The knock came again, hard and impatient against the wood. Lucas didn’t look at the door. He looked at her—a single, scorching assessment—then his hands were moving.
He didn’t reach for her. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded square of paper and a single, tarnished key. His fingers closed around hers, forcing her palm open. The paper was creased and soft, the key cold.
His voice was a low, desperate growl against her temple, his breath hot on her skin. “Back window. It sticks, shoulder it. Follow the tree line west two hundred yards to an old logging road. There’s a bike chained to a pine. Key fits the lock. Run.”
He pressed her fingers closed around the objects, his callused grip crushing. “Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”
But his eyes, when he pulled back just enough to meet hers, said something else entirely. A furious, possessive refusal. A promise. The world would not have her. Not again.
Aria’s breath hitched. The map felt like a live wire in her fist. “Lucas—”
“Now.” It wasn’t a request. It was the last command of her tour manager, the man who used to clear a path through screaming crowds with a look.
He turned his body, placing himself squarely between her and the door. His shoulders blocked the thin strip of daylight from the crack. He became a wall.
Another knock, followed by David Chen’s voice, cool and filtered through the wood. “Time’s up, Mr. Reed.”
Aria’s feet were rooted to the floorboards. The silver ring on her thumb bit into her skin as she clenched her fist. Run. The word echoed, but her body was a riot of opposing signals. The instinct to flee, honed by a decade of escaping into blacked-out SUVs. The newer, more terrifying instinct to stay behind the wall he’d made.
Lucas didn’t glance back at her. He stared at the door, his posture deceptively relaxed, his hands loose at his sides. A sentinel waiting for the breach.
“Last chance for a dignified exit,” Chen called.
Aria looked down at her hand. The key’s teeth pressed a pattern into her palm. The map was a secret. A way out he’d kept ready. For her.
She took one step backward. Then another. Her eyes never left Lucas’s back, the simple white cotton of his t-shirt stretched across his shoulders.
The door handle rattled.
Lucas’s head tilted, a predator listening. “Aria.” Her name, just her name. A final, taut wire of sound.
She turned and ran for the back of the cabin, her socked feet silent on the floor. The small window above the sink was latched, painted shut by seasons. She shoved the map and key into the pocket of Lucas’s borrowed sweatpants, the fabric swallowing them.
She braced her hands on the chipped countertop and drove her shoulder into the frame. Wood groaned. Paint cracked. A splinter caught the sleeve of his hoodie.
Behind her, the front door opened. A wedge of cold morning light split the cabin’s dimness, and with it came the sound of boots on the threshold.
“Where is she, Reed?”
Lucas’s voice, flat and final. “Gone.”