He couldn’t wait any longer.

Ten minutes of deliberation on an uncomfortably soft sofa. Another ten of standing in the middle of the room like a fool, staring at the four walls, staring at the floor, not seeing anything.

Five seconds charging up the stairs and even less after the knock on Kalani’s bedroom door.

“Ethan . . .” She didn’t look as surprised as her voice sounded. Behind her, a dimly lit room. Perhaps a single reading lamp. Lea perhaps sitting on the bed, out of view, perhaps cringing at the sound of his voice. What would he do about her? Ignore her.

“Kalani, sorry.”

“What?” she said in a hushed quiet tone. “Did everyone leave?”

“Jackson wants me to keep an eye on you guys.” He paused for minute, hearing the distinct sound of Lea clearing her throat. She was on the bed. She was hating him . . .

“What do you mean, keep an eye on us? What are they doing? What are you doing?”

“I’m keeping an eye on—”

“But why?” Kalani said. “What?”

“They’re just doing a little scouting out there, before the morning.”

“The cave?” Kalani said. “What happens in the morning?”

“It’s shaping up to be pretty busy, so I just wanted to give you an update. I think Jackson’s calling in a pretty large group.”

“He’s got all of us hopefuls at the SWAT training just down the road.”

“Them too,” Ethan said. “It’ll be busy. Is Lea in there, too?” He tried to look beyond, around the corner, but Kalani held her ground at the door.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” she said. “A quick walk?”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?’

There were so many things that Ethan wanted to do. Things he could do alone with her, from a logical perspective, that might help their current predicament, and from an irrationality that might just mire them worse. It was like quicksand, dealing with her.

Lea, too. A different kind of quicksand.

“I’m in here,” Ethan heard Lea say from somewhere in the room. “Is that Ethan? That you, big boy?”

He was startled by the sound of her voice, from her quiet hatred to an overly schmaltzy greeting. She almost sounded pleased that he was there at their door, knocking, barging in, interrupting. Keeping an eye on them . . .

“Big boy?” she said. “When do we get to leave?”

Ethan couldn’t help but grin. Kalani glared at him in response. It wasn’t really funny. Nothing from Lea in the last few days had been even remotely funny.

Nervy? Hell yes.

He would have to act fast around the previously perceived sleeping-pill addict. He could almost feel that brain of hers humming from behind the wall.

“We’re all here for your safety,” Ethan said. “You and Lea . . .”

Kalani backed away from the door, leaving room for Lea. She appeared, rubbing her eyes. She had looked, somehow, sleepy. But a flash in her eyes suggested otherwise. “But I don’t feel too safe here. No offense.”

“I understand that.”

“Tucker,” Lea said. “Like, what the heck happened to Tucker?”

“I understand.”

“You do? Because it could happen to us.”

“We’re not letting that happen.”

“Ethan, could I talk to you?”

“We’re talking now,” he said.

“Downstairs.”

Kalani, from inside the room, yelled out, “I’m coming, too.”

The three of them made their way down the steps, Lea in front, Ethan bringing up the rear. He liked having both girls in his sight. He made a mental note of it, to keep up the practice for the rest of his time there. After the situation improved and it was just him and Kalani, he would keep up the same practice. He yearned for the day that it could be just her under his watchful eye.

Life could be so simple.

“Is it just you?” Lea said, halfway down the stairs. “Ethan?”

He didn’t like the question.

Walking away from the bottom of the stairs, she continued, “Did Jackson leave anyone else behind to protect us? Or are did they all go on their little hike in the woods?”

Ethan really didn’t like that question. He felt at the side of his pants, the firm butt end of his gun reassuring him.

“I mean,” Lea said, “Did they leave us just one prison guard?” She laughed.

They were all together in the living room. Kalani looking around at the remnants of their movie night. It felt so long ago. “What a mess,” she said, sounding a little tired and subdued. Beaten down, almost. “Sorry. I should have cleaned up the place. Especially since we’re having company over.”

“The mess is all from us,” Ethan said, staring at all the locked weapon boxes. “But don’t worry about it anyways. These guys don’t even know what clean is.”

“Like frat boys,” Lea said.

Ethan forced out a chuckle. “That’s it, frat boys.”

There was a pause for a moment as the three of them stood awkwardly in the living room. No one moved to sit anywhere. No one moved to do anything at all. In the quiet, Ethan noticed that both sisters had gotten into a change of clothes. No longer comfy pajamas for a movie, but street clothes, both of them in jeans and black band T-shirts. Something good for disappearing into the night.

“So you guys couldn’t sleep or something? Or . . .”

“What?” Lea said, with a snarky laugh.

Kalani said, “Well, there’s so much going on right now. Inside and out, odd developments.”

“We weren’t sure if we should wake up or go to sleep, if it’s morning or night,” Lea added.

“It’s night,” Ethan said. He was exhausted, and yet still wired. “It’s most definitely night.” He checked with Kalani. It was her eyes that told him everything. Right at that moment, however, they were like two sunken holes. He had never seen her looking so dead before. So full of loss. He nodded his head to her, trying to ask her, to plead with Kalani to tell him she was alright. With Lea in the room and in the way, it made the simplest communications difficult.

He wanted her out of the way, for good. It was wrong to think like that, but he wanted Lea gone. In jail. Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad if the ruling came out and they revoked some of her deal and put away the problem child for five to ten years.

At least things would be a lot more peaceful that way.

And simple between him and Kalani.

They would finally have the peace they needed. That Kalani so desperately deserved.

It would be sad, of course. But at least Kalani would always know where to visit if she’d ever want to see her sister again.

As for Ethan, he could already tell that he’d be in no rush for visiting hours.

“I just want to thank you again,” Lea said to Ethan. “For coming out here and everything, for watching us. I know you’re busy back in D.C. with your paper and everything, and I still don’t quite get what you’re doing with these DARC guys. But, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Ethan said, the words coming on like autopilot, but his brain moving a hundred miles a minute.

“I appreciate it,” she said, shrugging.

“Well, thank you. I appreciate that.” They were dressed for outside. He kept having that certain nagging thought. They were also wearing running shoes. Lea never, ever wore running shoes. “So what’s up, guys? Planning on going out somewhere?”

Kalani almost looked disturbed when she said, “What?”

“Going where?” Lea said.

“I don’t know. Going out? You have any plans?”

“Yeah, right,” Lea said, “Plans. Actually, though, that kind of reminds me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, while we were out last. I forgot something. In the car . . . I forgot something in the car.”

“Oh?” Ethan said.

“Yeah, want to help me out? Want to escort me as I go get it? That’s kind of like your job here, right? To escort me around? To make sure I’m safe and secure and everything?”

“Lea,” he said with a polished smile, “I would like nothing more than to make sure you’re safe and secure and that you don’t break a fingernail on whatever it is you’ve got for me in the car.”

Her face went limp for a split second, before her smile matched the sickly sweet of his. “Now that’s exactly the kind of service I’ve been expecting here.” She turned to Kalani and said, “See, I told you these guys would eventually step up to the plate.”

Kalani’s limp expression hadn’t changed in the slightest.

The radio-squawked voice of Matthias suddenly filled the room. Ethan had left a satellite radio lying on the coffee table. It was another toy brought in by Jackson, tinkered with by Tansy. Communications through a private, unhackable channel. Though Lea, squinting her eyes at the words, could listen to it clear as day.

“Confirming bear tracks through the woods and onto the rocks. Quite obvious bear activity, which confirms your story, Mother Goose. Good for you.”

Ethan had forgotten his temporary call sign. Mother Goose, of all things. What he hadn’t forgotten about was his insistence that wherever they followed the footprints, the smears of clay, they would eventually find something worth the effort—whether that something was Tucker, or an enemy platoon lying in wait.

The thing about the clay prints, however, was that they’d only show up after the shoes got wet. Dried clay dust turned into a type of paint after the application of water from the puddles around the swimming hole. Ethan had suggested they check out the quarry again, this time looking carefully to see if water around the cave entrance had caused someone to track some clay paint anywhere.

“Mother Goose,” Matthias said over the radio. “We’re going in. Commencing initial probe.”

Kalani had been staring at Ethan the whole time, trying to decipher the code through his expression perhaps. And then he saw Lea, her head cocked to the side.

“Want to explain what’s going on, Mother Goose?” Lea said.

“Sorry,” Ethan said. “It’s a need-to-know thing. What do you need help with again?” Ethan let her lead the way out of the house, the two of them stepping off the stairs and into the crushed stone near the parked cars. Kalani wasn’t too far behind. He listened to her footsteps. They were quieter, more timid.

She was afraid of something.

He supposed that he should be, too. But he pressed on—half out of bravado, the other half from careful training for these types of scenarios. With men twice Lea’s size. There was no way she could ever take him down, and surely the guys would have spotted anyone else lurking so close to the house in their travel out to the cave.

But these were exactly the types of situations that would turn on a dime. From lobbing candy at local village boys in Iraq, to lobbing grenades a half minute later. Always those innocent little situations. Always that eerie calm.

The wind outside had died down.

Even the frogs had called it a night.

The same could not be said about the bugs, however. They’d come back after the wind—and with a vengeance.

“It’s right in here,” Lea said, stopping at the rear door of Kalani’s car and slapping something that landed on the side of her neck. With her other hand, she pointed inside the car and said, “Just that box right there.”

He could almost hear Kalani’s breathing behind him.

“Do you see it?” Lea said.

His mind heavy with trying to instantly tactically plan, Ethan had spent half a second looking down at the ground near the car, but it was long enough to notice in the pale light of the house a set of white-gray footprints leading up to the car from the direction of the barn.

He could feel his heart beating in his throat. The footprints seemed to cluster and accumulate and busy themselves near the rear of the car. Near the trunk. Busy footprints all the way. Were there two sets?

“Ethan?” Lea said. “Do you see that cardboard box?”

“I see it.”

“It’s really heavy. That’s why I’m asking you. Otherwise, I’d get Kalani here to help out. She’s the strong one, right, Lani?”

“Right,” Kalani said, sounding almost like a zombie, or like a lobotomy patient. Had she hit some of the sleeping pills?

That’s when he knew. It was all over. Something had happened that had made Kalani give up. There would be no way out. He was completely and utterly fucked. He could try to fight back, try to run, but then he’d lose Kalani. There was no way that was happening. Ever. He would just have to shut off and coast on autopilot, get through the worst of it, survive it, then after the initial shock had passed, he could start thinking again. Planning and strategizing. But no earlier than after the initial—

He felt the hard pressure at his side holster, Lea’s hand rocking and ripping out his gun.

He let go.

Then he felt an even harder pressure, an even heavier hand at his back, punching into the back of his ribs and then pushing him, two hands now, thrusting Ethan headfirst into the backseat of the car. He landed on his face, into one of the sharp cardboard corners of the box he’d been asked to carry, lying next to it in a heap, his limbs twisted around, his face numb and most likely cut.

He was alive, for the moment. That was the risk of submitting and allowing himself to be kidnapped by a crazy Lea and perhaps her even crazier friends. He would stay alive for as long as it took to see it through, to stay right in the thick of action. He’d let Kalani go before, after Hawaii, and he wasn’t ever doing it again. He’d take whatever extreme measures were necessary for staying with her. No matter how much danger he’d just put himself in. He knew he could get out of it, eventually. He was a magician, an escape artist. An actor, too. It was a long-term hobby, a way to entertain his fellow soldiers on long, boring nights in camp, and now, it might save both their lives.

If that meant letting Lea assume he’d been hoodwinked, then so be it. His pride would live on after the adventure, and so would Kalani. That was all that mattered.

He’d tuned it all out so successfully that he didn’t even hear Kalani’s wild screams until after the final door slam, the driver’s side door, Kalani sitting behind the wheel and sobbing. He paid attention to that above all else. He studied how she got in the car and sat at the wheel, instead of how her sister slid in next to Ethan in the back seat, a gun stuck up hard against his ribs.

“Move and I’ll tear your guts out,” she said. “I mean it. Just do one stupid little fucking thing, and I’m gonna blast you away right in this car.”

Kalani screamed no, her face having turned around, that beautiful face having gone wet and red and distorted in the low glow of the car’s dome light. “What the fuck are you doing!?” she screamed to her sister. And then she screamed the same question to Ethan. What the hell was he doing? He’d so blatantly allowed it to happen.

Blatant to himself and Kalani, anyway, who knew how well trained he was with close-quarters combat. But Lea . . . He wasn’t sure how sold she was, but she had the gun’s muzzle so far between his ribs that it almost didn’t matter. There was enough to believe about the situation already.

“Get back down,” Lea said calmly, rationally, and just underneath the Kalani’s screams. She turned to her sister and said something that Ethan couldn’t understand, or hear. Something that shut her up.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Ethan told her, hoping she could hear him up at the front.

The sisters were making a run for it.

He could have gotten away, attempted to follow them, but Blackwoods would have picked up the tail and tried to pick him off within a mile of the safe house. He’d thought about several other plans, each with varying degrees of risk. The one he had chosen was definitely the riskiest. But it was also the closest to Kalani. He felt that, even in the back seat, with the taste of blood in his mouth, the psychotic next to him, the steel in his side. Through it all, he felt it. He felt close to her. He felt in love with her.

Ethan wanted to reach across and just touch Kalani, to let her know that it was going to be okay. He said it again to her, how okay everything was going to be, until Lea jabbed him even deeper with the gun. It cut off his words, and his breath. He stayed quiet.

“Alright, Lani,” Lea said. “You ready?”

There was no answer. She’d turned to stare through the windshield, her gaze locked straight ahead.

“Lani? Come on, wake up.” Lea punched the back of the seat, Kalani’s head rocking with the impact. “Come on, let’s go. Start the engine, Chica.”

After a moment that felt like an hour, the engine revved and then roared to life.