“Negative,” Steven says into his walkie-talkie. “No movement here. Target not sighted. All’s quiet. Over and out.”

He’s nervous and jittery, too excited, and talking like a he’s a Navy SEAL in a bad action movie, but I let him do it. Anything I try to communicate is gonna be too profanity-laced and loud to even get my point across, so I don’t bother.

My point being, let me the fuck at that bastard.

I pace back and forth again, right in front of the hotel doors. The Kevlar vest Charleston PD gave me is a little too small, digging into my skin, but that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that he’s out there, only a few blocks away, and someone else is going to be the one to take him down. Some Charleston police officer is gonna get to grab him, cuff him, be the first one to see his face and tell him that it’s all fucking over and he lost, and I’m here, at the hotel.

Just waiting.

I fucking hate waiting.

I get it, obviously. I’m Ruby’s bodyguard. It’s my job to guard her, and she’s here, up in her room, probably pretending to be asleep. Anyone who comes here is gonna have to get through me — and also Steven, sure — before he can hurt her, and he’s gonna have one hell of a time doing that.

But it doesn’t change that I’d love to be the one punching this guy in the face.

The radio they gave me crackles, a rough, tinny voice coming through. I listen tensely, still pacing back and forth like a caged animal.

“Gibson, roger that. In position now, Cartney and Stiles heading Southeast on third street. Target is still moving very slowly, approximately ten miles per hour.”

“All right. Moving to block now, nice and easy.”

Silence. More silence. I imagine what’s happening right now, the plan we laid out not five minutes ago: one police car behind the minivan, one in front, officers with weapons drawn and bulletproof vests on. Ideally, the unarmed suspect gets out of the van, hands on his head, gets on the ground, and it’s over.

If anything else goes down, it’s ten armed police officers against one lunatic. I don’t like his odds.

The radio crackles again.

“Gibson,” the man’s voice says. “Gibson. Shit!”

Over the radio there’s the sound of a motor revving so hard it roars, the sound of metal crunching and glass shattering.

“What the hell?” someone shouts.

Steven and both shove through the hotel doors, drawing our weapons, moving in sync. I’ve got no fucking idea what happened, but it sure as hell wasn’t the plan.

We stand on the sidewalk, motionless, the curve of the hotel driveway in front of us. For a moment, there’s nothing but the near-total quiet of a quaint town at two-thirty in the morning, the slight hum of the street lights, the occasional rustle of the breeze.

And then there’s a siren. The sound of crunch, shattering glass, an overloaded engine being driven so hard it’s practically screaming.

I tighten my grip and plant my feet, every nerve in my body practically humming. Someone’s shouting over the radio, but I can’t understand him through the static, and I’m using every muscle in my body to listen for the sound of a minivan careening my way.

Come on, I think. Come the fuck on.

Try me. Just fucking try me.

More glass shatters. The sirens get louder. Metal crunches, and then there’s a screech, the sound of metal grinding on metal and a dark hulking shape rounds the corner like a drunk turtle on a skateboard, fishtails, and then points itself right at us.

I swear to God I almost smile.

The minivan’s engine howls, redlining, and blue lights whirl around the corner right behind it, but I’m not looking at that. I’m looking at the pale shape behind the steering wheel and I’m thinking, finally, you motherfucker.

He doesn’t stop and I don’t move. Instead I tick off the milliseconds, forcing my nerves quiet as I wait until he’s in range. I feel like everything is moving in slow motion: the sirens, the van, the spinning lights. Another car’s side mirror goes flying, and then the van is there, in range, and I finally fire.

It happens almost instantly. I get the driver’s side tire with my first shot, and the van jerks to the left, losing control. He bumps off a pickup truck parked in the street, careens over the curb as Steven and I move out of the way, but the minivan’s nose plows into a concrete planter and comes to a dead stop, steam pouring from under the hood, airbags deployed.

Nothing moves inside it. Two police cars pull up, screeching to a stop, sirens howling, but I’m already sprinting for the driver’s side door of the minivan, Steven behind me, weapons out and at the ready.

We look at each other. He nods, weapon trained on the driver’s door, police moving into position as I yank the door open.

“Hands up!” someone shouts.

I still can’t see his face, because he’s got long, stringy brown hair that’s flown forward and covered it. Slowly, shakily, he holds up his hands, both shaking so badly it almost looks like he’s waving.

At the same time, we all pause, just for an instant. There’s something wrong here, wrong about the man behind the wheel, about the small, delicate hands he’s holding up.

“Now get out slowly,” the voice says. “Nice and easy.”

The figure unbuckles, still shaking, and turns slowly toward the door, and suddenly I can see a face.

It’s a woman.

For a split second, it throws me off. This entire time I had a mental image of the man who was stalking Ruby, the man who threatened to tie her up and rape her and keep her in a basement, the man who might be capable of overpowering her and taking her against her will.

But it’s not. It’s a woman, small and delicate and terrified, shaking and crying hysterically. Worst of all, she looks familiar.

I wonder if we got the wrong person, but then she steps out of the van and the spell’s broken, instantly.

“Against the car!” someone shouts, and then the cops swarm her. They frisk her and cuff her while she sobs, her face red and her nose running, so utterly distraught that I almost feel bad for her.

I’m at a loss. I have no idea what to think or how to feel. I don’t even know that we got Ruby’s stalker, and if we did, I can’t bring myself to think about punching this girl’s face in.

A big, meaty hand claps my shoulder and I look down into a tanned, lined face.

“You good?” it asks.

It’s Captain Dodson, the guy currently in charge.

“I’m good,” I confirm.

“Great. You’re gonna need to give a statement down at the station. Nice shooting, by the way.”

Steven stays at the hotel while the Captain drives me to the police station in a daze.

All I can think is, what if that’s not him?

* * *

“She didn’t deserve it,” the girl sobs, desperately. “The scriptures are very clear on that point. Matthew 19:6. ‘Let no man tear asunder,’ it says, and she tore their union right in half.”

The officer in the room with her says something quietly, pushing a bottle of water toward her, but the girl doesn’t take it. I’m on the other side of the one-way mirror, and though I’m not exactly supposed to be there, no one’s raising any objection to my presence.

Her name is Lilah, and she looks familiar because she’s the Senator’s aide’s fianceé, always around when we go to campaign events. I think she’s also Lucas’s sister, though that part is a little less clear since she won’t say his name out loud.

She knew about the county fair because she was there with us the entire time, and she stole her parents’ car to drive to Atlanta late at night to mail the letters.

This whole time, we were barking up the wrong tree. She was right here and we were so, so wrong.

“And then Ruby got another chance,” she hisses, her voice quiet but hateful. “You know where she should be? She should be in a ditch somewhere, her head shaved because that’s what they used to do to shameful women—”

I turn around and walk out, pushing open the door and heading back into the main room of the Charleston Police Department, paper cup half-full of stone-cold coffee in my hand. This feels a thousand times worse than I thought it would, and I find a bench along a wall and just sit on it because I just need a minute amidst all the chaos to think.

Lilah’s not well. That much was dead obvious almost immediately, and that was before she spent about an hour telling a police officer how she talks to angels in long, detailed conversations every night.

And how the angels tell her to do things. Specific things, and often things that aren’t very nice, and furthermore, the angels have warned her that she can never, ever tell anyone about their conversations.

It took about thirty seconds for all my anger toward her to fade into awful, gut-wrenching pity, because it’s dead clear that this girl needs a kind of help that she might never get.

On the bright side, even though she’s told everyone about Ruby and me and our fornication, sinful in the eyes of God, no one believes her.

It’s five-thirty in the morning. I’m supposed to be escorting Ruby to breakfast in an hour and a half, and though I’m sure that the schedule is non-existent now, I’m still hanging onto that. Because right now, that’s what I want to think about: knocking on her door, her face when she opens it, the way she might sneak me a smile as we get on the elevator.

I don’t want to think about her father quizzing me about whether Ruby and I have been fornicating. I don’t want to think about whether I’ll even be employed with them past today, or how it’s going to be harder for Ruby to run away with me if I’m not.

All those things are coming, but I’m tired and the end to this story has been almost nauseatingly unsatisfying. Instead of a bad guy, there’s just a girl deep in the throes of untreated mental illness. So I think about Ruby in the morning, her smile, the possibility that our fingers might touch when she passes the salt.

I’m still thinking about that when footsteps approach, and I look over to see Ray standing there, hands shoved deep in his pockets. His expression is almost aggressively unreadable, so perfectly blank that I know something is wrong instantly.

“What is it?” I ask.

His face doesn’t change.

“Could you please come with me?”

“Is it Ruby?” I ask, heart seizing in my chest.

“Just come with me, son.”

“Is she okay?”

Ray just starts walking away, giving me no real choice but to follow after him.

“Ray,” I say, trying to keep my voice low even though I want to shout. “Ray, what’s going on?”

He just walks out of the main room and into the reception area at the front, empty because it’s too early for the receptionist.

“She’s fine,” he says, holding up one hand to stave me off. “But the Senator wants to talk to you.”

I exhale.

“Of course,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s been a night, and with everything that happened—”

“Son, he wants to talk to you about Ruby’s whereabouts last night,” Ray interrupts.

I stop short, mid-sentence. I don’t even shut my mouth, I just stare at Ray.

I’m not even surprised. It was too inevitable for me to be surprised, too many things that had to go exactly, perfectly right for me to be surprised.

But I know, in that instant, that the charade is over. I’m done seeing her every day and pretending that I’m not desperately in love with her. I’m done spending time with her family and acting like I’m not thinking about her lips on mine and her bare skin under my fingers.

He knows. I feel like I’m staring at a bridge that just got wrecked, and I have no clue which way I’ll go now, but I know it’s somewhere. I’m unmoored, in freefall, but I know exactly one goddamn thing and it’s that somehow, I’m getting out of this with Ruby.

I toss my half-full coffee cup into a trash can, cold coffee splashing up the side.

“I know where she was,” I tell him, my voice finding its lowest, most serious register. “She was with me.”

Ray nods grimly.