Page 50 of What We Become

“I’m really looking forward to those aroused ones,” Milo says, bouncing on his toes.

Knox lifts me again. His forearm crosses the bad rib and I hiss through my teeth, and this time I don’t bother protesting. His hands are warm and careful in a way that doesn’t match his face at all. He handles me like I’m something breakable and expensive. I like that about him.

He settles me onto the leather bench seat and makes sure my legs are in before he climbs in after me, taking the spot beside the door like a barricade. Micah slides in on my other side immediately, all soft concern and restless hands. Eli takes the far back corner. Holden gets in from the opposite side after a quick scan of the gravel drive, and Milo folds himself in next to him with a suitcase balanced against his knees and commentary already loaded in the chamber.

The door shuts with a thick, airtight thud.

The outside world vanishes.

For one strange second, I sit there breathing cold air and staring at the tinted window, at my own pale reflection ghosted over the mountains and the facility compound behind us. A few days ago I went out to dinner with someone I thought was my best friend. Now I’m in a mobile panic room with five violently codependent men and a lifetime’s supply of trust issues. If this was a game, I’d have maxed out the Survival and Inventory categories and left Sanity deep in the negative.

The suited driver starts the engine and hits the privacy screen as he eases us down the gravel drive, tires crunching slow, the facility shrinking in the rear window. I glance back, expecting to see Odin, but he’s already gone. Dissolved into the building like he was never there at all.

No one talks for the first minute. Holden’s inventorying his surroundings—the mirrors, the road, the treeline. Knox stares dead ahead, jaw in a murder line, hands fisted and close to his thighs. Beside me, Micah sits so close we’re practically fused together. Eli stares out the closest window, deep in thought.

“Music,” Milo says, like a light bulb lit up over his head. He reaches for the console panel and pops the radio on, scanning stations until he lands on some decades-old alt rock. “Cabin in the woods playlist, engage.” He grins. “But if banjos start, it’s Holden’s fault.”

Holden ignores him, eyes fixed on the rear window like he’s expecting the devil himself to pull up in a Ford Focus.

Micah leans in, his voice for me only. “Do you want to sleep?”

“No,” I say. “If I sleep you’ll all do a secret meeting and decide to fill my pillows with sedatives and I’ll wake up two months later in Canada with a new set of fingerprints.”

He chuckles low. “That’s just basic safety protocol, baby girl.”

I open my mouth to deliver a witty retort, but he ducks his head to mine and catches my mouth with his. It’s soft, the way he does it. Almost nothing, just his lips and breath, warm and slow, until I relax and let him in. Only then does he drag his tongue across the seam, coaxing, steady, and I’m gone, absolutely gone, half of me floating and the other half bricked in by pure want. I kiss back harder, and he makes a sound, this tiny, desperate exhale like I’m something he needs. When he pulls away there’s a smear of melancholy and longing left on my lips, and the taste of him settles at the back of my throat.

Micah’s thumb glances along my cheek, a one-two swipe before he turns away, just in time to catch Milo staring, eyebrows way up. Knox watches it all, face flat but eyes tracking it with a weird stillness. It makes the inside of the SUV feel two sizes smaller.

I’m not actually sure what the fuck to do with all of this. I want to laugh, or cry, or pick a fight just to have the pressure go somewhere. Instead, I look at Knox, who still hasn’t moved, and I tap the outside of his thigh with my hand.

“Hey,” I whisper, just loud enough for him to hear over the old Pixies song playing up front.

He glances down. I tip my head, and after a second of frozen consideration, he slides his arm along the top of the seat behind me. Like an invitation. I lever myself sideways and curl up, making my body as small as I can, and press my face into the space between his jaw and collarbone. He smells like cedar and aftershave and the unspoken terror of the last five days. His arm closes around me and holds, a perfect lock, like I’m a part of his own quietly loaded system.

His heartbeat is slow under my ear. Steady. The metronome I didn’t know I needed—nothing like the last one, the scrape-tap-scrape-tap of bricks and mortar. This one says here, here, here, here and asks for nothing in return.

Micah’s fingers find the back of my neck, tracing once down my spine before settling between my shoulder blades. A touch that says I’m here too without making me move.

“This is normally the part where I say something about wanting to get involved,” Milo whispers from the seat beside Holden, across from us. “But you’re still recovering and I know that would be inappropriate. So . . .” He mimes zipping his lips and locking them shut.

Holden glares at him, but Milo just shrugs.

With a shake of his head, Holden returns to watching through the back window. Eli keeps guard through the side window, both of them stoic.

The road winds deeper into the mountains. The paved surface gives way to gravel, then to something rougher—packed dirt and loose stone, the SUV rocking gently over ruts. The trees crowd closer, taller, blocking the sky. Cell signal disappears somewhere around the second switchback. Milo checks his phone, shakes his head, and puts it away without comment.

We climb. The air gets thinner. The world gets quieter.

Milo turns the radio down.

I close my eyes against Knox’s throat and feel the car carry us deeper into the silence, away from the compound. Away from the coast and the diner and the booth where a man pretended to be my friend. Away from the wall and the foam and the dark. Away from everything except the five heartbeats surrounding me and the slow, green silence of a world that doesn’t know our names.

And I wonder if we’ll ever get to go back.

TWELVE

KNOX