Page 65 of You Can Run

“I was angry,” he finally said. “I hated that I'd spent two years trying to make you love me and you were still just—waiting for a ghost. Every time you looked at the door, or the phone, or just stared out at nothing, you weren't looking for me. You were looking for him.” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice had lost whatever was left of its strength. “In that moment, I wanted you to hurt. I didn't care if they killed you. I just wanted the weight of you off my chest.”

Jessica said nothing for a long moment. She kept expecting the words to hit her, kept bracing for the impact, but it didn't come. What settled over her instead was something else, something more like tiredness than pain. This was the man she had lived with. The man she had cooked for and slept beside. A man who had been capable of trading her life for the relief ofhis own wounded pride, and had waited until now to find the honesty to admit it.

So she didn't say anything back. There wasn't anythingtosay.

Dante tapped on the passenger window, two knuckles against the glass.

Jessica startled at the sound, her pulse spiking. Dante opened the door, the wet heat of the marsh rolling in. He didn't look at Trent. He looked past him, his eyes finding Jessica.

“You can't stay in the truck,” he said. “There's a loft above the bait counter. It's rotting, but it'll hold. Get up there.”

“What about him?” she asked, nodding toward Trent.

Dante let his eyes move to the man in the driver's seat. “He stays on the floor. He watches the door. If he tries to leave, or if he tries to call anyone, I'll finish what I started in that parking lot.”

Trent didn't argue. He climbed out of the truck with the slow, stiff movements of a man twenty years older than he'd been yesterday. He walked to the corner of the shed and sank onto a stack of moldy burlap sacks. Something about the way he folded into himself made Jessica look away.

She followed Dante to the ladder. Her hands were shaking as she gripped the old wood, and she focused on that—the grain of it, the way it bit into her palms—because it was easier than thinking.

The loft was dark, the air dense with dust. The floorboards groaned under her weight. Dante climbed up after her and pulled the ladder up without a word.

They lay down on a pile of old canvas sails, the fabric stiff and smelling of salt. Jessica stared up at the dark and listened to the marsh outside, the distant sound of frogs and water moving, and beneath that, barely audible, the shift of Trent settling on the floor below.

Then Dante's arm came around her, heavy and deliberate, pulling her against his chest, and for a moment the rest of it receded.

“He's coming, isn't he,” she said, quieter than she meant to. She felt the words leave her like something she'd been holding in a fist. “Borya.”

Dante's arm tightened. He didn't answer right away. She could feel his pulse against her cheek, steady and slow.

“He's been coming for thirteen years, Jess.”

She closed her eyes. The image of the dog crate swam up behind them—the smell of it, the sound of it—and she pushed it back down, the way she'd taught herself to. She focused on the heat of Dante's skin. On his breathing. On the fact that she was here and not there.

After a while, she became aware of Trent again. The occasional creak of the floorboards below. It was the sound of a man sitting in the dark with what he'd done.

She didn't feel sorry for him. She wasn't sure she felt anything toward him at all anymore. But somewhere between the sound of his breathing and the slow shift of the night, she understood something she hadn't before: that the man downstairs wasn't guarding them because he wanted to be a hero. He was guarding them because he had nowhere else to go, and no one else to be.

Trent sat on the stack of moldy burlap, the cold of the concrete seeping through his slacks. He could hear the faint creaking of the wood above him, two people shifting their weight to be closer. Every time the floorboards groaned, he felt it somewhere behind his sternum.

He reached up and touched his nose. The bone was a jagged, throbbing mess of heat. He pressed his fingers against it harder than he needed to, because the pain was at least something solid in a night that had come apart at every seam.

He'd been a cop for eleven years. A good cop, he'd told himself. He'd worn the uniform like it meant something, let the badge authorize things he didn't want to examine too closely. But sitting in the dark of this shed, in someone else's jurisdiction, the uniform felt like something he'd borrowed.

He was off-shift, out of county, with no leave filed. He'd used his access to the department's traffic database to run the private plate of a federal witness. He'd stood across from that woman in his own kitchen and handed over information about Jessica to keep himself in a game he'd already lost. And then there was Ferrera, a man dead on a dock because Trent had followed a feeling instead of a thought.

In another life, there was a headline:Local Officer Downs Dangerous Escaped Felon in Daring Pier Shooting.He could almost see it. Could almost feel the weight of the commendation in his palm. But there was no version of that story where the investigators didn't start pulling threads. The unauthorized GPS pings. The protected witness he'd burned the moment someone more dangerous knocked on his door. The whole thing would unspool in about forty-eight hours, and at the end of it there'd be nothing left that looked like a career or a hero.

Because he wasn't a hero. He was a crooked cop who had run out of road, and the worst part was that he'd known it for a while and kept moving anyway.

The sound of a siren drifted across the marsh, low and distant, but deliberate. Then another. He knew that cadence. He knew the way a perimeter sounded when it was being drawn. They weren't looking for a cartel hit squad. They were lookingfor a decaled Dodge Ram seen leaving a homicide. They were looking forhim.

He looked up at the loft. Jessica's pink hair caught a stray thread of moonlight from the high window. She was curled into Dante's side, her shoulder against his chest, her hand somewhere he couldn't see. He'd watched her sleep for two years and she had never once looked like that.

He'd told himself a lot of things about those two years. That she was healing. That she was cautious. That she needed time and patience and eventually she'd settle into the life he was building around her, like a frame around something that didn't quite fit. He'd believed it, or he'd made himself believe it, which was close enough until tonight.

Apparently, she'd never bought it. Not for a second.

He stood up. His legs felt slow and waterlogged.