16. Zoe
Zoe
The sedan was empty.
That’s what Ryker tells me when he comes through the apartment door twenty minutes later.
The car was still running. Engine warm, heater on, coffee cup in the holder still steaming.
But no one inside. Whoever it was saw him coming, slipped out the passenger side, and disappeared into the alley between the hardware store and the post office before they could get a visual.
“Surveillance posture,” Ryker says from the doorway. He stays on the landing, eyes on the street below. “Parked facing the apartment entrance, engine idling, clear sight line to the side door and the stairs. They were watching this building specifically.”
“Any physical evidence?” Jax asks.
“Coffee cup, no prints. Rental agreement under the fake name. A road map of the county with two locations circled. This address and the Forest Service road that leads to my cabin.”
The cabin. Someone circled the road to the cabin on a map and left it in a rental car one block from my apartment. The information settles cold in my body.
Ryker sees it. He crosses the room in three strides, puts his hands on my upper arms, and ducks his head until his eyes are level with mine.
“You’re safe. Nobody’s getting through that door. Jax is on the landing, Kane is en route, and Mason has local PD running plates in a three-block radius. We’re going to find out who was in that car. But right now, in this room, you’re safe.”
I nod. The rational part of me believes him. The rest of me is still screaming.
Jax closes the door, staying right outside my front door. The latch clicks. Ryker and I are alone in my apartment and the adrenaline is still running hot through my bloodstream.
This is the apartment where I lived before everything. Yellow curtains. Hedgehog mug on the shelf with its tiny painted smile. The radiator clanks once, the same old sound, and it nearly breaks me.
Ryker stands in the middle of my living room looking too big for the space. Too solid. He studies the shelves, the animal mugs, the tilted photo of my parents in the cheap plastic frame.
“This is where you lived,” he says.
“This is where I lived.”
“It’s small.”
“I’m small. It fit.”
He turns and looks at me. Whatever he sees in my face changes his expression into something rawer.
I don’t let him speak.
I cross the room in four steps, and cup his face, pulling him down to me. I kiss him hard, with every ounce of the adrenaline that’s been building since he said the word surveillance.
This kiss is different. The first ones were questions. This one is an answer. Fast and desperate and slightly rough. He freezes for half a second, then his hands find my waist and he’s kissing me back with a hunger that fuels me.
I push him backward. He lets me. His back hits the wall. The photo of my parents rattles on the shelf. I press against him, my body against his, and the difference in our sizes only makes it fiercer.
“Zoe.” His voice is wrecked. His hands grip my hips through the jeans.
“I know,” I whisper as he presses his forehead to mine.
He walks around my apartment, studying everything, learning more about me as he does. “Your radiator sounds like my generator,” Ryker says, voice rough. “Ugly, loud, and completely essential.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my radiator.”
“I’ll put it in the field journal.”
I turn my face into his chest and breathe him in. Cold air and leather and the scent that’s just him.
“Ryker.”
“Yeah.”
“I need one more thing before I leave. A shoebox.”
He follows me into my room and his eyes glance around, looking at all the things.
“This you?” He points at a picture I keep of myself taped to my mirror.
It was from a simpler time. When I was eight years old and riding my favorite horse, Daffodil.
My father took the picture as my mother smiled at me.
“Yeah,” I say, telling him the story.
He grabs the picture and slips it into his jacket side pocket, next to his heart.
I don’t know why the simple gesture brings tears to my eyes, but it does. Tyler never even looked at that photo. Never cared. But Ryker’s different. Better. Outside Jax is on the landing and Kane is on the way and somewhere in this county a man connected to that gray sedan is still out there.