Page 63 of Beautiful Savage
He just replies: Try.
I set the phone beside my fork at the dinner table. Papa notices but says nothing. He serves the leftover chicken and rice, pours the last of the wine, and sits across from me. The eveninglight gilds the kitchen and the dust motes in the air. It is almost beautiful, but for the constant undertow of dread.
We talk about nothing. The garden, the neighbor's new dog, a town hall meeting that neither of us will attend. But every beat of conversation is shadowed by the phone, by the waiting, by the knowledge that at any moment everything could change. That Gunner might keep me waiting forever.
23 - Gunner
Extraction. Four. Pristine, FL. 0900 Mon.
The line of text burns across my monitor. Everything in me goes still and cold. They're going after her.
The dispatch went out fifteen minutes ago at 8:45 AM. Four operators already on the road, heading north. My mind runs the calculation: eighty miles from Miami to Pristine, ninety minutes in normal traffic. They'll arrive between 10:15 and 10:30.
Daphne. Nicolas. My chest constricts.
Three seconds to decide.
I'm on my feet, laptop still open on the desk where I've been monitoring Hallstein's communications since dawn. Two days since I put Daphne in Logan's SUV and sent her to Pristine. Two days of empty apartment, her vanilla scent fading from the sheets, her lamp still burning beside the bed because I can't bring myself to turn it off. The channels I've had running for five days have been quiet since Saturday's breach attempt outside the coffee shop. Hallstein's been operating clean while the Pentagon announcement ticks closer.
Until now.
Keys from the counter. Glock on my hip, silenced secondary from the desk drawer, the go-bag I've kept ready since Tuesday. My hands move fast, but underneath, rage builds. They're going after her because of me.
The apartment behind me holds its emptiness. Bare wall above the bed where her father's painting used to hang, two finishing nails still visible, the drawer with it locked away. Herlamp glowing beside the bed, a beacon for someone who isn't coming back. I don't look as I leave.
Down the back service stairs, taking them three at a time. Through the hallway, past the loading dock's perpetual chill. My truck waits in the shadows. Engine starts rough.
I dial Logan as I pull onto the side street. He answers on the first ring.
"Stand by."
I hang up before he can respond. Nine years under the same roof means he knows that tone.
North on Calle Ocho toward I-95. The math keeps running as I merge into traffic. The extraction team had a fifteen-minute head start. If the dispatch was confirmation of an operation already moving, they could be twenty minutes ahead.
They could already have her.
My hands tighten on the wheel until my knuckles go white. I push the truck to ninety-two, weaving through traffic. Reading patterns three hundred yards ahead, picking lanes by instinct. Fort Lauderdale blurs past. West Palm Beach. Jupiter. Stuart. Each mile marker counting down.
I try Daphne's phone once at mile marker forty-three. Four rings, then her voicemail: "Hi, you've reached Daphne. Please leave a message." Her recorded voice guts me. I don't leave a message. What would I say?
The last time I heard her voice in person, she said "stay alive" at our apartment door.
The citrus country opens up, traffic thinning. I push to ninety-five. Every mile per hour gained is thirty seconds saved. The exit for Pristine appears, and I take it at speed that makes the tires scream. Through town in under ninety seconds. The dairy farm where she probably bought eggs, the bait shop her father frequents, the two-lane stretch she's driven a thousand times, the welcome sign claiming 4,217 souls.
One of them is hers.
I reach the cottage at 9:50.
I kill the engine two blocks out, coast the final stretch in silence. Park behind the cottage on the alley street, the same approach I used when I first came here and took her.
The back gate hangs open. Wrong. Nicolas never leaves it open. Through the gate, his studio door also stands open. My stomach drops.
The easel is overturned, ultramarine and cadmium yellow bleeding across the floor. Paint water spreading dark. One brush snapped in half. The violence started here.
The studio is empty, but the evidence screams. They came for her, found him instead. The path through the garden shows the struggle continued. Herbs trampled, releasing rosemary and basil into morning air. Scuffed grass. One of Nicolas's paint-stained slippers lying in the tomato bed.
The back door of the cottage is ajar.
