She nodded. Swallowed hard around the knot in her throat.
As she reached for her pack, fingers searching for bandages, a faint blinking light at the bottom caught her eye.
Her sat phone.
Her heart skipped. She grabbed it, thumbed the screen to life. A voice message from Emberly.
“Nim, Coco and a few of her team are on their way, but it’ll take more than a day. Stay safe and don’t?—”
The screen went dark.
Dead battery.
Her brow furrowed. That made no sense. Sat-phone batteries lasted days, especially with minimal use. She popped the back panel.
Her blood turned to ice.
The battery compartment had been tampered with, the wires askew and a tiny chip soldered where it shouldn’t be with a green light blinking from its side.
A tracker? A bug?
Her pulse hammered as the pieces clicked into place. The trashed bus. Untouched laptop. Package with Liam’s name.
Not the teens.
Bratva.
They’d been in her bus. Sabotaged her gear. And she and Liam had walked straight into their trap.
“Liam.”
He turned, MREs steaming in his hands, eyes narrowing at her tone.
“We’ve got a problem.” She held up the sat phone, hand shaking. “They’re tracking us.”
TEN
Sleep?
Right.
Liam shifted against the canyon wall, every muscle screaming protest. The night had dragged on—cold seeped through the sandstone into his spine while his hip throbbed where a jagged rock had dug in for hours. He’d been about to fix it when Nimue had pressed her back warm against his side sometime around three a.m. The canyon’s heat had finally bled out, leaving the air knife sharp. Rock or not, he wasn’t going to move after that.
His ears strained against the silence, cataloging every whisper of sand shifting in the breeze.
The Bratva knew exactly where they were.Perfect.Nothing like being a sitting duck, waiting for killers to drop by for a chat.
His chest squeezed tight every time his mind wandered to that breath-stealing what-if. Nimue with a gun pressed to her temple. Nimue’s eyes wide with terror. Nimue?—
No.
He couldn’t lose her. Losing Christiana had nearly destroyed him, and they’d only been friends. Nimue?
Yeah, she’d become so much more. Something about her kept drawing him back, as if she might be his grounding point, the calm in his chaos—despite the fact that they were on the run.
She was the one that made the rest of the world make sense.
From that first moment at the lodge—her sarcastic quips, the way she’d looked at him like he was some puzzle she wanted to solve—she’d gotten under his skin. Every conversation revealed another layer, another piece of her story he desperately wanted to know. The good stuff. The messy parts. Even the secrets she refused to tell him.