21. Closing In #3
She lifts her face to mine, eyes still dark with shared emotion, and gives me a small nod.
We have to move. The rescue is not over, the night still holds threats, but this stolen reunion has given us both the strength to face whatever comes next.
I help straighten her clothes with gentle hands, and she does the same for me.
Our touches linger a moment longer than necessary, a silent promise that we will find more time when the danger has passed.
"Nolan," she whispers, voice rough but steady. "You came."
"Always," I answer, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.
I tighten my hold on Voss for one final second, then force myself to step back just enough to meet her eyes. The promise in them mirrors my own. Later. When we have a door, and time, and no one watching. For now, this proof is enough to carry us through whatever comes next.
Nolan, Paper, Not Muscle
Eli's voice pulls me back, and it isn't telling me we're clear. It's telling me the opposite.
"Travis. Listen to me before you feel too good about this." Calm, the way Eli is always calm, which is how I know it's bad.
"You got her off the ground clean and quiet, and clean and quiet is the only reason this doesn't become a headline.
I can make the desert forget tonight. I've already started.
The strip, the flight that never filed, the men who were never here.
None of it happened, and none of it happened because none of them want it to have happened any more than we do. "
"But," I say, because there's always a but, and I feel Voss go still against me, reading it off the set of my shoulders before Eli even says it.
"But the take was never the whole play. The man above me didn't need the plane. The plane was one road. He's got another, and it's already moving, and it's the one road you can't put a truck across." A breath.
"The filing's still live, Travis. Far as the law is concerned, she's a federal witness who belongs in protective custody, and you're a private detail with no standing to keep her out of it. He's not going to send men into the desert again. He's going to send paper. And paper, you can't disarm."
My arms tighten around her without deciding to, and she understands it in the same second I do. We won the part you can win in the dark with people you trust. We got her back and we made no sound and no one bled, and by morning this strip will be as empty as if we were never here.
And it doesn't matter, because the man who wants her never planned to win in the dark.
He planned to win in the daylight, in an office, with a signature.
There's no gate to cut and no plane to still and no crew to send home, because the weapon this time is the law itself, and it's already on its way.
Nolan, Be the Voice
She's the one who says it, and she says it into my chest, quiet, so it's a thing between us and not an announcement to the dark.
"So he takes me the legal way." Her voice is steady again, the analyst back in it, but under the steadiness is the thing neither of us has said out loud since the alley.
"Protective custody. A system you can't follow me into.
He doesn't have to send another man with a gun, Travis.
He just has to be the government, and I just have to be the witness, and the law does the taking for him.
And the worst part is it looks like safety.
It looks like the right thing. No one will even see it as a take. "
My hand comes up to turn her face to mine in the half-moon, and the true thing has to be said, because we don't let the important ones live in the quiet anymore.
"Then we don't go playin' it their way. We already went and learned that lesson tonight, yeah. Loud loses, but quiet? Quiet wins the day. He's fixin' to fight me with paper, we don't hand him no war—we hand him the one thing paper can't never survive."
"Which is?"
"You. Testifyin'. Up on the record, before he can go and wall you off from the world, no.
The only way he keeps your mouth shut is if he hooks his claws in you and drags you down into that custody before you ever get a word out.
So we ain't fixin' to let him," I say, and I press my mouth right to her forehead.
"I fetched you off that runway tonight without pullin' a trigger once, yeah.
I can keep you out of a courtroom's back door the exact same way.
But I need you to trust me for a few more days the same way you trusted that pen.
Just stone-blind. All the way down to the riverbed.
Even when you can't see the light of day breakin' through the timber. "
She's quiet a moment, her heart going against mine, the desert enormous and silent around the two of us. And then her hand finds mine and closes over it, the way it closed at her own door a lifetime ago, and she gives me the only answer that has ever mattered.
"I stopped needing to see the light a while ago," she says. "I just need you to keep being the voice. Be the voice, and I'll walk toward it every time. All the way to the stand, if that's where it's going." Her fingers tighten.
"Get me there, Travis. Get me there before he does."