“That’s the working theory. Her location, her cover name, the shop, her routine. Everything the crew needed to find her came from someone with access to her file, and Rawlings had the file.” Rook paused. “It also explains why he stopped answering. If he sold her out, he’d go dark. Distance himself. Make sure nothing connected him to whatever happened next.”
I sat with it. The simplicity of the betrayal, how clean it was when you stripped it down. A man took money. A man gave up a woman. A woman who’d done everything right, who’d followed every rule, who’d sacrificed her name, her home, and her life to do the right thing. And the man the system assigned to protect her had a price, and somebody met it.
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
Rook nodded. Stood up. Paused at the door.
“She’s tough,” he said. “Tougher than most people I’ve briefed on bad news. She’ll handle it.”
He went inside.
I foundher in the guest room. She was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, a book from the lodge shelf open in her lap. She’d showered, her hair damp, pushed behind her ears.
She looked up when I came in. Read my face. Her expression shifted, her instincts picking up a change in temperature. She closed the book slowly.
“What is it?”
I sat on the edge of the bed beside her. I didn’t soften it. She wasn’t a woman who needed things softened. She needed the truth.
“Rawlings is compromised. Angel’s federal contact confirmed it this morning. The word is he’s been taking money from Salieri’s people for months. They can’t prove it yet, but the pattern’s there, and the contact is confident. He sold your location. Your cover. Everything.”
She didn’t fall apart.
Instead, her whole body locked. Hands folded in her lap, spine straight, breathing measured. The information landed behind her eyes and I saw what it did. Recognition, instant and bitter. The final confirmation of a thing she’d already feared.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice was flat. Controlled. A single word that carried the weight of every protocol, every sacrifice, collapsing into rubble.
“The club is on this. Rook’s working the intel. Angel’s contact is putting pressure on the Marshals Service from the federal side. We’re going to handle it.”
She nodded. Slowly. The nod of a woman who was hearing the words and filing them away without attaching belief to them. Her gaze had shifted inward, to a place I couldn’t follow. The machinery behind her eyes was recalibrating, the old rules spinning up, the woman who’d given me her real name last night being quietly replaced by the woman who knew how to disappear.
“I think I need some time,” she said. “Just to process. Is that okay?”
“Of course.”
I stood up. She was already turning inward, her focus pulling away from the room, from me, from the compound. The distance opened between us. Self-preservation. The reflex of a woman whose survival strategy since the program relocated her hadbeen to need nobody, trust nothing, and move before the ground gave way beneath her.
“Mia.”
She looked up.
“You’re not alone in this.”
She gave me a small smile and a nod. It was the saddest thing I’d seen on her face.
I left the room and walked down the hallway, through the common room, out to the porch. The afternoon was warm, the mountains sharp against a blue sky, a day that made Forsaken feel like the safest place in the world.
I stood there with my hands on the rail, chasing a feeling I couldn’t name. An instinct, sitting low in my gut, the same instinct that had made me turn my head before the drive-by, the one that read trajectories before the conscious mind caught up. She’d smiled at me and the smile hadn’t landed. She’d said she needed time and the word had sounded like goodbye.
I didn’t know what she was going to do. But the woman I’d been falling for across all those Tuesday mornings was the bravest person I’d ever met, and brave people made decisions that cost them everything because they’d decided the cost was worth it for someone else. The thought bothered me, in a way I couldn’t quite place.
FIVE
MIA
I left at two in the morning.
The compound was dark. I moved through the lodge with the training that governed every space I needed to leave without being noticed. Soft steps. No lights. The bag over my shoulder, the same one I’d always kept packed just in case. I had cash in my purse, keys in my hand, and held them tight so they didn’t jangle.