Page 119 of Final Drive

I take the helmet from her long enough to pull the strap straight where it’s twisted, then hand it back.

She puts it on.

I swing onto the bike and start the engine. Reese climbs on behind me, and her hands settle against my ribs, flat and warm in the same place they were before.

She says something through the helmet.

Three words.

The engine eats most of them.

I could turn around. I could kill the bike and ask her to say it again.

I don’t.

I caught the shape of them through the visor.

For tonight, that’s enough.

We take the county road home with her hands on my ribs and the new bond warm somewhere under my skin.

When the house finally comes into view, every fucking light is on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Reese

Tyler makes Bo stop the van at the student health center at twelve past five in the morning so he can put an envelope in the after-hours slot.

It takes nine seconds. We watch him do it through the windshield, headlights on him, and when he climbs back in nobody says anything for a mile.

“That’s it?” Zane asks finally.

“Eight registrations, one packet.” Tyler puts his seatbelt on. “Morrison’s order is satisfied as of the timestamp on that slot. Five-twelve.”

“You checked the timestamp.”

“I photographed the slot.”

Beckett makes a noise from the back. “Of course you did.”

I sit in the middle bench with Cameron’s jacket over my knees, and I think about the fact that a week ago I was a woman with a designation nobody could prove and now I’m a line item in a university database. It should feel worse than it does.

The bus is a coach with reclining seats and a bathroom nobody uses twice. Bennett takes the front row. Wilder takes the row behind him and falls asleep before we’re out of the county.

The blood panel comes back at 7:40.

I read it twice on my phone with the sun coming up over the median. It’s two pages, most of it numbers I don’t understand. The line that matters is near the bottom.

Designation: Omega. Underneath, Confirmed by serum marker analysis

Then a date, a lab code, and the name of a physician I met for six minutes.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Four years of my life, and it fits on one line of a PDF.

Bo’s watching me from across the aisle.

“It’s fine,” I tell him.