Old Alyssa—she heard it in her voice, the reflexive compliance, the smooth social response. Take the clothes. Say thank you. Make yourself easy.
She took the clothes. But she didn’t move.
“You said Blake was working for them.” She kept her voice level. “I want to know what that means.”
Mack was already turning away. “Change first.”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“And I’ll answer it.” He crossed to the window again—she was starting to suspect he’d check it every five minutes until dawn—and looked out at the wall of white beyond the glass. “After you change. You’re soaking wet, and it’s sub-fifty degrees in here until the heat kicks in.”
“I’m fine.”
He turned and looked at her for the first time since they’d gotten out of the car—those dark blue eyes doing the thing she’d forgotten about, the thing where he assessed a situation so thoroughly you felt like a problem being solved.
“Your hands are shaking, Lyss.”
She looked down. They were. Had been since they’d fled the party. The small tremors were unmistakable now that she was standing still. She squeezed her bag tighter.
Fine. He had a point. “I want answers when I come back,” she said and walked down the hall to the bathroom before he could respond.
She locked the door and stood with her back against it for ten full seconds, breathing. Her bag slid to the floor next to her still-cold feet.
Okay, she told herself. Okay. Take stock.
She was alive. She was warm, or getting there. She was in a cabin in the middle of a Montana blizzard with her ex-fiancé, being hunted by a drug cartel that apparently included her brother. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and there was a warning pressure building behind her right eye that she was refusing to acknowledge.
Completely fine. Totally manageable.
She peeled off the wet dress with fingers that fumbled on the zipper, changed into Mack’s clothes, and tried not to think about the fact that the shirt smelled like him—cedar and the same soap he’d always used. Some things, apparently, didn’t change.
She washed her hands and willed them to stop shaking. It helped, marginally. Then she opened her bag—miracle of miracles, she’d kept hold of it through the entire disaster—and found her pocket sketchbook and a charcoal pencil wedged beside her migraine meds and her phone.
She looked at the medication. Then at her phone.
Jenna first. She dialed. It rang four times and rolled to voicemail. Her best friend’s voice filled her ear, bright and warm and so achingly normal that Alyssa’s throat tightened without warning.
“Hey, it’s Jenna! Leave me something fun!”
“Jen.” She kept her voice quiet, steady—Mack would hear if she wasn’t careful, and she didn’t want him to hear this. She didn’t want to explain it. “It’s me. Something happened tonight—I’m okay, I’m safe, but I might not be home for a day or two. Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything when I can. Just...” She paused. “Lock the apartment door. Okay? Love you.”
She hung up and stared at herself in the mirror.
She looked terrible. Mascara was smudged under her eyes, her hair half-fallen from the updo she’d spent forty minutes constructing that afternoon. She was pale enough that the scar through her eyebrow faded against her skin.
Mack’s clothes swallowed her. She looked young and scared, and nothing like the independent, self-sufficient woman she’d been constructing, piece by piece, over the past few months.
Great job, Bennett. Very convincing.
She slid down to the floor with her back to the tub and opened the sketchbook.
She didn’t plan what she was going to draw. Her hand moved before her mind could direct it—it usually did in moments like this. Processing through the pencil and thinking through the image.
The room came first. The study. The table, the men arranged around it. She drew in quick, economical strokes, the way she’d learned to sketch during courtroom sessions when speed mattered more than perfection. The one man’s cold eyes. Another’s rigid posture. They’d both been in fancy suits—the cartel leaders?
The huge guy with the neck tattoos standing against the wall who’d come after her. Then Blake.
Her pencil stopped.