Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
“The plan was built around me having information Marlena needs. That hasn’t changed.” I’m already pacing, which is what I do when my brain is running faster than my mouth. Old habit from job days. Liam used to call it my scheming walk. “She took Liam to force my hand. Fine. Let her think it worked.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when she comes back on that screen, I break. I give her the location. Every detail, every landmark, every turn in the trail. I make it so thorough she’ll have no reason to doubt me.” I stop pacing and look at him. “And I leave out the safe code.”
Knox is quiet for a beat, processing. “She’ll verify the location first. Send a team.”
“Good. That takes time. A day, maybe more. And when her team finds the safe and can’t open it, she needs me again. She needs me alive, and she needs me cooperative. Which means she needs you and Liam alive too, because she’s smart enough to know I won’t give her a damn thing if either of you are dead.”
“And then what? She drags us out there to open it?”
“That’s exactly what she does. And that’s when we’re outside this cabin for the first time in ten days.” I let that land. “We’ve got the fire extinguisher. We’ve got the bleach and ammonia. Knox, we talked about this. Transport is our opening.”
He runs a hand over his face. I can see him turning it over, testing it for holes, doing that tactical calculation he does where he weighs every variable against every risk.
“She’ll have armed guards.”
“She will.”
“Multiple vehicles, probably. Maybe air transport.”
“Probably.”
“The odds are garbage.”
“The odds have been garbage since day one. But out there we’ve got space to move, weapons she doesn’t know about, and a woman too busy drooling over a twenty-million-dollar diamond to watch our hands. I’ll take that over sitting in this cabin waiting to die.”
He’s quiet again. “We need to figure out what we can smuggle out of here without the cameras catching it.”
“See, this is why I keep you around.”
We spend the next hour going through it. Quiet, methodical, backs to the cameras whenever we need to discuss details. The fire extinguisher is too big to hide, but Knox thinks he can rig a smaller container with the ammonia and bleach that would fit inside a coat pocket. The steak knives are obvious but effective. We talk about positioning, about how many guards she’s likely to bring, about what terrain we might be dealing with around the mine.
There are holes. Plenty of them. But standing around cataloging reasons it won’t work hasn’t kept anyone alive, and I didn’t survive five years on the run by waiting for a sure thing.
Knox sits across from me at the table, his lip still swollen from yesterday’s fight with Liam, a bruise darkening along his jaw. He looks like he’s been through a war.
I probably look worse.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I blink. “For what?”
“For not seeing who you really are.” He shakes his head. “I kept following you around, watching over you, like you couldn’t handle yourself. But you can. You’ve been handling yourself since long before I came along.”
“Knox—”
“You don’t need a bodyguard, Hailey. You never did. I just couldn’t get out of my own head long enough to realize it.”
“You were both right,” I say eventually. “You and Liam. About each other. He made deals behind my back and got us kidnapped. You tracked my movements like I was a target instead of a person. You both made choices for me without ever asking what I wanted.”
Knox tenses, but he doesn’t look away.
“But I also made choices.” I gesture around the cabin, at the mess we’ve made of everything. “I came here. I stayed. I . . .”
I think about the past ten days. The fighting. The fucking. The way we fell into each other like it was inevitable, like gravity had been pulling us together since the beginning.
“This,” I finish.
“Do you regret it?”
“No.”
The word surprises me with how easily it comes out. But it’s true. Despite everything—the danger, the betrayal, the fact that we might all die before midnight—I don’t regret any of it. Not Knox. Not Liam. Not the complicated, messy, impossible thing the three of us have become.
“I don’t regret you,” I say. “Either of you. Even if we all went about it the wrong way.”
Knox crosses the space between us. His hand cups my face, rough and gentle at the same time. He doesn’t kiss me. He just holds me there, forehead pressed to mine, breathing the same air.
I close my eyes. “I love him too, you know. Liam. Flaws and all.”
“I know.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “So do I.”
His arms come around me, and I let myself be held. Let myself pretend, for a moment, that this is enough. That love is enough to keep us alive. Thirty seconds. That’s what I give myself. Thirty seconds of this before I go back to being the woman with the plan.