12. Sage
TWELVE
SAGE
Milo drives like he’s being chased by a monster only he can see.
Not fast, exactly. Fast would imply a straight line and a destination he’s trying to reach. This is more evasive. Lane changes that serve no purpose. A left turn followed immediately by a right turn followed by a U-turn in a Wendy’s parking lot while he checks his mirrors obsessively.
“You missed the highway,” Holden says from the passenger seat, his voice flat and his demeanor saying he’s already regretting the group decision to go with Milo to his server room while he did a thorough check of all our devices.
“It’s called defensive driving, Grandpa,” Milo says, and flicks his turn signal like an accusation. “Someone’s been in the digital perimeter. Not even trying to be subtle about it. My job is to get us off the grid for a few minutes.”
Holden shoots him a look I can feel, even from the back seat.
“You know being off the grid only works if the pursuer isn’t tracking you in real time.”
“I’m running the VPN through a tiered privacy chain,” Milo says, as if that explains anything, and makes another hard right, sending Holden’s elbow into the console with a dull thunk. “Which I could do in my sleep, but it’s more fun under pressure.”
Knox, in the seat next to me, doesn’t say anything.
He’s watching Milo’s hands on the wheel like a hawk, those deep brown eyes narrowed and all the softer lines of his face drawn tight.
Milo’s reckless turns don’t faze him—Knox braces a broad palm against the door and takes it, muscle and instinct entirely at home in chaos.
“You doing okay, Fury?” he rumbles with a little more concern than usual. His hand settles on my knee and rests there, solid and reassuring, as if he can anchor me to the seat through osmosis alone.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
No one calls me on it, but Milo gives me a worried look via the rearview mirror, and Holden glances over his shoulder just long enough for his eyes to flick over me, then away again.
I’m wedged between Knox and Micah, which is like being sandwiched between a brick wall and a warm blanket.
Knox takes up approximately sixty percent of the available space.
Micah has his arm stretched along the seat behind my head.
His fingers brush my collarbone in a subtle, unconscious caress that costs nothing and means everything.
The motion is grounding, and right now my insides are about as stable as a half-frozen lake.
“It’s okay if you’re not,” Micah whispers, dropping a soft kiss on the side of my head.
I close my eyes and lean back, let the sounds of rubber on wet pavement and the guys’ bickering in the front seat wash over me, try to pretend I’m anything but a dead girl riding passenger in my own life.
Like the me from before is gone and now I’m just piloting a body, learning how to move, how to not give in to the urge to crawl out of my own skin and into anything less complicated.
Maybe it’s cumulative. Maybe it’s just today.
When I woke up, I felt good. It was the first morning since the attack that I felt like me again.
Then I’d reached for Holden, realized I was alone, and things went downhill from there.
Knox found me in the kitchen. I was standing at the island with my coffee—the one Eli makes every morning—when Knox walked in holding my phone like it was a bomb waiting to go off. Which, I guess, it was.
“Fury. I need to show you something.”
He didn’t sugarcoat it. Didn’t ease me into it or ask me to sit down or do any of the careful, gentle lead-up things that Micah would’ve done.
He just handed me the phone, unlocked, the messages already on the screen, and stood close enough that when my knees buckled he caught me without having to move.
How’s the throat?
Bet it would have hurt less if you’d let me fuck it.
And underneath—a contact card. Brock Davis. His face. His number. Smiling, like he hadn’t been dead for weeks.
I threw up in the sink. Knox held my hair. Then I rinsed my mouth, splashed water on my face, and asked him to tell me everything.
He did. All of it. Including the part where the text came in while I was asleep in Holden’s arms. Including the part where five men stood in a garage at three in the morning and debated whether I got to know.
“Some of them wanted to wait,” Knox said.
“Who?”
He didn’t answer that. Didn’t need to. I know who. I know exactly who would try to fold me in bubble wrap and call it love.
“I told them you should decide what happens next,” he said.
I looked at him—this enormous, quiet man who says less in a day than Milo says in a minute—and I thought: you’re the only one who never tries to make decisions for me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me, Fury. Be angry.”
So I am. I’m angry. I’m angry at whoever sent that message, and I’m angry that they used Brock’s face to do it, and I’m angry that even dead, even buried, even reduced to a name on a spoofed contact card, that man is still trying to fuck me.
I’m angry that the first good morning I’ve had since someone strung me up like a wind chime was ruined before I’d finished my coffee.
And underneath the anger, in the place I don’t let anyone see, I’m terrified.
Because whoever sent that text knows what Brock did to me.
Knows about the rope. Knows about my throat. Knows enough to make a joke about it.
And they’re still out there.
In for four. Out for four.
Eli shifts in the cargo area behind me. He lost the coin toss for seating—or more accurately, nobody offered him a seat and he didn’t ask for one.
I can hear him back there every time Milo takes a corner, sliding on the flat carpet, bracing himself against the wheel well.
Something more than a meeting about that text happened last night.
Because when I went to bed, Eli was fine.
But this morning he’s moving carefully. One cheekbone is split, his mouth bruised.
Nobody explains it, and I’m too tired to ask.
I wonder if he knows I heard him talking this morning.
After Knox showed me the phone, after the others filtered downstairs one by one looking like men who’d had three hours of sleep and a lifetime of bad news, I went out to the porch to breathe.
The back door was open. Eli was in the kitchen, and Micah was with him, and their voices carried in that way voices do when people think they’re being quiet but aren’t.
“She knows,” Micah had said.
“Knox told her?”
“Yeah. She’s out on the porch.”
A pause. Then Eli’s voice, scraped down to nothing, “How is she?”
“She threw up. Then she asked for the details.” Another pause. “She’s tougher than you give her credit for.”
“I know she’s tough, Micah. That’s not—” A thumping sound cut him off.
A cabinet closing, or maybe a fist against a counter.
“I feel guilty, okay? She’s in this situation because of decisions that I made—ever since that night on the beach.
And I’d like one morning where she wakes up and nothing’s trying to kill her. Is that too much to ask?”
I’d walked back inside before Micah could respond. Made eye contact with Eli across the kitchen. Watched him freeze with a dish towel in his hands, caught between wanting to come closer and knowing he’d lost the right.
“I’m fine,” I told him. Same lie I tell everyone.
He nodded. Didn’t believe me. Didn’t push. That’s the dance we do now—him hovering at the edge of my orbit, close enough to catch me, far enough that I never have to acknowledge he’s there. It should make me angry. Some days it does. Today it makes me tired.
But I’d rather be tired with him near than rested with him gone.
And that’s the part I can’t say out loud yet—that even after everything, even after easy and fun and passing you around, some stupid, stubborn part of me would panic if he left again.
I haven’t forgiven him. I don’t have that in me yet.
But love doesn’t wait for forgiveness. It sits there, inconvenient and unkillable, like a weed growing through concrete and attempting to bloom into a flower.
Milo takes another pointless left turn, and Eli thuds against the side panel.
“Fucking hell,” Eli groans, shifting around in an effort to wedge himself in the space more securely.
“Aww, is diddums having a hard time back there?” Milo mocks.
“If I die in a rollover, I want it noted that I protested this seating arrangement.”
“Noted and ignored,” Milo says, checking his mirrors for the millionth time.
I lean forward between the seats. “Milo. Are we actually getting closer to wherever we’re going, or are you driving in circles?”
“We’re getting closer via a carefully designed countersurveillance route that happens to resemble a circular shape to the untrained eye.” He slows at a four-way stop, scans every direction, and pulls through. “Nobody’s following us.”
“Nobody was following us when we left,” Holden says.
“You don’t know that. That’s the whole point.
This guy spoofed a dead man’s phone number and sent our girlfriend a message about her throat.
While she was sleeping. In your bed. In your house.
” Milo doesn’t look at Holden, but the words land anyway.
“So forgive me if I’m being a little extra today. ”
The car goes quiet. He’s not wrong.
Knox’s thumb moves on my knee. Small circles. Steady.
When Milo finally seems satisfied that we’ve shaken whatever phantom tail he was worried about, he straightens in his seat, signals properly for the first time in twenty minutes, and turns onto a quiet residential street.
Ranch-style houses. Mowed lawns. A kid on a bicycle.
A sprinkler going chk-chk-chk-chk in someone’s front yard.
“Your server room is here?” Holden says.
“It’s in the basement of my mom’s house. So, yeah.”
“Wait,” Eli says from the back. “You’re taking us to your mom’s house?”