Page 59 of Screwed

I made a bit of a detour instead of heading straight for the kitchen. My eyes tracked Nate as he moved to the corner of the room, pulling a pocket knife to trim a frayed edge on a ratchet strap. I walked over to him, my boots clicking against the sawdust-covered floor. I knew he heard my approach, even if he didn’t turn around. He tucked the knife away, his chest rising with a deep breath.

“Nate,” I said quietly, the word hanging heavy in the darkness.

He finally turned to look at me, leaning his lower back against the barricade and crossing his arms over his chest. His dark eyes were tired, but still sharp.

“I’m sorry,” I confessed. It had to have been the millionth time I’d uttered those words today, and yet it still didn’t feel like enough. Seeing the reality of the lake house’s fortress revamp coming together had cemented something for me. This was all becoming very, very real. “Months ago, when we started this… I should’ve listened to you about all this glass. It was supposed to be an architect’s dream.”

My laugh was bitter. I swayed slightly, shifting my weight, and I couldn’t quite keep eye contact the entire time. I’d been so brazen with him before out on the porch when I made my desire known. But now, having the reality thrown in my face that I’d endangered the very men I claimed to care about, I had no confidence left to spare. I just wanted this over and done with.

“It feels like a joke. I made your job twice, thrice, a hundred times harder than it needed to be,” I said.

A faint shift softened the hard line of his jaw. There was barely a foot of space between us. He reached out, his thumb gently catching a smudge of charcoal on my cheek, brushing it away with a touch that was tender. My guilt and regret bubbled away beneath the warmth that touch provided.

“On any other day, I would’ve bitched about your taste in modern design,” he said. His words were laced with a hint of amusement behind the gravel. “But today is just about problem-solving. The glass is covered. The headers are anchored. We handle what’s in front of us, one step at a time.”

His hand dropped, but his gaze stayed fixed on my face, intense and undoubtedly protective. It was the same sort of look he’d had even as a teenager, and although I didn’t appreciate it back then, I definitely appreciated it now.

But that only made me feel worse. The tenderness, the protection, the care. I didn’t deserve any of it. All of their lives were in danger because of choices I’d made, and no amount of eye contact and soft touches was ever going to undo that. The thought of something happening to them, especially because of me, was enough to make me sick. They might’ve been confident, but we were talking about a company with billions of dirty dollars at their disposal.

We’d already seen drones and heard helicopters. Who knew what else they were willing to throw at us to silence me?

Suddenly, the bright idea I had to steal that data didn’t seem so bright anymore. As I heard Ethan whistle from the entrance area and still felt the heat from where Nate had touched my face, I realized that this whole thing was starting to look like one of the worst decisions I’d ever made in my life.

34

Ava

I held my phone up toward the tree line, making little micro-adjustments, hoping I would magically find a signal on the wraparound porch of my cabin. The screen reflected off my face in the dark, showing the single, hollow bar flickering to No Service. I shifted my stance, stretching my arm as high as I could toward the roof this time.

The refresh button yielded no better news, just a relentless loading circle spinning in a loop as it mocked me. I sighed and dropped my arm, finally defeated. When I first discovered the closest place with cell service was the town, I’d thought it inconvenient but quaint. Disconnect was freedom, in a way. Now, though, it felt like an anchor pinning us to the bottom of the lake, cutting us off from civilization entirely.

Okay, maybe that was a smidge dramatic. But the point still stood—without a signal, we had no way of contacting anyone for help. There was no way anyone could drive here now. It would be a tactical nightmare. Leaving the cabin meant taking the main road, which, Nate explained, was the exact place an ambush was most likely to happen. And Deacon was pretty sure they were watching our movements.

Then there were the cameras, local gossip, and digital tracking that came with visiting the town. Here, we could at least control the terrain. But still, the idea of being totally isolated from anyone else, even with three powerful men whom I trusted completely, deepened my fear, not just for me but for them.

Plus… I just wanted to hear Julia’s voice. With all the mess that had transpired and her brother finding out about our secret, I wanted nothing more than to reconvene with her and make sure she was still okay.

I turned around to go back inside, but before I could even touch the handle, the door opened. Deacon stepped onto the porch, shrugging his shoulders into a faded canvas jacket. The metal zipper rasped loudly as he pulled it up to his throat, his face set in a hard, uncompromising line. He reached into his pocket, his knuckles rapping against a heavy ring of keys that jingled in there.

He was leaving.

My chest tightened. “Deacon? Where are you going?”

“Town,” he muttered, not really making eye contact with me. “I have an old contact I think can help us out.”

I stared at him in disbelief, trying to make sense of what he had just said.

“But did we not agree on the fact that we all needed to stay here?” I asked with disbelief. I stuck my hands into the pockets of my jacket, trying to stave off the cold encasing my fingers. My breath came out in little white plumes. “Nate said it’s a death trap to take the main road. If they’re watching the access lines—”

“I’m not taking the main road,” Deacon interrupted. He leaned his lower back against the railing, looking out over the misty property he’d spent the morning rigging with deadfall and tripwires. “And I’m sure as hell not sitting in a dark box waiting for some corporate fixer to come kicking down our door. Look around us, Ava.”

I dragged my gaze around the lake house and the front lawn. We’d done a decent job of fortifying the place, but in the grand scheme of things, what good would that do other than borrow time? With no reinforcements and nothing really to defend ourselves with except some renovation tools, I hated to concede his point.

That didn’t mean I wanted him driving around by himself at night, though.

“We don’t have so much as a slingshot between the four of us. If someone manages to get in, we’re fucked. Unless you wanna try throwing timber at them,” he said.

A cold spike of dread twisted my stomach into knots. I knew what “town” meant to him. I was fully aware of his past. I didn’t know every single detail, but I could guess that the kind of people he used to run with before he came to Blackwood Lake were the type of men who didn’t exist on standard payrolls.