Page 29 of Open Road

“Then I look at Rose, and the thirty seconds are over.”

His hand moves on the table. A fraction toward me. He stops it there, and somehow I understand that the stopping took something.

“He’s not going to touch you here,” he says.

The sentence lands quietly. There’s no heat in it or performance. It’s a statement of fact from a man who deals in facts.

“You can’t promise that.” My voice is steady. “You don’t know him. He’s resourceful, has money, and he has people who owe him things. He finds what he needs to find.”

Roam holds my eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “I can.”

Two words.The same flat certainty he gives everything, the same voice that told Rose the exhaust pipe was hot and told Creed over the phone that a woman and a kid needed somewhere safe. No performance. He says it the way he says everything that is simply true.

Something in my chest does something complicated.

It’s been two years of being managed, handled, and spoken at in careful constructions designed to make me smaller. Four days of this man’s plain sentences, his cold coffee, his manual he stopped reading to listen to me, his hands flat on the table, and his eyes on mine the whole time, without the particular expression that means a person is waiting for you to stop.

He believes me.

Before the schedule, the USB drive, or anything else, on a dark highway at three in the morning, with nothing to go on except my face and the way I was standing, he read the situation and came back. He didn’t ask me to explain myself. He didn’t ask me to earn it.

He believed me.

The burning behind my eyes gets worse. Craig’s voice, ever-present, has a volume I’ve learned to manage, background static, white noise, the soundtrack of two years. It’s all still there. It’ll bethere for a while. The voice doesn’t disappear because someone says two words in a compound’s common room on a Tuesday afternoon.

But it’s quieter than it was this morning.

Outside, Rose’s voice starts up from behind the hallway door, mid-sentence as always, surfacing from sleep already in conversation with Mr. Rabbit about something requiring immediate resolution. Devil’s low laugh answers her.

Roam’s eyes move to the hallway and come back to me.

“Coffee’s cold,” he says.

“Mine too.”

He stands, takes both cups to the kitchen, and comes back with two full ones. He sets mine down in front of me, his fingers grazing mine for a moment before they’re gone. Without ceremony. Without turning it into something.

He sits back down with his manual and opens it to a page he finds without looking.

Over the rim of my cup, I catch his eye. The corner of his mouth moves, barely, and then he goes back to his page.

The afternoon settles around us.

Craig’s voice is background noise.

And for the first time in a very long time, silence doesn’t feel like something I need to survive.

Chapter Ten

ROAM

The USB drive sits on the edge of the table between Janie’s coffee and a crescent wrench Reaper left three days ago. Nobody moves either one. It’s small, plastic casing, a standard issue, the kind you pick up at a gas station checkout. Nothing about it looks like anything.

She set it down this morning without ceremony, held between two fingers. Divorce files,maybe. Property records,perhaps. Somethinghewanted to keep. Her voice is careful the way it gets when she’s deciding whether what she’s saying matters.

The thing she’s saying matters.

Winchester is at the counter with a second cup of coffee. He looks at the drive the way he looks at everything that lands uninvited on a table—patient, assessing, a man running numbers before he speaks.