She's in bed, but she's not sleeping. She's propped up against the headboard, phone in hand, the blue glow illuminating her face in the half-dark room. Her thumb flicks upward in a mechanical rhythm, scrolling through a feed of news stories and tabloid headlines. It takes three seconds to find the video of her near-miss, already edited down to a meme format with garish yellow text and red circles. The clip loops: her walking, the flash, my body colliding with hers, both of us hitting the ground hard. She's watching herself almost die, over and over.
I sit down in the leather chair across from her, the cushion exhaling softly beneath my weight. "You shouldn't watch that."
She holds the screen up, lips twisting. “Good angle. You really went for it.”
I scan her. “Need something for the pain?”
She shakes her head. “Not pain. Not really.”
There’s a long pause. She puts down her phone and looks at me.
“Did you ever freeze, Cade?” she asks. “Out there, with the enemy. Did you ever just… stop?”
“Everyone does,” I say. “If they say they don’t, they’re lying.”
“And then you keep going?”
“There’s no alternative.”
She nods, and for the first time since we’ve met, she seems older than her years.
I stand, chair scraping the floor. I check each window latch, then the door, running my fingers over the lock. The security light pulses green in the corner. "I'll be right outside," I say. "Anything you need, call for me—your voice only. Don’t answer the phone, even if it’s your father."
She doesn’t answer, just pulls the blanket up over her knees and watches me do one final check as I leave.
"Stay till I’m asleep," she says, quietly.
“Wasn’t planning on moving.”
CHAPTER SIX
DELILAH
Ifall asleep with the light on. The room reeks of antiseptic. Underneath lingers something primal—tanned hide, dried perspiration, or maybe just my own body mending itself. I dream about running through wet grass, my shoes filling with blood, my father’s campaign poster nailed to a tree and split down the middle. When I jolt awake, Cade is in the chair with his head tipped back and his arms folded over his chest. Still as a wolf in tall grass. I can hear him breathing.
I learned, at boarding school, how to measure a room by its silences. Walking the halls before curfew, ducking the prefects by sense and sound, I noticed which types used their voices as a warning and which types never said a damn thing. Cade is the second kind. In the quiet, he is everywhere: the flex of the floorboards, the subtle metallic click inches from the door, the near-imperceptible shifting of presence. When I get up to pee, I nearly trip over him. He’s not even apologetic.
“You’re supposed to knock,” I say, keeping my voice down.
He stands, blinking. “Bathroom’s clear,” he says, as if he’s just helping. He glances at the bandage on my thigh, frowning. Then he fixes the line of my pajama shorts over the gauze with military precision and turns his back so I can finish. I want tohate him for holding me captive. But how do you hate someone who wants to keep you safe? Especially when they look like Cade.
The next three days are exactly what I expect. I exist in lockdown, with Cade as the warden. Except he doesn’t hover. He moves along the periphery, loading a dishwasher, checking window sensors, prepping fuel-efficient meals—like someone stocking a bunker. I don’t think I ever see him actually eat.
My body stores fatigue the way my father hoards grievances: permanently, at dangerous density. I limp less, but each step feels like proof of a deficit. I should have more to show than this half-dead shuffle from bed to kitchen and back. But here we are. I know, rationally, that I’m okay—shot missed, stitches holding, a doomed-to-fade bruise snaking down my quad. But the exhaustion is bone-deep. I watch the security monitor Cade installed on the kitchen counter, waiting for blurs of movement. I watch the yard, the path to the barn, the windowsill by the old flagpole. Nothing happens. That’s almost worse.
Cade keeps his promises: I am never alone, but never supervised. If I want to be in the living room, he’s in his office nook—one eye on the laptop, the other on a miniature replica of the guesthouse he’s built from colored blocks and gridded paper. Sight lines are marked in red. When I’m in the bath, I hear him on the porch, muttering into a walkie-talkie. Sometimes faint music leaks under the door—Miles Davis, or George Strait, or the far-off shattering shrill of mariachi from a ranch hand’s radio. It helps. It doesn’t help.
I go two more days before I even test the boundaries. He’s set up four cameras inside and two out, all funneled into his phone. The first night, I try to walk the perimeter, just to see the stars without panic lights in my eyes. I put on slippers and a sweatshirt. I make it thirty feet before I’m intercepted.
He’s not rough—just immediate. One second, I’m in the gravel. Next, his hand is on my bicep, and his body is betweenme and the night. His grip is the opposite of soft, but there’s space for me to pull away if I want to make a scene.
“You left the perimeter,” he says.
I shrug. “It’s a perimeter, not an electric fence. I was bored.”
He looks me dead in the eye. “Get inside.”
I consider my options: the satisfying crack of my palm against his face, the shatter of glass hurled into the night, a scream to wake the property. Instead, I turn and walk back inside. He follows. Neither of us speaks, but the air hardens between us with each step, like amber trapping an insect.