by Jodie Bailey
Whipping to look over her shoulder, Amy caught sight of the other car resting against a tree at the start of a curve. It had missed the guardrail by inches, saved from going over the edge by a tall pine.
She planted her palms on the dashboard, trying to ground herself as Sam grabbed his phone and checked for a signal before dialing, only one hand on the steering wheel as he navigated his way around the twists and turns of the mountain at a truly terrifying speed. Amy locked her elbows and dug her feet in to keep from being thrown from side to side.
“I’ve got no radio signal, and we’ve got trouble.” He detailed the incident and their general location, ordering someone to call the police and an ambulance and to “get help on the road now.” Finally, he listened, nodding as though the other person could see him. After several turns that nearly threw Amy against the window, he killed the call and dropped the phone into the cup holder without saying anything. There was a tension in his jaw, one that told her he’d not only passed on some distressing information, he’d received some as well.
“What’s happened?”
He held up a hand, then shoved his sweater up to his elbows, focused on the road. “Give me a minute.”
Instinctively, Amy shrank against the door, the words hitting like quick, clipped blows. Time spun and looped on itself.
If the way his voice had deepened and his forehead creased during that phone call hadn’t clued her in, the breakneck speed he was hurtling along the road would have told the tale. “You didn’t have to snap at me.” It was the first thing that came to mind. Stupid, but better than focusing on the bigger truth—for all of the precautions Sam had taken today, her life had once again come very close to being extinguished.
He drew his eyebrows together. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have.” He tapped the wheel a few times and navigated a couple of turns. “Forgive me for forgetting my manners when someone just tried to drive us off the side of a cliff.”
Okay, so neither of them were at their best right now. Given his job, he should be used to this.
She was not. “Don’t lie to me. What else is going on?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
“Then why are you bound and determined to make sure I die on the next turn this road throws at you?” Control. She needed control. Their speed was the least of her worries, even if her stomach was threatening to run for the next county. No, this lone-wolf marshal was serving up her worst nightmare on a rusted metal platter in the cab of his dark gray sedan.
The reins of her life had been wrenched from her grasp the moment she’d chosen to reveal the true business happening behind the scenes of the day spa she’d managed in El Paso. Now, someone had located her in her new life and was determined to destroy her. This flight up and down the mountains highlighted a stark fact... She had no control. Not over where she was going and not over how fast she got there.
Her heart pounded faster, pulsing through her like a drumbeat. Her thoughts spun. Her breaths pumped harder. She couldn’t fill her lungs, couldn’t get enough air. Couldn’t process what was happening. For all that she’d been numb earlier, the panic now broke over her in waves. Nowhere was safe. No one was safe.
She had to run. The vest over her clothes was too hot, too tight. She wanted to claw it off her body so she could breathe.
Desperate to escape, Amy snaked her hand toward the door handle, heedless of the warning shriek in the back of her mind that the car was moving too fast and she’d die if she made the leap.
It didn’t matter. Someone already wanted her dead, and now the marshals were going after Layla because of her. She had to save herself. She had to save Layla. Surely she could run faster and farther on her own, outside the prison of this metal death trap. She needed to be free and to breathe fresh, moving air.
The world hazed gray as she jerked, the panic taking total control. Her left hand jammed the button on her seat belt as her right grasped the door handle.
A strong arm slammed against her chest, knocking her against the seat as the car skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, fishtailing slightly, headlights shining at a ridiculous angle across the low hills in front of them.
“Have you lost your mind?” Sam’s voice was a roar. “If you have a death wish, I want to know now before I risk my life for you again.”
Amy clawed at his arm, digging her fingernails into his sweater, frantic to escape. If she stayed in this car, she would die. So would Layla. They’d all die.
They’d all die.
When Sam released her, Amy shoved out the door, but the smack of cold air and the surrounding darkness stopped her. She turned left, right. There was nowhere to run. No escape.
Strong hands grasped her shoulders, holding her steady. “Look at me. Right now. Look. At. Me.” The words were authoritative yet gentle, commanding her to meet his eyes.
Sam’s face was shadowed by the headlights at the front of the car, but there was enough illumination to see dark concern in his eyes.
“Good. Watch me.” He breathed in deeply through his nose, then out through his mouth. “Do what I do.”
Cold sweat heated her skin as fear cooked through her. Amy fought to stand still, to center her attention on Sam and to shut out the monsters in the darkness. One shuddering breath in, one out.
In. Out.
Sam nodded. “Again.”
Five or six breaths later, Amy closed her eyes. Her heart settled. Her mind reconnected to her body. The panic dropped to a manageable fear.
“Okay.” Sam’s hold on her shoulders eased, though he didn’t release her. “I promise it’s going to be okay.”
Amy’s muscles gave way and she slid down the side of Sam’s car, sitting against the tire, dropping her forehead to her knees. She’d almost grown used to the way fear leaped out of the dark like a rabid coyote, striking when she least expected, taking over her senses and driving her into flight. The first panic attack had hit the night federal marshals had faked her death, the moment she’d realized how irrevocably her life had changed. There was no reset button, no way to return to what she’d left behind. She would never be herself again, never reunite with her twin sister, never chase her dreams.
The panic had sprung up again and again over the years. No one ever knew what to do with her when it happened. But Sam... “How did you know how to help?”
He kicked a stone off the side of the road, then walked to the rear of the car and stared in the direction from which they’d come. He paced past her again, looking to where they were headed, patrolling, watching for danger. His movements were like some of the soldiers she’d met at the gym in El Paso. Systematic, rigid, trained.
It was a long moment before he spoke. “We can’t stay here. There’s no telling if that guy has friends waiting around the next turn. We have to get moving.”
When her muscles felt as though they could hold her weight, Amy reached up, grabbed the base of the side mirror and pulled herself to stand. She reached for him as he passed, her fingers around his wrist. “How did you know what to do?” She laid each word out slowly, emphasizing the syllables, refusing to let him ignore her.
“Been there, done that.”
Amy dropped his wrist. Nothing about Sam Maldonado made him seem like the type to lose control. All evening, he’d held the reins, had been completely in charge. Even now, pacing and watching, he seemed larger than life, his broad shoulders and the muscles evident in his back and arms an outward show of capability. The idea of him losing control the way she had...
Fear melted into embarrassment. She’d lost control. Completely. Sam ought to leave her on the side of the road to freeze to death. It would save her the trouble of dying from humiliation.
“You okay now?” Gone was the friendly man who had talked with her on the highway and distracted her from her fear. Gone was the compassion that had helped put her back together
a few minutes earlier. In their place was a federal marshal ready to move out and complete his mission.
Amy nodded once, even though he wasn’t looking at her, then slid into the car and buckled her seat belt.
The car rocked when Sam slammed his door, but he proceeded at a slower speed. He drove several miles and made a handful of turns along back roads in silence until he reached a deserted gas station and pulled off behind the building, killing the lights.
The darkness across the hills was complete, thick clouds hanging low to obliterate the stars.
Amy pulled her thin sleeves over her hands, trying to make herself small. “Why are we stopping?”
“Because you need a minute to catch your breath and I need a minute to wait for my people to catch up to us. We’re less than an hour from Atlanta and this is getting out of control.” He shoved the car into Park but left the engine running. “We’re relatively safe for now, and I can get out of here easily if I have to. We’re waiting on a next step.” He glanced at her. “Local law enforcement is coming in to offer an escort. Unmarked cars, more people watching before and behind us.” Sam didn’t look at her as he laid out the plan. Instead, he seemed to be hiding.
He was keeping something from her. “You still haven’t told me what’s changed. Whoever was on that phone call told you something.”
“I don’t think you should worry about—”
“Don’t.” In the aftermath of panic, boldness took over, fighting for control so that fear couldn’t stage an encore performance. “The conversation was about me. I deserve to know.”
“Fine.” Sam pressed his palms against the steering wheel, his expression unreadable. “It was my team leader. Whoever is after you has a motive we can’t figure out yet.”
“You can’t say that. It’s Grant Meyer. He wants me—”
“No. It’s not.” Sam faced her, his eyes dark and flashing something that might be anger. “Grant Meyer is dead.”
* * *
Sam should have found a better way to tell her, should have given her a little bit of buildup or warning before he informed her the man responsible for her life’s destruction was not the same person who was now trying to wipe her off the planet. A small transgression in the grand scheme of things, but one more reminder of how easy it could be to miss the mark.
He knew how fragile life was, how quickly someone in his care could be ripped from this world.
Sam jerked his chin to the side, trying to shake free the unbidden vision of Devin Wallace, bloodied on the ground by a bullet fired in a drive-by shooting.
A camera on a convenience store across the street from the shooting had told the tale. Sam and his team had been forty-two seconds too late. Forty-two seconds marked the time between a man’s life and his death.
It was a number he’d never forget, especially since Devin’s brother, Xavier, had confronted Sam outside of his office the day he’d packed up and left his job to join this team. My brother’s blood is on your hands. You cared so much about yourself that you couldn’t even spare forty-two seconds to save his life. The other deputies on Sam’s former team had intervened, pulling Xavier Wallace aside, but Sam had never forgotten the grief and hatred in the other man’s eyes.
Hatred Sam deserved.
The woman beside him was still alive, although Sam had no idea if her forty-two seconds had started ticking already. He hated this, sitting behind a burned-out gas station on the edge of a field with only a handful of escape routes, waiting on an escort that might take forty-two seconds too long to arrive.
He had to shut down the countdown clock in his head. Dragging his focus into the present, he turned toward Amy.
His current assignment sat beside him in her seat, frozen. She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to be breathing. Instead, her eyes were fixed on something outside of the vehicle and she simply stared, a sudden statue that Sam had to protect at all costs.
As her eyes widened, understanding shot through him. Sam reached across the car and grabbed her shoulders. “Breathe, Amy. You have to breathe.” He’d seen this before. Shock, panic or some other high emotion smacked a person sideways, then their brain shifted out of survivor mode into processing the intel.
With a shuddering gasp, Amy inhaled and whipped around to face Sam. She gulped air and stared at him as though she were trying to comprehend if this was reality, if she was wide-awake or trapped in a very cruel nightmare.
Once again, he demonstrated for her what to do. “Breathe with me. Come on, Amy. I don’t have a paper bag if you’re going to hyperventilate on me here.”
She choked on a laugh and turned away. It was possible she was hysterical, or maybe his off-the-cuff sarcasm had somehow been funny enough to break through. If she thought he was a laugh riot, she was worse off than either of them had imagined.
Amy breathed a few more times, her lips rounded as she took in air and released it again.
Sam lost track of his own breathing while watching her. The close air in the car, the adrenaline rush of a life-threatening chase... It all stirred his emotions, swirling them inside his stomach.
No. It wasn’t the danger or the brushes with death. It was Amy herself. Since he’d flown to her rescue a few months earlier, she had never been far from his thoughts. Every meeting with her and Edgecombe had left him wishing for more. Sam had held his silence and been stoic during those encounters, but it was mostly because he was full of questions about her, wanting to know who she really was, how she really ticked. There was something about the way she drew her shoulders back and faced whatever came after her. Something about the way her situation might throw her into a spiral for a moment but she always fought back, stronger than before. Those green eyes spoke to him, sometimes showed up in his dreams.
Yeah, no. He’d been down that road before and he’d paid a heavy price when his ex-wife couldn’t stay faithful. There wasn’t room for relationships in his life. Wasn’t room for a woman who distracted him from the job. He was gone too much and in too much danger too often, exactly the same as he’d been when he was married to Lindsay. This job was all-consuming, and he wouldn’t drive down that road again.
Even if the scenery was beautiful.
He dropped his hands from Amy’s shoulders and sat back in his seat, letting his fingertips rest at the base of the steering wheel, giving them both space to reset themselves.
Amy found her equilibrium first. “Grant Meyer is dead?”
“He was murdered.” Someone in the prison where he was awaiting trial without bail had managed to get a run at him, using a homemade knife to stab him in the neck.
“I thought he was in some sort of solitary, away from the rest of the population or something so he couldn’t reach out or make any contacts.”
“He was. Apparently, this happened a few hours ago so the authorities are still trying to piece together what went down.” It could have been a typical behind-bars beef. Traffickers weren’t always treated kindly behind prison walls, not by other inmates who viewed them as lower than even murderers on the scum scale. Another prisoner could have gotten wind of who he was and taken justice into his own hands.
It was better than the alternative explanation: that someone had targeted Grant Meyer, someone who was trying to clean up whatever mess they perceived he’d made, someone who was making a power grab in order to rebuild an organization that had been left in shambles when Amy turned over her evidence and agreed to testify.
That scenario would be infinitely worse, because it would mean whoever had had Meyer killed was the same person trying to take Amy out of the equation, trying to tie up Meyer’s loose ends in a bid to restart the organization with a clean slate. It would mean that whoever was out there was a big fat unknown and that prosecutors were going to have to start from square one.
It meant Sam and his team would have no intel on who might be after Amy, how
they operated or where they might strike next.
They needed to get to Atlanta and his secure headquarters now more than ever. Sam leaned forward and scanned the road, searching for lights, listening for sounds. He needed that escort, fast. He took in the field before them, deep blue in the moonlight, and tried to scan the shadows. They probably couldn’t hide for long.
“Does this mean I’m free?” The question, thin and tentative, looped a noose around Sam’s heart and pulled it tight. Amy saw light at the end of the tunnel and thought it was hope—freedom from a life of lies on the run.
Sam wished she’d waited until they were in Atlanta before she asked that question. He didn’t want to be the one to have to tell her the light was a freight train carrying volatile nuclear explosives.
He rolled through a dozen different ways to cushion the blow, to put off the question or pretend he hadn’t heard her. In the end, he couldn’t deny her the truth. “No.”
It was a simple answer, the best he could give her when his intel was thin and his communication was spotty. It was both freeing and binding, speaking with honesty yet snuffing the light on her one candle of optimism.
“Oh.” Amy barely breathed the word and, while Sam wasn’t looking at her, he could sense the defeat. She slumped as though her spine had given out and left her with nothing for support.
Hope dashed. What was that verse his mother used to say? Something out of Proverbs, something about lost hope making a heart sick. Maybe if he’d listened closer, he could offer Amy something more than a crushed spirit right now.
Her pain seemed to take on a life of its own in the car. It practically whispered to his own hidden pain, reminding him of how it had felt when he’d realized Lindsay wasn’t going to change. That there was no longer any hope for his marriage, that his entire future with all of its goals and dreams and plans had shattered, slicing him into ribbons and leaving him to stare at a dark void.
No one had been there to reach for him when he’d stepped into an empty apartment after that last brutal deployment. An empty space devoid of furniture, of Lindsay, of anything.
