Chapter 18
Reagan had steady hands. Cara had known this in the abstract—but watching her stitch Wade’s knee by the light of a desk lamp was a different kind of knowing.
Wade sat on the counter, one leg extended, his muddy pants cut open to the thigh.
The gash above his eyebrow had been butterflied shut with Steri-Strips from the first aid kit, and it would scar, but the knee was worse—a deep slice from something sharp in the underbrush, opened wide enough that the muscle showed through.
Reagan worked with a curved needle and dental floss, because the first aid kit’s suture packets had exactly two pre-threaded needles and she’d already used both.
Wade hadn’t made a sound. He held a bag of frozen peas against his ribs with one hand and watched Reagan work with polite professional interest, as though she were demonstrating a mildly engaging hobby.
“This would go faster if you’d stop flexing,” Reagan said.
“I’m not flexing.”
“Your quad is literally a rock, Wade. Relax.”
“That is relaxed.”
Cara was at the kitchen table, a blanket around her shoulders that Tom had produced from somewhere without being asked.
Her hands were wrapped around a mug of tea she hadn’t drunk.
The shaking had stopped, but the adrenaline was still metabolizing out of her system in waves, each one smaller than the last, like aftershocks.
Tom sat across from her with his laptop open, three browser windows running. “Walk me through it,” he said. “From the top.”
Cara walked him through it. The parking lot. Pirelli pacing. The second vehicle, headlights off. The hooded figure. The fragments of conversation.
Wade picked up the thread. “Private security. High-end. The first one came at me from above—he’d been positioned upslope, which means they scouted the terrain in advance.
He knew the sight lines. Knew where a surveillance team would set up.
” He adjusted the frozen peas. “The second one went for Cara. He was faster but less disciplined. Rage runner. Once she was in the trees, he didn’t have the training to track her. ”
“I got lucky,” Cara said.
“You got smart,” Wade corrected. “Luck doesn’t throw a decoy rock.”
Tom was typing. “The phones—both of them, Pirelli’s and the burner—went dark at the same time.
Simultaneously. Not one then the other. The same second.
” He looked up. “That’s not two panicked people turning off their phones.
That’s a coordinated signal. Kill switch.
Someone gave an order and both devices went offline. ”
“And now?” Cara asked.
“Pirelli’s phone is still dead. Signal’s been gone since the parking lot. Either the phone’s been destroyed or it’s in a Faraday bag somewhere. Same with the burner, though I expected that.” Tom closed the laptop with more force than necessary. “We’re blind.”
The room absorbed that.
Blind. Their one digital thread—the monitoring Tom had built, was gone.
Whoever was on the other end of that burner phone had anticipated not just surveillance at the meet, but digital surveillance of the communications that set it up.
They’d used the meet as a trap and the trap as a reason to burn the evidence.
These were not amateurs.
“So we’re back to zero,” Reagan said. She tied off the last stitch, snipped the floss with kitchen scissors, and pressed a gauze pad over the wound. “Worse than zero. We’re back to zero and they know we’re here.”
Nobody argued with that.
Tom rose. “I’m going to run everything I have. Tower records, the vehicle that came from the north, anything that pinged in that area tonight. If the driver used a phone, if anyone used a phone within a mile of that trailhead, I’ll find it.” He paused in the doorway. “It’ll take a few hours.”
“Go,” Cara said.
He went. Reagan followed—not because he’d asked, but because that was how they operated now, the two of them, a unit that had stopped pretending it wasn’t one.
Wade eased himself off the counter, tested his weight on the stitched knee, and nodded once—the Wade version of a full medical evaluation.
“Get some sleep,” Cara said.
“After you.”
“Wade.”
He held her gaze. The Steri-Strips above his eyebrow were already darkening with blood.
“We’re still here.”
He limped down the hall. The bedroom door closed quietly.
Cara sat in the empty kitchen. The tea was cold. The blanket smelled like someone else’s fabric softener.
She stood. Her ribs protested—a sharp, bright objection that took her breath for a second.
In the bathroom, she peeled off her jacket and her shirt.
The mirror showed her what she’d been feeling: a bruise that covered her entire left side, shoulder to hip, deep purple shading to black along the ribs where she’d hit the slope.
She touched it with careful fingers. The intake of breath was involuntary.
She turned on the faucet and cleaned the scrape on her forearm—gravel rash, shallow, the kind that stung worse than it damaged. The water ran pink. She watched it swirl down the drain and looked at her own face in the mirror. Wet hair. Pale skin. Dark circles she’d been carrying for a week.
Lord, we’re in over our heads. But Elena’s still out there. Keep us moving.
The prayer came without rehearsal, without the self-conscious negotiation that had characterized her early attempts at talking to God—the careful transactions of a woman who’d spent her whole life calculating what things cost. This was different.
Simpler. A woman standing in front of a mirror with a bruise the size of a continent, asking for help.
Not for herself. For a stranger in the rain.