She’d spent her whole life defined by Blake and her father and let their decisions shape her world. When those decisions broke things, she’d been the one left holding the pieces while they walked away unscathed.
Not anymore.
Blake had put a target on Mack’s back by dragging the cartel into their lives. The cartel had put a bullet in his arm because he wouldn’t stop protecting her.
And now the man who’d always chosen her was bleeding in the driver’s seat of an SUV with a shattered windshield in a drugstore parking lot, and he was looking at her like she was the mission he’d die for.
No. You don’t get to die for me. Not today. Not ever.
She let go of his hand. Wiped the blood from her fingers onto her sweats—his sweatpants, borrowed, too big, rolled at the cuffs. She picked up the sketchbook from the footwell where it had fallen.
“Call Claire back,” she said. “Tell her we’re coming in. Wherever she wants us, whatever it takes. I’m giving my statement today.”
“Lyssa, we need to reassess?—”
“I wasn’t asking permission.” She met his eyes and held them. “They just shot the man I l—” She caught herself.
Love. The unsaid word hung in the air between them as if something had just detonated.
She looked away, cleared her throat, and met his eyes again. “I’m done hiding. I’m done being scared. And I’m done letting Blake’s choices destroy the people I care about.”
Mack stared at her. He blinked as if he didn’t know what to say.
“Make the call,” she said.
He made the call.
CHAPTER NINE
The windshield was a problem. Not the graze on his right arm, which had settled into a deep, steady burn. Not the blown rear window letting cold air pour through the cab. Not even the fact that someone with a high-caliber rifle and professional-grade aim had just tried to kill him in a federal parking structure in broad daylight.
The windshield was the problem because the spiderweb of fractures across the driver's side was a beacon. Every car they passed, every pedestrian on the sidewalk, every bored cop running plates on a Sunday—any of them would notice a shot-up SUV rolling through residential Missoula.
Mack checked the mirror. Checked the road. Turned down another side street, keeping to neighborhoods where the houses were spaced far apart and the driveways long.
Beside him, Alyssa was quiet. Her hands were in her lap, fingers stained with his blood. She was staring straight ahead with the particular stillness of someone holding themselves together by sheer force of will.
She'd almost said it.
They just shot the man I l?—
He'd heard her catch on the word, watched her pull it back like a hand from a hot stove. But the shape of it was there, the ghost of a syllable that hung between them alongside everything else they weren't saying.
He'd seen the way her eyes had widened when she realized what she'd almost let slip, the quick look away, the cleared throat. The way she'd met his gaze again and pushed forward, harder, fiercer, like she could bury the almost-word under enough determination.
He couldn't think about it right now. Couldn't think about what it meant or what he'd do with it or why the unfinished word was lodged behind his ribs like a piece of shrapnel.
What he could think about was the half-second in the parking structure.
The windshield fracturing. The sound—sharp, splitting—and in the space between that sound and his training kicking in, a single thought so raw and primal it bypassed every circuit he'd built in eight years of combat operations:
Was she hit?
Not: Where's the shooter? Not: What caliber? Not: Exit route, cover, return fire?
Was she hit?
Half a second. Maybe less. His arm was already moving, shoving her into the footwell, his body shifting to put himself between her and the direction of fire.