far from the door?”
“Fifteen feet. Standing by the register. The hostess is talking to them.”
I run the layout in my head. The front door is the obvious exit. The kitchen will have a back door, since every commercial kitchen has one, thanks to fire code requirements. The hallway to the restrooms probably runs along the back wall, and the kitchen entrance will be near it.
“Restroom hallway,” I murmur. “The kitchen will be past it.”
“I know.” She sets her coffee down and slides out of the booth in one smooth motion, like all she’s doing is heading to the bathroom on a normal afternoon. I drop two twenties on the table and follow her.
The hallway is narrow and smells like industrial cleaner.
The restroom doors are on the left. At the end of the hall, a swinging door leads into the kitchen, where a cook in a stained apron looks up from the grill with the expression of a man who’s seen stranger things than two people walking through his workspace.
“Back door,” I grunt.
He points with his spatula. We’re through the kitchen and out the rear exit in under ten seconds, emerging into a gravel lot behind the diner where the dumpsters sit baking in the afternoon sun. Our car is parked alongside the building. I have the keys out before we reach it.
“They’ll know we left,” she points out as she slides into the passenger seat.
“Not if they’re still scanning the dining room.
We’ve got maybe two minutes before they figure it out.
” I start the engine, pull out of the lot, and take the first turn back toward the highway without flooring it.
Peeling out of a parking lot is a great way to attract the attention of everyone within a quarter mile.
We make it roughly five minutes before I see the truck behind us.
Black. Full-size. Tinted windows. It appears in my rearview, hanging back three or four car lengths on a stretch of highway where there’s almost no traffic. It’s not tailgating. No flashing lights. Nothing overly aggressive. Just following.
“We have company,” I announce.
She adjusts the side mirror without turning around. “I see it. How long?”
“Just appeared. Same guys we met at the diner. I thought we got rid of them. I guess they somehow followed us after all.”
“Or they have another way of tracking us.” She says it quietly, and the implication sits much heavier in my stomach than the plate of bacon and eggs I just ate.
I push it aside for now. At the moment, my priority is the truck.
I gradually accelerate, testing them. The truck matches my speed. When I change lanes, the truck follows suit. I take an exit and loop back onto the highway. The truck follows, maintaining the same distance, patient and professional.
“They’re not amateurs,” she observes.
“No, they’re not.”
“Are we going to talk about this, or are we going to deal with it?”
Good question.
I press the accelerator. The rental isn’t built for speed, but it has enough under the hood to put distance between us if I push it.
The speedometer climbs to seventy, eighty, and finally to ninety.
The truck responds immediately, closing the gap easily.
It tells me somebody put money into that vehicle.
The highway curves ahead, threading through a stretch of hills with guardrails on either side. Trees press close on the right. I take the curve hard, feel the tires protest, and pull ahead by three car lengths.
“Brace yourself,” I warn.
“I’m fine. Drive.”
The next curve is sharper. I take it at full speed, using the full width of the lane, and the truck follows in a wider arc. It’s heavier, and the center of gravity is higher. I watch it rock on the turn. The tires scream against the asphalt.
They’re committed. They’re not going to back off.
A straightaway opens up ahead, and I floor it. The engine roars, and for a few seconds, we pull ahead. Five lengths, six. The truck pushes to match, but the next curve comes fast. Too fast.
I see it happen in the rearview. The truck enters the curve at full speed, and the rear end breaks loose.
It fishtails once, twice, as the driver overcorrects, which is the worst thing you can do at that speed.
It crosses the center line, clips the guardrail on the left side with a sound like a cannon shot, and flips.
It goes over once, twice, three times before coming to rest on its roof in a ditch. Glass and debris scatter across the asphalt. The engine block is exposed while steam and smoke rise from the wreckage.
I slow down, but I don’t stop. Not yet. I watch the mirror for movement that never comes.
“They’re done,” she announces in a flat, emotionless voice. She’s seen enough death to know what it looks like from a distance.
I pull over half a mile past the wreck, on a shoulder hidden from the crash site by a bend in the road. We sit there for a minute, engine idling, while we both breathe harder than we’d like to admit.
“We can’t question them if they’re dead,” I mutter.
“They’re dead. Nobody walks away from that.”
She’s probably right. That means we’ve lost our best chance of finding out how they tracked us here. The men at the cabin had a phone with intel. These men had a truck and a tail, somehow. The question underneath both situations is the same: how are they finding us?
I pull back onto the highway and drive until a rest stop comes up eight miles ahead. It’s a small one with restrooms, vending machines, and a few picnic tables. I park at a distance from the other cars before killing the engine.
“They found us at the cabin,” I recall, thinking out loud.
“Liam’s people swept that location. The security specs might’ve been compromised, which would explain that one.
But this? We left in the middle of the night.
We drove for hours on random highways. We never used credit cards and didn’t check in anywhere they could trace.
There’s no way they followed us from the cabin—we would’ve spotted a tail in the dark on empty roads. ”
“Unless they didn’t need to follow us,” she suggests.
I look over at her. She’s already there—I can see it in her face. The same thought that’s now forming in my mind has already formed in hers.
Liam put a tracker in Aurora back when their relationship was a little rockier than it is now. He had it implanted under her skin, in the back of her shoulder.
Is it possible? Could they have done that to her? All the way back in the early days, when she was recovering. When Vincenzo would’ve wanted to keep her close. In the many years since, it would’ve been a convenience, being able to track one of his weapons.
And she knows it. There’s a sick certainty in her voice when she concludes, “They’re tracking me. Not us. Me.”
“It makes sense,” I have to admit. In fact, it’s the only thing about the last half hour that makes sense. How else could they zero in on her the way they did?
She’s quiet for a long moment before opening the car door and getting out. I follow her inside to a restroom, one of those single-occupancy family bathrooms with a lock on the door. She goes in first. I follow, locking the door behind us.
The lighting is harsh and makes a buzzing sound, washing the room in a shade of gray that makes anyone look sick when they stand under it. She waits in front of the chipped porcelain sink with her back to me. “Check me,” she says before pulling her shirt over her head.
I step closer. Her back is bare under the fluorescent light.
The scars from the explosion are visible on her arm, trailing down her left side.
I start at the base of her neck and run my fingers slowly over her skin, pressing gently, feeling for anything that isn’t muscle or bone.
Across her shoulders. Down her spine. Along each shoulder blade.
There. On her upper back, just below the right shoulder blade.
There’s a tiny lump under her skin, maybe the size of a grain of rice.
If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never notice.
It’s deep enough that it doesn’t show on the surface, but it’s unmistakable under my fingertip.
A hard, smooth object that doesn’t belong in a human body.
I have to swallow back my rage. “Found it.”
She reaches back, and I guide her hand to the spot. When she presses it, she goes very still. “That son of a bitch.”
“We can find a vet’s office nearby,” I suggest, watching her face in the reflection as she processes the latest betrayal. “Break in, get the right tools to take it out properly—”
The look on her face stops me mid-sentence. It’s not fear or disgust. It’s cold fury, maybe edged in something that could be dark humor. “I’ve dug bullets out of my own body,” she tells me. “I’m not a pussy. Just get me a blade and something to clean it with.”
I stare at her for a beat, then leave the bathroom with a grin.
There’s a small convenience counter near the entrance to the rest stop, staffed by a teenager who looks like he’d rather be literally anywhere else.
I buy a first aid kit, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a pack of gauze pads.
There’s already a pocketknife in my jeans. I’ve carried one since I was fifteen.
She’s standing in front of the mirror when I get back to the bathroom, her shirt still off and her jaw set in a way I’ve come to understand means she’s preparing for pain.
She knows what’s coming. She’s already building the wall around herself, shielding herself from what’s definitely going to hurt.
First, I wash my hands thoroughly, then open the pocketknife and hold the blade under a stream of rubbing alcohol until every surface has been covered. I soak a gauze pad and clean the area on her back, wiping in widening circles around the lump.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Just do it.”
I press the tip of the blade against her skin and make a small, precise incision.
She doesn’t flinch or make a sound. Her hands grip the edge of the sink, her knuckles white, but that’s the only hint she gives of being in pain.
Blood wells up immediately—not a lot, but enough to run down her back in a thin, red line.
I widen the cut just enough to get my fingers in, pinching the tiny device between my thumb and forefinger.
It resists for a moment—it’s been in there a long time, and the tissue has grown around it—before it slides free.
A small, smooth capsule, no bigger than a pill. Dark in color, slick with blood.
I hold it up so she can see it in the mirror.
She looks at it the way you’d look at a cockroach you found in your bed. She then takes it from my hand, turns to the toilet, and drops it in. The flush is satisfying.
“Gone,” she says.
After cleaning the wound with alcohol—this time, she hisses through her teeth—I close it with butterfly strips from the first aid kit, then cover everything with a gauze pad and tape. It’s not pretty, but it’s clean and it’ll hold.
She pulls her shirt back on and looks at herself in the mirror.
The only thing to give away what’s turning inside her is the way her eyes burn.
The tracker was in her body for twelve years, and she never knew.
Every move she made, every city she traveled to, every safe house she slept in…
he knew. The freedom she thought she had was really a longer leash, and the other end was always wrapped around Vincenzo’s fist.
“Let’s go,” she decides.
I unlock the bathroom door, but rather than head straight for the exit, she stops off at the convenience counter. “Jack Daniel’s,” she announces, pointing to one of the bottles behind the register.
When she glances my way, I realize she’s waiting for me to pay.
And as much as part of me wants to remind her we need to be clearheaded, she just finished having a foreign device extracted from her body.
Something tells me clearheaded is the last thing she wants right now. Refusing her would be cruel.
Besides, good luck to me. I couldn’t force her to do anything.
Her purchase made, we head out to the car, where she slams the door harder than necessary before staring straight ahead, both hands wrapped around the bottle like it holds the answers she needs.
By the time we pull back onto the highway, still headed south, the tracker is spinning in a sewage pipe somewhere beneath a rest stop in the middle of nowhere. For the first time since Prague, nobody on earth knows where we are.
It should feel like freedom.
Something tells me, from the passenger seat, all of this looks a lot more like just another betrayal.