We weren’t stupid enough to try to break into the church in the middle of the afternoon. We knew we’d have to wait until a more opportune time, namely nightfall. This created the problem of having to sneak out and hope Delfino didn’t wake up and come check on me in the middle of the night, so we were going to have to work fast. Get in and get out was the name of the game.

A short rest and good meal did wonders for Leo’s ribs, which was exactly the kind of luck we needed, since we were going to have to walk into town again. Stealing Delfino’s car was right out. Sure, I knew where his keys were, and even if I didn’t, Leo assured me he could hot-wire the thing, but that wasn’t the point. That engine was loud, and if Delfino didn’t notice the sound, someone else sure would. We didn’t need to draw any unnecessary attention to ourselves, which meant going on foot was the only viable option.

It was almost three a.m. before any of our plans could come to fruition. The good news was that the streets were deserted. There was no one, and I mean absolutely no one, around to see us skulking close to the tree line, giving ourselves plenty of places to duck down and hide should one of the patrol cars come cruising by. The shadows were going to be our only friends tonight. Other than that, it was me and Leo against the world.

“We make a good team, you know that?” he said as we carefully descended the slope leading to the brook beneath the covered bridge. Going across the bridge itself was too risky—we’d be too obvious, too exposed, with nowhere to hide if things went bad—so we’d planned on crossing the water below, coming up the other side, and then following the trees again. Once we got to the business and residential area nearest the church, things would get a little trickier, but if we avoided the main roads I was pretty confident we could avoid detection.

I picked my way down the embankment toward the rocky shore and gasped when my shoes didn’t find immediate purchase. I started to slide and Leo grabbed my arm, spinning me up against his chest. I looked up into his face.

Breathlessly, I asked him, “How do you figure?”

He smirked, reached up, and tucked an unruly strand of hair back behind my ear. “ ‘Cause we’ve got it all, babe. I’ve got the brawn.” He booped my nose. “And you’ve got the brains.”

I wrinkled my nose and pulled away, steadying myself on the bank of the brook nearest the water. The dirt here was soaked through, depressing beneath my weight, leaving behind perfect imprints of my shoes. I scuffed my feet to cover them. “You’re awfully cheery for a thief in the night. Especially one who’s about to get wet.”

Leo shook his head. “Can’t let that happen, or our shoes are gonna squeak all the way to the church and back.”

I wasn’t about to spend my night trying to find the narrowest point, or a configuration of stones suitable for us to use as a crossing. Back when I’d believed going to nursing school was still a possibility, I’d done a lot of reading on the subject, which included advice on how best to obtain a diagnosis on a patient if they were unconscious, or unwilling to give up the relevant information. There was a theory called Occam’s Razor, which boiled down to this: the simplest solution is usually the correct one. In this case, Leo and I had two problems: getting our shoes and socks wet was going to make us squeak, which wasn’t conducive to committing a B&E, and we didn’t have time to figure out another point to cross at—not to mention the backtracking we’d have to do afterward.

I bent down and started rolling up my pants legs.

“What are you doing?” Leo asked, brow creasing in confusion. “I told you, if we get wet, it’s gonna be a problem.”

I started unlacing my sneakers next. “Not if we take off our shoes.”

I heard him open his mouth to object. And then I heard nothing at all. A moment later, he stepped up beside me and carefully stooped to follow my lead. He smiled to hide a grimace of pain, one inspired by the act of condensing his ribcage like that.

“Told you. You’re the brains.”

I got my shoes and socks off, stuffed the former into the latter, and then slapped Leo’s hands away from his jeans. I rolled them up to his knees for him, then helped him with his shoes.

“If you don’t start paying more attention to your limitations,” I said, “you’re going to end up even more injured than you were to begin with.”

He chuckled, “I’ll keep that in mind, Nurse Ratched,” but fell silent under my withering glare. Normally I found Leo’s devil-may-care attitude soothing, charming even, but tonight it grated on my already frayed nerves. There was too much at stake for either of us to get cocky. Cocky led to lazy, and lazy led to mistakes, and mistakes led to getting caught.

And in this case, getting caught would lead to winding up dead.

We crossed through the shallow part of the brook in our bare feet, holding onto our socks and shoes until we made it to the other side. The water was absolutely freezing and I regretted my plan immediately, even in lieu of having no viable alternative. Every sweep of the current against my ankles and toes was like being bombarded with a thousand knives, each one cutting me right down to the bone.

I was numb and shivering by the time we made it to the other side. Wet dirt clung to the bottoms of my feet, but that at least was easy enough to brush away. The cold stayed, even after I’d slipped my socks and shoes back on. Leo rubbed my arms to try to warm me, but the chill persisted.

“Let’s get moving again,” I said, even though the last thing my body wanted was to put its frozen appendages to the test. “Maybe the increase in circulation will help.”

“You’re the boss,” Leo said. It felt good to have someone trust my judgment.

We followed the tree line until it thinned and gave way to the residential zone, along with a labyrinth of back roads that fed into the street the church was located on. There was no real need for a neighborhood watch in a town like Pleasant Lakes; Leo and I were able to move relatively freely here, but we kept to the fences anyway. No need get sloppy this close to the finish line.

“What if someone’s dog starts barking?” I wondered aloud, momentarily giving in to the anxiety making my hands tremble in the pockets of my coat. “Then what do we do?”

“Keep walking,” Leo replied, “and hope we find a good hiding place before someone comes out.”

I knew it wasn’t likely that we’d have to worry about anything like that happening, but living with Delfino all these years had me paranoid. He was so damn meticulous, so hyperaware of everything that went on around him that it had rubbed off a little on me, too. Hopefully it would help us not to get caught, though right now, I was so worked up that I felt like even a slight change in breeze might send me running for cover.

The steady decline in the surety of Leo’s gait didn’t do much to soothe me, either. I could tell he was in pain, no matter how hard he tried not to let on. He may have bounced back quickly earlier in the day, but this was twice now we’d tested the limitations of his injuries. Then again, if we didn’t find a way to get the hell out of town, the state of Leo’s ribs would be the least of our problems.

Finally, we could see the church in the near distance. We were standing on the corner at the mouth of the neighborhood we’d just slipped through, looking up at the behemoth looming before us. It was an old, Colonial-style structure with a massive white steeple that disappeared into the dark, low-hanging clouds veiling the stars. A single shaft of moonlight filtered through, highlighting the stained glass window that faced the street. The scene it depicted was Jesus hanging on the cross, a Roman soldier jamming a spear into his side. It always struck me as morbid… and almost like a warning. Who it was meant for, I could only guess. But every time I glanced at it, I couldn’t help but feel like it was intended to be threatening.

“Guess that’s a sign,” Leo said, nudging me gently with his shoulder. “Approval from the heavens themselves.”

But I couldn’t take my eyes off of Jesus’ agonized face. “Could be an omen, too. How’s that song go? Don’t go around tonight… well, it’s bound to take your life… there’s a bad moon on the rise…”

“Creedence Clearwater Revival.” Leo smiled at me. “A girl after my own heart.”

I shook my head. His irrepressible optimism didn’t sit well with me. It reminded me of a phenomenon I’d read about in terminal patients called “the surge.” Hours, or sometimes days before death, a period of marked physiological improvement might ensue, affording the patient a few moments of happiness—or in the crueler cases, a few moments of hope. Ultimately, it would turn out to be just another cog in the machine that we call the process of dying. One not necessarily well-understood, but well-documented regardless.

As I looked up at Leo, I wondered if something similar was happening to him. Had the news of his impending death made him reckless? Had he come to a certain peace with it, preferring to die on his terms rather than Delfino’s? Was he regarding this entire excursion as some kind of suicide mission?

No. Screw that. I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. He’d promised to save me, and I was going to hold him to it. Even if that meant I had to save him.

“Let’s go,” I said, tugging his arm for him to follow me across the street. “The sooner we get what we came here for, the sooner we can get out of here and get on with our lives.” I wanted to remind him that there was a future for us, if he was willing to believe in it. I wanted him to focus on what would happen if we succeeded, instead of preparing for us to fail.

We hurried across the road and around the side of the church, gunning for the private entrance the staff used. It led directly to the private offices where I knew Delfino kept the information he didn’t want to risk me stumbling across at home. This was it: the last hurdle between me, Leo, and sweet freedom.

I had waited for this for so long, built up the idea of liberation in my head until it was more myth than possibility. Now that I found myself standing at the threshold of it, I hardly knew what to do with myself. So much of my time in captivity had been spent telling myself it wasn’t going to happen, that emancipation just wasn’t in the cards for me, and now that it was… it was like standing on the edge of Niagara Falls, looking down the rapids as they dissolved into mist, and trying to fathom the great unknown that lay beyond it. And then, on top of everything else, trying to convince myself to jump.

My self-preservation instinct kicked into overdrive, rattling off every reason in the world why I should do this—why I should just let things be. The status quo was safer, it whispered to me. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

But how could I continue living as I had with Delfino, knowing I’d squandered this opportunity, and possibly at Leo’s expense? How could I go back to my cage having teetered on the cusp of freedom, knowing it intimately enough that if I closed my eyes, I could still smell it, taste it, see the afterimage of it burned into my retinas like I’d stared too long at the sun? That wouldn’t be living—it would be existing, surviving, which was exactly what life had been like before Leo returned for me. Days had passed in a dull, gray haze. The moment I saw Leo in his hospital bed, it was like watching the sun rise for the first time in years. He held all the colors of the dawn in his eyes.

Wetting my dry, cracked lips, I asked him, “Once we have what we need… what then? If we tell Delfino we know what he’s doing, what’s to keep him from killing us instead of giving in to our demands?”

Leo glanced down at the door handle. “We’ll tell him I called a buddy of mine. Told him what we found, where we hid the evidence, and that if we don’t show up on his doorstep in the next twenty-four hours, he’s gonna take it to the Feds.” He began taking off his jacket. “Fair enough?”

“Actually… yes,” I said, my nagging fears subsiding slightly. “But who are you going to call? And on what phone? Yours got wrecked when your bike did, and I don’t exactly have one—”

I just barely stifled a shriek as Leo put his jacket-wrapped fist through the narrow, vertical pane of glass on one side of the door. He cleared away the jagged leftovers, then reached inside and released the locks.

“What are you doing?!” I hissed at him through my teeth. “Are you actually out of your mind?” In the distance, a dog barked in warning; it was all I could do not to shake Leo until candy came out. “What happened to subtlety? To… stealth?”

“Bobby pins weren’t gonna do the trick on that lock,” he said, and I looked down at the knob. He was right. It was way too heavy-duty, too complex. “You said Pleasant Lakes doesn’t deal in security systems, which means we won’t have that to worry about. And besides.” Metal scraped against wood and Leo flashed me a grin. “There was a deadbolt.”

Again, I stifled a shriek, though this was less surprise and more anger. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists to stop from trembling as he opened the door, affording us entry. “You could have warned me. I wasn’t prepared.”

“If I’d warned you, you would’ve told me not to do it,” he said, shaking the shards off his jacket before donning it again.

I scowled. “Of course I would have! You took a huge risk, doing that!”

Leo’s gaze took a languid stroll up and down my body. He’d told me before that I was sexy when I was angry. If that was the case, I must have been smoking hot to him now, because I was livid.

“You know what the Bible says about risk-taking, don’t you, Lulu?” he asked me. Before I could reply, he held up a hand in a mimicry of a saint and said, “ ‘Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.’ ”

“That was Grace Hopper, you idiot,” I said as I moved past him. “And you’re quoting one of the gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame!”

“Hey, it was a good movie,” he called after me, his voice a harsh whisper. When I paused just after the threshold, he almost ran into the back of me. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” I chewed at my lip. “I guess I’m just now realizing what we’re doing. How much is going to change, after we’re done here.” The hallway before me tilted and pitched. My chest felt tight. “Jesus, Leo… we could die. Delfino could kill us both. He…”

Firm, callused fingers on my waist gave me pause. “I told you, that’s not going to happen. We’ve got this in the bag, Lulu.” I looked up at him to see if he meant it, but his face was nigh unreadable. He was probably trying to seem brave to keep me from losing my nerve. Joke was on him—I’d been doing the same thing for his sake.

“It’s scary, though. Isn’t it?” he continued, and for a moment, I was sure I saw a crack in his façade—a slipping of his mask that revealed the man, the human being, underneath. “Making a decision this big. Knowing you’ll have to live… or not… with the consequences.”

I nodded faintly. “Yes.”

He closed the door. It was only when he turned the lock and secured the bolt that any sound emerged, like twin gunshots fired in close quarters. I felt like the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, hearing evidence of his guilt where no one else could. So loud was his conscience that he gave himself away, certain he couldn’t possibly be the only one who knew what he’d done—mistaking the jovial nature of the constables for mockery. I, too, was making mountains out of molehills. But unlike that sad, devious narrator, I was not alone in my struggle. I had Leo here to assuage me.

Raking his fingers through his hair, he said, “Thing is, Lucy… thing is, we’re never actually prepared to go through with our big plans, no matter how much we think we are. Right up until the last second, we think we’ve got a handle on things. We’ve crunched the numbers. We’ve gathered our courage. Opened ourselves to the possibility of success; steeled ourselves for failure. But then it comes time to act, to put one foot in front of the other, to speak up, to pull the trigger, or even just… take a stand. And everything changes. It doesn’t matter who you are, how tough, how educated. When we stand on the precipice of possibility becoming reality, we all falter.”

He held my gaze so intensely I found myself unable to look away. There was a low smolder in his cognac irises, a golden glow that neatly rimmed the twin singularities of his pupils. I found earnestness there and a certain… vulnerability. It took a moment, but eventually, I realized the veil of cocksure certainty had fallen away, and what I was seeing was the real Leo, trying to make a connection—trying to tell me, without saying so, that he was scared too.

I sucked in a slow, shaky breath. “What happens then? After we stumble… what comes next?” I allowed myself a thin laugh. “Sounds an awful lot like we fall.”

“We might,” he admitted, stepping forward to brush his fingers down the side of my face. “Lots of people do. More often than not, that’s how these things go.” I lowered my eyes and gently, Leo grasped my chin, forcing me to look up at him again. “But baby… what if you fly?”

My throat grew tight with emotion at the prospect. Oh, that was all I’d ever wanted—to rise and to soar. To experience a life without boundaries or limitations. The first time I met Leo, he’d forced me to remember that dream. Just being in his presence was enough to make those bittersweet memories of freedom come flooding back, to ignite the fantasy that one day I might experience something like that again. When he’d left, I’d made such an effort to let go of it—to deny myself the agony that came with hoping for better, when all I’d end up getting was worse—I’d thought such desires lost to me forever.

But now that he was back… I wanted again. Desperately. Shamelessly. If there was even the smallest chance that we could come out on top, that we could cross the divide between dream and reality, then I wanted to step off the cliff’s edge, spread my wings, and let the wind take me where it may.

I wanted to fly. And when I did, I wanted Leo there beside me.

“We should… we should find Delfino’s office,” I said with a new steadiness in my voice. “Dig up as much as we possibly can. I don’t want there to be even the most minute possibility that he’ll slither out of this one.” Gently, I pulled away from Leo. “I want this to be the last night either of us spends in Pleasant Lakes ever again.”

One corner of Leo’s lips curled in a smile. “That’s my Lulu.”

Furtively, I wiped my eyes with my wrist and turned to the hallway, glancing between the doors. “It’s this one,” I said, a little surprised by my own confidence. “The one without a name on the door. He’d want to keep a low profile. And it’s the only one with a lock that looks like that.”

I gestured to it. Delfino had had his office door outfitted with a keypad like he was an agent for the NSA, or something. I wrinkled my nose at it. I knew next to nothing about any dates or other numerical values that might be important to that bastard. Now what were we going to do?

As it turned out, Leo already had a plan, and it looked a hell of a lot like the last one he’d executed.

“Back up,” he said, giving me just enough time to move out of the way before he delivered a solid kick to the door.

“Why?” I asked him, staring in disbelief as he kicked a second time, making enough noise for it to echo down the hall. “Why are you like this?!”

“Just getting the job done,” he answered, kicking again. Taking a moment to breathe, he finally acknowledged my glare. “Oh, come on, Lulu. We don’t have all night to try to figure out the code.”

I shook my head. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Leo shrugged. “Sounds better than being dead.” And he took a step back, reared up, and kicked again—as hard as he could this time.

The door gave way, buckling beneath his boot. As it swung inward Leo groaned and clutched his side, cursing on the back of a wheeze. “Fuck!”

“Shh,” I urged him, covering his mouth with one hand while my other pulled up the hem of his shirt. His ribs had been bruised before, but over the past week some of them had faded from midnight blue to sickly shades of yellow and green. Now, though, they were purpling again. I sighed. “I told you. I told you this was going to happen. Between exerting yourself this way and crossing a stream of freezing cold water, you’ll be lucky if you don’t end up with a raging case of pneumonia by the time this is all said and done.” I listened to him wheeze. “And you better not have collapsed a lung, Leo Richards, or so help me…”

He kissed my palm. I glared at him. Though his lips were obscured, the crinkling of the corners of his eyes told me he was smiling.

“I like how you take care of me,” he said as I moved my hand away. “Sometimes the best medicine is a good kick in the ass.”

“You’re going to get more than that, if we don’t hurry up and get out of here,” I said, pulling him into the office past the ruined door. “All right, let’s find his filing cabinet.”

Limping slightly, Leo moved past me. “Don’t need to.” He approached the desk near the center of the room and started prying open the computer tower. “We’ll jack the hard drive. Easier to find, gives us access to all of Delfino’s personal files, and is way more portable than a stack of manila folders.”

While he worked on separating the drive from the rest of the hardware, I opened up a couple of drawers anyway, peering inside. I thumbed through the folder tabs and opened one up, squinting at its contents in the darkness. Then I flipped the nearby switch for the light to get a better look.

“Holy crap,” I whispered, turning to Leo. “You would not believe how much money has been donated to this church.”

“Is it all by guys with very Italian-sounding names?” he quipped. I glanced down at the file. It was.

“Yeah. How’d…?”

“Money laundering,” Leo said, freeing the hard drive and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. “For the mob. Delfino’s well-connected, Lucy, and nobody—and I mean nobody—looks at charitable donations to churches. Not in America, anyway. And on top of all that, the money’s all tax-free.” He chuckled. “Clever bastards. I bet it all funnels back out in the name of public service works. And every single one of those, I bet you could trace back to a name on that list.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Delfino really has been running a racket… and a complicated one.” It made sense now, why he posed as a pastor—why he spent so much time “ministering” to the supposed “unfortunates” of Pleasant Lakes. No doubt he was overseeing a hundred deals like this. And why not? We were an idyllic little town in the middle of nowhere, well off the radar when it came to organizations like the FBI. Pleasant Lakes was the perfect ruse.

This wasn’t just a hideout for Delfino. This—the whole town—was a front for a much larger operation.

“Keep that file,” Leo said, turning the light back off. “We’ve got all our bases covered now—between whatever’s on this thing and what you’ve got in your hand, we’re gonna nail this fucker to the wall.”

“I wouldn’t count on that, if I were you.”

I whirled at the sickeningly familiar sound of the voice behind me. Delfino stood in the doorway to the office, a pitch black silhouette against the wan light of the hallway beyond.

“How…?” I whispered, but I knew there was no point in finishing that sentence. There was no point in talking, begging, or pleading at all. The way his flat, dead eyes glinted in the vermilion glow of the exit signs, I could tell what he was thinking: that up until his moment, he’d shown us mercy. Now that we’d crossed him, though, we had seen the last of it.

Behind him, I could make out three men wearing sheriff’s department uniforms, batons already in their hands. The breadth of them blocked the exist and any hope Leo and I had of escape. The blood drained from my face and I felt dizzy, like the floor beneath my feet had started to spin.

I looked up at Leo. Though his face was a cold, emotionless slate, I could see in his eyes clear as day what he was thinking—watched as he sized up Delfino, then the deputies, and finally the width of the door to see if we had any hope of getting out. When his shoulders slumped and Delfino smiled, I knew what the answer was.

We were screwed.