When I was ten, I went to summer camp for the first time. It’s not like it was a huge feat or anything. I went with my childhood friends. I’m pretty sure our mothers lived for that first overnight camp when we were gone for an entire week because they booked themselves into summer camp for hoity-toity mothers—the spa.

On the second day of camp, I was on the ropes course. Since I was a puny ten-year-old, it was more than challenging. Sweaty from the afternoon heat, my hands slipped, my feet got tangled. I fell but I never hit the ground. I hung there by one foot, breaking my leg in the process.

Summer camp was over and so was my mother’s week at the spa. She was not happy.

During the moments I was waiting for someone to free me, time stood still. The pain was excruciating and I never thought it would end.

In the back of an old Pathfinder in the middle of a rainforest in Nicaragua, it is not unlike that day at summer camp.

Fear.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced real fear until this very moment.

And, again, time stands still as I watch our driver, Armando, produce a gun from under his shirt. My scream echoes in my head as he turns and point-blank shoots our bodyguard in the head. Sergio, sitting right in front of me, falls to the side and onto the window, where the back of his head is splattered all over the glass.

My mouth falls open and I jerk when Armando turns that gun to me, but instead of pulling the trigger, he motions toward the door. “Get out of—”

He doesn’t get another word out.

He slumps with a thud over the steering wheel and, when I look over, I realize Gabe shot him through the driver’s seat. The horn, blasting continually from Armando’s dead weight, is polluting the small cab of our old Nissan.

I want to scream and cry and run from the nightmare unfolding in front of me, but I don’t get a chance to do any of that. Through the bellows of the horn, I hear shouts from the men blocking our path just moments ago.

I let out another scream when Gabe’s hand comes to the top of my head and forces me down in the seat, my head now pressed into his lap. It seems like a lifetime ago I was feeling up my boss by accident.

I hear more gunshots—so many—as Gabe pushes me to the grimy floor of the car. I don’t know how there’s room for both of us, but he leans over me, giving me a good deal of his bulky weight as more gunfire rings through the forest. Glass shatters and the sound of metal hitting metal pierces my ears, terror shooting through my veins.

Just when I think it will never end, all that remains is the constant horn droning on. My lungs ache—my body begging for oxygen—my brain working hard to catch up. The weight pressing me into the filthy floorboard disappears and, when I peek over my shoulder, Gabe’s attention is focused on the massacre that unfolded. His elusive gun is still aimed out the front of the car. Once he sits upright, he leans forward between both seats and grabs Armando from behind, yanking him off the steering wheel. The silence is deafening as I hear dead weight fall to the side.

“You can get up,” Gabe says in a low, gruff voice.

Shaking, I push off the floor. Without looking at me, he grabs my arm to help pull me to the seat next to him. All I see is Armando, slumped in a bloody mess, sideways over the center console and poor Sergio, dead, collapsed against the passenger door. Sergio has been with us since we landed in Mexico at the beginning of the week. He was sweet and kind and seemed good at his job. He was vigilant with our security—I have no clue what happened today.

I can’t even process, at this moment, why Armando did what he did. I yelp and jerk when I feel a hand on my chin.

“Shhh.” Gabe cups my face and turns me to him. I tense when his other hand comes to my shoulder, sliding down my arm, over my hip, and firmly ends on my bare thigh with a squeeze. He’s lost his aviators and his blue eyes are piercing, following his hands down my body before jumping back up to my face. “You okay? Are you hurt?”

Finally finding the oxygen to survive, my chest heaves but I don’t answer. I feel my face tense and try to turn back to Sergio, but Gabe’s big hand grips me and forces me to look at him where he’s shaking his head. “Don’t. Focus on me. You’re okay. I don’t know what just happened, but you’re gonna have to be okay because we need to get out of here and by the way the car’s smoking, it’s gonna have to be on foot.”

I swallow over the lump in my throat and do everything I can to fight back my tears.

“Lillian?” he calls for me again, using a tone I’ve never heard from him before. It’s not soft—I doubt Gabe has a soft tone—but it’s weirdly reassuring, though it still has a bite to it. “We’ve gotta get out of here. You with me?”

I don’t answer him, but ask, “You have a gun?”

His eyes narrow, but other than that, he doesn’t move a muscle.

I ramble on stupidly. “They were going to kill us, weren’t they?”

Gabe’s brows furrow and he tips his head to study me. At the same time, his hand slides back up to my hip where he gives me a squeeze. “Lillian, stop.”

I feel my body start to tremble as the words jumping around my head fly out my mouth. “Oh. They were going to kill us. Maybe not now, but eventually. Armando set us up. This is like … I don’t know what this is like—”

Gabe’s thumb brushes my lips to shut me up and yanks me toward him where he presses me into his chest. If there was ever a time when someone needed to get their point across swift and fast, now would be at the top of that list. “Stop. Don’t think. We need to get out of this fucking car and off the road before whoever sent these shitheads comes to look for them. That didn’t exactly go down quietly. So, stop. Grab what you can carry and let’s go.”

Held tight to him, his words whip across the side of my face in a minty breath and, if anything has, that gets my attention. His arm is wrapped around my back and he’s holding me close as we sit in this smoking car surrounded by death and blood. I have no other choice, so I nod.

“Good.” On a squeeze, he gives me one more intense gaze and lets me go. “Grab your bag. When we get to civilization and find a signal, we’ll need our laptops, phones, and passports.”

He grabs his messenger bag and climbs out the door. I can’t help myself. I take one more look at Sergio and my heart clenches.

“Lillian.” I look back and Gabe is standing in the open door with his arm outstretched, offering me his hand.

I look at his hand, the one I’ve looked at so many times, even gushed over it in my head, wishing it belonged to someone nice, someone more pleasant, or just someone who didn’t hate me. But it doesn’t. It belongs to my boss’s boss, who’s been walking around with a secret gun on his ankle and who just killed five men, probably saving us from who knows what.

He motions his hand for me to take it again and I can tell he’s losing his patience. “If I have to fucking pick you up and carry you, I will, but we need to get outta here. I can’t leave you in the middle of the rainforest.”

Oh. Yes. We need to get out of here.

Without hesitation, I put my pale hand in his large, tan one. When he wraps his fingers around mine, I grab my tote with my other and let out the breath I’ve been holding. Gabe pulls me out of the car and, even though it’s stifling and hot, I appreciate the fresh air.

That is, until we round the front of the car and I see the results of Gabe protecting us. The four heavily-armed men, dead on the jungle floor.

Gabe throws his messenger bag over his head, hanging it across his body and bends to pick up one of the rifles, along with some extra ammo off one of the dead guys. Slinging all of it over his shoulder, he looks at me in a way he never has before. I feel a little lightheaded and I’m not sure if it’s from all the dead bodies or the way his eyes are raking up and down my thankfully alive one.

Giving his head a little shake, he sighs and mutters, “This is going to be interesting. Let’s go.”

And with that, he turns and disappears into the rainforest. It doesn’t matter how much I liked poor Sergio, I do not want to be left here by myself, so I put one wedged espadrille in front of the other and pray to God I don’t see a snake—reptile or the murderous human variety.

I have a feeling summer camp did nothing to prepare me for this.

I had no idea how right I was.