Page 56 of Open Road

Roam’s arm is heavy across my waist. His breathing has settled into the slow, even cadence of a man at rest, the dog tags now cool against his chest, his body a warm wall at my back.

I lie in the dark and wait for Craig’s voice.

It doesn’t come.

Not the silence before it starts, the held breath, the tightening of the chest that means it’s about to begin. Not the particularcold precision of it. Not the word ‘embarrassing,’ not ‘look at you,’ not ‘you know what you are.’

Nothing.

The compound breathes around us. Somewhere outside the gate, Gerald is in his strip of yard, the low sounds of a place that never fully goes quiet.

Roam’s arm tightens slightly in his sleep, and I exhale.

For the first time in two years, I am completely inside my own body, and it is quiet in here. It is mine, Roam is here, and the voice in the back of my head has gone somewhere I can’t hear it.

Maybe it will come back. It probably will, some morning, some mirror, some unguarded moment when the volume creeps back up. Healing is not one conversation in a bathroom and one night in the dark.

I know this.

But tonight it is quiet.

Tonight, I chose this with both hands, eyes open, and the man at my back said my name as though it means something.

It’s enough.

It’s more than enough.

It’severything.

Chapter Nineteen

ROAM

They come at two in the morning. Not because two in the morning is inherently optimal, but because men like Axel Vane believe it is, the hour itself is a weapon, and a sleeping compound is a slower one. Twenty-two years in this club, and I could have told him we don’t sleep the same way civilians sleep. We close our eyes and stay close to the surface, one layer down, where the sound of the world still reaches us. It’s not a skill you develop but a thing the life builds into you, the way scar tissue builds.

Creed pulled me at midnight.

“Tree line,” he said. The full sentence was ‘East tree line,’and‘You know why.’

Neither needed saying. The years between us have compressed the language down to its load-bearing elements. Creed gives me the location and trusts the rest of my brain to build the structure around it. He’s never been wrong to trust that. The math of what ‘tree line’meant I worked out while I was moving, forty yards of open ground between the rear wall and the first oaks, no cover, one clean approach corridor, the only angle on the compound perimeter the gate crew can’t hold, and the wall men can’t see. Someone needs to own that ground from the dark side of it. Someone patient. Someone whose answer to a long wait in wet grass is nothing more complicated thanfine.

He handed me the rifle case without a word.

I took it without one.

That’s twenty-two years.

The compound sits on the northeast corner of its lot, the back perimeter forty yards of open ground between the rear wall andthe first tree line. The ground is dark and flat, and there is no cover between the wall and the oaks, which means anyone crossing it is exposed for the full forty yards before reaching anything solid. Anyone on the wall side with a clean sightline and patience can hold it indefinitely.

Creed knows this.

Creed has always known this.

He built this compound with the knowledge of what it might need to withstand, and he positioned me because I am what you put in a dark place when you need something to stay very still for a long time and make one decision correctly.

The ground is damp. Florida at two in the morning carries its own particular heat. Even now, the air is thick and close, the kind that sits on the back of your neck and stays there. I’ve been on my stomach in worse. The M24 is an old friend, the scope is familiar ground, and I settle in the way I’ve settled into positions from Georgia to the border and back again, weight distributed, breathing slow, the world narrowing to the rectangle of glass in front of my eye and the forty yards of open ground beyond it.

I wait.