Page 58 of You Can Run

“I want them alive,” the voice continued. “The woman especially.”

The silence that followed was worse than any threat. It lasted three seconds, maybe four, and in it Miller heard everything that wasn't being said: the twenty-three years of clients whose names lived only in his memory, the network of contacts and safe houses and ghost identities that he'd built from nothing, the fact that all of it existed because men like the one on this phone allowed it to exist.

Miller opened his eyes and stared at the dark wood of the bar.

He thought about the girl touching her ring. He thought about Castaño's hand at the small of her back as they'd walked out, the unconscious protectiveness of it. He thought about Ryan Inglis, who'd called in a favor for these two, and what it would mean when Inglis found out how that favor had been repaid.

“The pier,” Miller said. “Nine o'clock tomorrow.”

“Good. My people will handle the rest. You won't need to be present for what follows.”

“I don't want to be.”

“Of course not.” The voice softened further, almost sympathetic. “You'll be compensated, naturally. And your operation will continue without interference. You have my word on that.”

The word of a man whose name Miller had never been told, and whose face he had never seen.

“Are we clear?” the voice asked.

“We're clear.”

The line went dead.

Miller sat in the dark for a long time after that. The bourbon was still front of him, but he didn't touch it.

He thought about the third phone, and the two other times it had rung, and the two other people he'd handed over, and the way he'd told himself both times that survival wasn't the same thing as betrayal. It was a distinction he'd gotten very good at maintaining. It was the kind of distinction that let you sleep at night, right up until the morning you looked in the mirror and couldn't remember when you'd stopped being the man who helped people disappear and started being the man who made sure they didn't.

He put the phone back in his jacket and finished the bourbon. Then he rinsed the glass, locked the back door, and stepped out into the night.

TWENTY-ONE

Jessica woketo grey light and the sound of water dripping from the eaves.

The storm had passed. What it left behind was a heavy, rinsed-out stillness; just the water lapping at the pilings, the house settling back into itself.

She was on her side, facing the window. Dante was behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him along her back, his arm heavy across her waist. At some point in the night, they'd shifted and now they were fitted together in the sag of the old mattress like two people who'd been sleeping this way for years.

His breathing was slow and even. She thought he was asleep until his thumb moved, one small stroke against her ribs. He was awake, holding still on purpose.

She didn't move either.

For a while, they just lay there, the room slowly brightening around them, the silence filled with everything that last night had made impossible to ignore. His hand on her bare skin. Her body remembering where his mouth had been.

Her stomach broke the silence—a long, audible growl that was so completely wrong for the moment that she felt a helpless laugh rise in her chest before she could stop it.

She felt Dante's breath change behind her. A short exhale through his nose. Not quite a laugh, but close.

“Romantic,” he murmured.

“I haven't eaten since yesterday.”

His arm tightened briefly around her waist, then he pulled away and sat up, the mattress groaning as his weight shifted. She rolled onto her back and watched him stand, barefoot on the cedar planks, the grey morning light catching the tattoos across his shoulders.

“There might be something in the kitchen,” he said, crossing to the small counter.

Jessica sat up, pulling the wool blanket around her shoulders. The room looked different in daylight too, smaller and shabbier, the water stains on the ceiling more visible, the bed more obviously the centerpiece of a space that had nothing else to offer. But the windows faced the Gulf, and the light coming through them was pale and clean, and for a moment the shack felt less like a hiding place and more like somewhere you might choose to be.

She watched Dante open cabinets—crackers, instant coffee, a jar of peanut butter, a few cans of something she couldn't read from the bed. The domesticity of it was surreal, considering that forty-eight hours ago, she'd been in a crawl space with a gun.