What she wants to do now is run. Not alone. With him. She wants to take him in her arms and carry him down the mountain, as far as Bayard Rock where she’ll bathe him in the sea. And then they’ll keep running to somewhere isolated and safe, where she’ll never have to be this kind of avenging angel again, a place where they won’t have to rely on anyone rich and powerful and deceitful to keep them safe. Maybe she’ll change her name again. Maybe he’ll change his. And she’ll never let Zypraxon touch her lips again. Never hear the names Dylan Cody or Noah Turlington or Cole Graydon again. Except in her nightmares.
She’s got a little less than two hours of strength left. The other two pills were destroyed when her jeans caught fire, she’s sure. But why should that stop her?
And there’s always the culvert, she thinks before she can stop herself. There’s always your secret stash.
And that’s when she realizes there’s no running. That’s when she realizes they’ve got their hooks in her in more places than she wants to admit, that no matter what comes next, her first thought will always be of Zypraxon and what she might be able to do with it.
She doesn’t want to run from what she had to do tonight; she wants to run from what Luke might think of it. And those are very different things.
Maybe the horrified look in his eyes and the shock in his voice were both responses to watching her kill, and maybe they’re signs he’s never going to come back to her. She won’t know until his shock comes to an end, until he’s back inside his battered body again.
She tells herself it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that she saved him.
What matters is that he was worth saving.
40
When one of Graydon’s black Suburbans comes charging up the dirt road toward the Med Ranch, dawn has just started to break over the rolling hills to the east, mingling with their flanks to create a gradually ascending curtain of gold. Charlotte ignores the SUV’s approach. For an hour now, she’s been sitting on the house’s front porch, listening to birdsong and trying to find the space between her breaths. She figures the SUV’s just carrying some of the hired mercenaries Cole scrambled to relocate the night before. At this point, she could not give a damn.
Too little, too late, she thinks.
Then the Suburban rolls to a stop a few yards from the front porch, and Marty steps from the back seat, looking tired, but freshly showered.
Charley shoots to her feet.
He must have gone to sleep last night with no sense of what was unfolding at their house or in the mountains above town. Now Cole’s brought him here. Maybe it’s a peace offering, or maybe Clements has more men out there and Cole wants to keep Marty safe. There’s no asking Cole. He doesn’t step out of the car after Marty, which means he and whatever cleanup crew he’s managed to put together are probably still up on the mountain, picking through the bloody mess she left behind.
Whatever Marty sees on her face causes him to rush toward her up the front steps. As soon as she’s in his arms, the entire night before comes rushing out of her in whispers.
Marty’s never set foot inside the Med Ranch, so he can’t hide his reaction to the stark contrast between the house’s exterior and interior. Outside, it’s a one-story ranch house with solar panels on the roof and a spread of drab-looking trailers in back. Inside, several windowless state-of-the-art treatment rooms run down the center from front to back, their perimeter walls creating two narrow hallways along the sides of the house. Any footprint suggesting the house’s old livable spaces is gone.
In the trailers behind the house are the implements and laboratories required by a basic trauma center.
In short, it’s a miniature hospital, built just for her. But the only patient today is Luke. He’s been out cold since they brought him in, thanks to a potent combination of painkillers. He sleeps sitting up in bed, his chest resting on the type of cushion designed to allow pneumonia patients to rest upright so their lungs don’t fill with fluid. In Luke’s case, it’s their best way of keeping him from rolling onto his injured back. For most of the night, she sat vigil next to him. The nurses and doctors, some of whom she recognizes from her last checkup, kept giving her long, frightened looks as they walked past her, fully aware that, for a while at least, she was capable of crushing their skulls in one fist even as she sat there quietly. Of course, they weren’t too scared to take their vials of paradrenaline from her when she first came in.
Maybe if she had put up a fight . . .
There’s a bench outside Luke’s room, just beneath a window that was probably once framed by frilly lace curtains. That’s where she leads Marty as she finishes the story.
“Where is he?” Marty finally asks.
She had just told him Luke’s on the other side of the nearest door, so he has to mean Cole.
“Cleaning up, I think. Probably up in the mountains. I figure they’ll want to get as much of it done before sunrise.”
“Well, time’s almost up.” There’s an angry tremor in his voice.
“I think . . .” Her breath catches in her throat. She clears it, but that somehow makes her eyes wet and she has to blink a few times. It works. The tears are gone for now. “I think we’re gonna need to change things up a little.”
“What does that mean, Charley?”