Chapter 8 - WHAT COLE HAD DONE FOR A LIVING
Getting out of the culvert meant choosing a direction and betraying a truth.
Cole already knew the direction.
What he hadn’t admitted—certainly not to Rachel—was the truth.
They escaped through a drainage tunnel June had mapped years earlier, emerging nearly a mile away behind an industrial lot. June had a hidden van there. They moved before the attackers circled wide enough to realize.
Inside the van, Emma fell asleep against Rachel with Noah between them.
June drove.
Cole sat in the passenger seat cleaning the shotgun like routine could still exist.
Rachel watched him from the back.
Finally she asked, “How many people have you killed for men like Voss?”
June went still behind the wheel.
He didn’t turn around.
“Enough.”
“Was I supposed to be one of them?”
“Yes.”
Emma stirred in her sleep but didn’t wake.
Rachel’s voice dropped.
“And my children?”
He answered honestly.
“I was told to find you. Nothing more.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
June cut in.
“That’s convenient.”
He turned in his seat and faced them.
“I’m not asking anyone here to trust me. I’m telling you the hunters won’t stop, and I know how they work.”
Rachel looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said the sentence that mattered.
“Do you want the money, or do you want to live?”
He frowned.
She lifted the duffel bag and unzipped it.
Inside were printed binders, a satellite phone, a compact drive, and a pistol wrapped in cloth.
“The men behind this bounty are already trying to erase everyone connected to the file. The minute they know you touched my children, you stopped being a freelancer and became loose end number three.”
He did not like how much sense that made.
“Three?”
“You, me, and June. Four if you count Emma. Five with the baby.”
He looked out through the windshield.
All his life he had survived by staying transactional.
A job was a job.
A target was a target.
Emotion was the rot that got men careless.
Then an eleven-year-old girl had grabbed his jacket in the middle of the desert and his neat categories shattered.
He turned back.
“What’s the plan?”
May you like
Rachel answered:
“Get the evidence to someone who can’t be bought before Julian Voss kills us all.”
