144
The sky was a fading grayish blue, that late-afternoon kind of light that wasn’t soft or golden anymore, just dull. Tired. Like the day itself was worn out. I stood on the front porch, rocking from one foot to the other, arms crossed tight around my chest, fingers clammy and restless. I could feel the sweat cooling on the back of my neck even though it wasn’t hot. My stomach twisted and ached like it had teeth, gnawing at me from the inside. I was exhausted, but not the kind sleep could fix. The kind that sits heavy in your chest and makes your hands shake a little when you try to be still.
The gate finally creaked open.
From the distance, I could see Dominic turning around, his broad frame ducking low as he gently guided Adam back into the backseat of the Ferrari. The boy looked so small in his arms, his cheek pressed to Dominic’s chest, arms limp with exhaustion. It was the kind of sight that punched the air out of your lungs without warning. A big, wounded man carrying a child like he was made of porcelain and shadows.
We hadn’t thought it through when we decided to pull him out in the first place. It made sense in the panic of the moment—get the kid out, keep him close, make sure he was breathing, warm, awake. We thought we’d be walking straight into the house, maybe crashing right away, maybe dealing with the bleeding and the screaming and the brokenness behind a closed door, away from the world. But none of that happened. The gate took longer than expected to open, and the moment stretched on just long enough for common sense to creep back in.
The Ferrari was parked right in the open. In plain sight. Even though there were no other houses for miles—just trees, a stretch of gravel road, and a fence that looked more decorative than protective—it didn’t matter. Not when that car was a walking, breathing target. Vaughn’s men didn’t need a street number. They didn’t need coordinates. All they needed was a whisper. A vague description. A black Ferrari F8 Tributo. That’s it. That’s all it took for someone to drop a pin and send hell crashing down.
And if it wasn’t Vaughn’s men, it would be worse—the cops. Because if my instincts were even halfway right, that car was already plastered across the news. Headlines. Tweets. Reddit threads. TikToks with dramatic soundtracks and voiceovers saying, “What REALLY happened in that school?” There’d be grainy CCTV stills with red circles drawn around the license plate and some amateur investigator posting, “This is definitely the car from the break-in. I know this model. My dad has one.” And then someone else jumping in, “Yep, that’s the one. Zoom in, you can see the blood on the hood.” Another would claim, “The woman who got stabbed was pregnant. I heard from a cousin who lives near there.”
“Someone said the kid that was kidnapped is the senator’s nephew.”
“No, no, he's a hostage. The guy with the bruises took him from the scene after shooting someone.” Even though Dominic didn’t have a single bruise on him. Not one. His skin was clean. Clear. Untouched. Except the gunshot wound under the shirt. But that didn’t matter. People would see what they wanted to see. Lies and lies and lies. Anything to make us seem worse than the devil.
“I heard they found drugs in the trunk. Like serious cartel-level shit.”
“There’s a picture going around of the woman before she got stabbed. She's, like, covered in blood. I think she was the one who broke in.”
“No, the woman’s actually the girlfriend of the guy driving. She killed the other woman out of jealousy. It was a love triangle.”
“Pretty sure the man is ex-military. You can tell from the way he moved.”
“Or a hitman. Look at his hands—definitely not normal bruises. That’s execution work.”
“They were running from a murder scene. The house was set on fire afterward, and the dog inside died. Poor thing.”
“No dog died. That’s fake. But they definitely left someone for dead. You can see it in the way he was carrying the kid, like he was fleeing something huge.”
The lies would keep spreading like wildfire, growing roots with every repost. Unrelated things. Every piece of fiction building onto another. People swearing they knew someone who knew someone who heard screaming at that school. Some teenage girl posting a blurry Snapchat she swore was from the neighborhood, claiming she saw the car speeding down the hill like hell was on their heels.
It didn’t matter what was true. What mattered was what sounded the most dramatic. The most clickable. The most retold.
And the Ferrari—they’d eat that up. It was the kind of detail that screamed scandal. Wealth. Blood. Dirt under silk. A nightmare in designer shoes.
We couldn’t let them pin that nightmare to this house.
We just couldn’t.
The best we could do now was to stop drawing attention to ourselves. Not make it easier for them. We had one shot at staying hidden. One chance to keep the only safe space we had. And we were already dancing dangerously close to the edge. All it would take was one phone call from a delivery guy or a lost hiker with a drone, and that would be it. Game over.
My eyes lingered on Dominic in the distance.
How he eased Adam back into the car, brushing the boy’s hair away from his forehead before buckling him in with slow, practiced movements. It was careful. Protective. Like he knew exactly what this world could do to soft things and was trying to delay the inevitable for just a little longer.
I stood there on the porch, gripping the wooden railing hard enough that my knuckles ached, and thought, We need to be smarter than this. We need to be careful now. No more fuckups. We couldn’t afford another mistake. Not even a small one.
Because no matter how far out we were, no matter how many miles of silence surrounded us, danger didn’t need a map.
It just needed a scent.
I swallowed hard. My legs itched with the need to move, but my body refused to go down the stairs just yet. My heart wouldn’t stop pounding, too loud, too fast, like it was trying to beat its way out of my ribcage. What if this was a mistake? What if I’d just walked back into a fire I didn’t have the energy to survive again? But no. I looked over my shoulder, caught Isabella standing behind the half-open door, her expression unreadable. After she opened the gate, she went inside to keep the gun in her hand. But I still had that gut feeling that maybe something was wrong. Why did she have a gun in the first place? Was the estate not safe anymore? Did something happen? I could trust her. I could trust her. I had to. Right?
Once the Ferrari rolled forward and stopped in the driveway, right in front of the porch steps, I pulled myself together and started walking down. Each step felt like I was dragging a thousand versions of myself along—the me from before, the one who used to laugh here, cry here, get drunk here, collapse on this very porch and swear life couldn’t get worse. Guess it could.
I paused at the bottom, turned to Isabella.
“We need help,” I said, voice flat but edged with something brittle. “She’s in the car. Can barely move.”
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