“How far?” she asked.
“Eight minutes.”
She watched him watch the road. His right hand rested near his thigh, close to where she knew his weapon was holstered. His left hand gripped the wheel, knuckles white over the scars.
“Mack.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for listening. For not—” She searched for the right words. “For not making it small. For not making me feel small.”
His jaw softened, just barely. “It wasn’t small, Lyssa.”
She nodded and returned her attention to the windshield and the street ahead. Three blocks up, she could see what she assumed was their destination—a nondescript government building, beige and institutional, with a parking structure beside it. The kind of building you’d drive past a hundred times without wondering what happened inside.
Mack signaled and turned toward the parking structure. The entrance was open, the lower level visible—concrete columns, fluorescent lighting, a handful of government vehicles in marked spaces.
He slowed as they approached, scanning the structure. “We’ll park on the lower level,” he said. “Stay in the vehicle until I come around to your side. We walk in together. You stay on my left, close enough to touch. Don’t stop for anything until we’re inside the building. Clear?”
“Yes.”
He pulled in. The light changed—daylight to LED, the shadows between the columns sharp and geometric. Their tires echoed on the concrete. He was rolling slowly, checking between parked cars, his head on a swivel.
She felt the shift in the air before she understood it. A tension that had nothing to do with the conversation they’d just had and everything to do with the way Mack’s body went completely still—that preternatural, unnatural stillness she’d only seen in him a handful of times, and never in a context that turned out fine.
“Mack?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on something—a reflection, an angle, a shadow. Something she couldn’t see but he could, because he’d spent eight years learning to read environments the way she read faces.
Everything happened at once.
The windshield cracked—a sharp, splintering sound, a spiderweb of fractures blooming across the glass on the driver’s side. The world fractured.
“Get down!” Mack’s arm shot across her chest, shoving her below the dash. His voice was a bark—hard, commanding, a voice she’d never heard from him before. Her body obeyed before her mind caught up.
She was crumpled in the footwell, the sketchbook jammed against her ribs, her face pressed against the rough fabric of Mack’s jacket sleeve as he threw the SUV into reverse. Tires screeched on concrete. A second impact—metal on metal, somewhere behind them—and the rear window shattered, glass raining into the back in a glittering cascade.
She heard Mack grunt. He drove with his left hand, his right arm tight against him. He reversed out of the parking structure at a speed that slammed her shoulder against the center console.
The SUV bounced over a curb, fishtailed on the icy street, and then they were moving forward—accelerating hard, weaving, and tossing her around. She peeked her head up.
“Stay down,” he ordered. His voice was still that other voice, the combat one, but she heard something underneath it now. A tightness. A control that was costing him something.
She crouched again and watched him from the footwell, her cheek against the seat, her hands braced on the floor. His jaw was set so hard she could see the muscles cording in his neck. His hand gripped the wheel. His right arm?—
Blood.
A dark spreading stain on the upper arm of his left sleeve, just below the shoulder, unmistakable against the gray fabric. It spread and grew as she watched.
“Mack.” Her voice came out softer than she wanted. “You’re hit.”
“I know.” Two words. Clipped, efficient, no room for discussion. He checked the mirror, checked the road, and took a hard right down a side street. Then another.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“Functional.”
That was a soldier’s answer—it meant he could still operate, which was the only metric that mattered to him right now. It told her nothing about how deep the wound was, whether the bullet was still in his arm, or whether he was going to pass out behind the wheel.