Chapter 9

Chloe's POV

The gunshots started the same moment her hand came down on my shoulder.

She shoved me flat into the seat, hard and clean, no room for argument. My face pressed against the leather and I caught the smell of it — hide and something chemical, like cleaning fluid. The driver up front swore and wrenched the wheel, and the SUV's rear tires screamed against the asphalt as the whole frame lurched right. My temple hit the door panel.

Ringing. One second. Two. It faded.

The shots punching through the car door had a different sound than the motel — heavier, closer, nothing between them and my skull but a sheet of metal. Static crackled over the radio. The driver said something in Spanish, short words, clipped hard, and I didn't catch all of it, but the tone said enough.

The car didn't slow down. It accelerated. Another impact from the right — the groan of metal folding — and my teeth snapped together. I drove my fingers into the steel frame under the seat in front of me and held on.

Then the gunfire shifted. Denser. Coming from behind us now. Not aimed at us.

The follow car was covering us.

I pressed flat against the seat and counted my breaths. One, two, three. I ran the pieces together in my head at the same time: two vehicles, four people, crossfire coverage, and whoever hit us already knew this route. Not random.

My brain reached that conclusion with a clarity that felt almost offensive given the circumstances — and then the car dropped speed without warning. Not a gradual slowdown. A hard stop. Something locked the front wheels, the nose kicked left, and I flew forward before her arm caught me against the seat back.

The car stopped.

"Out." She was already pulling the handle.

The door swung open and ocean air came in with the gunsmoke. She grabbed my wrist and hauled me out. My feet hit the ground and I caught a snapshot of the road — asphalt, broken glass, and our SUV's front bumper sheared clean off and wedged into the guardrail at a wrong angle.

The highway ahead was chaos. Two dark vehicles blocked the lanes. Gunfire was coming from the slope on the left, rounds kicking up gravel off the asphalt.

She pushed me toward the guardrail on the right side of the road and said one word, low: "Over."

The guardrail was old corrugated metal, rust-spotted, with a slope on the other side dropping into brush that disappeared into the dark below. She went over clean. I followed, landed wrong, my knee catching something hard on the way down.

No time for it. She was already moving, low and fast through the undergrowth, and I went after her, thorns catching at my arms, shoes sliding on loose rock with every step like the hillside was actively trying to put me down.

The shooting behind us didn't stop.

I didn't look back. Looking back wouldn't change anything — it would just make me fall. My mother used to say that when a variable goes out of control, you focus on the one you can still manage. Right now the only variable I could manage was the next step. Then the one after that.

Then there was a sound — not a gunshot, shorter than that, with a specific dull weight to it — and her stride broke. Her right shoulder dropped and snapped back tight in the same motion, and she kept moving, but her right arm barely swung after that.

She'd been hit.

Something tightened in my chest. She was taking rounds meant for me — not because she had any feeling about it, because someone was paying her to. Did the distinction matter? The outcome was the same. The blood was real.

I closed the gap and kept my voice down. "You —"

"Keep moving."

Same tone. Hard. No give in it anywhere. I shut my mouth and kept going.

At the bottom of the slope there was a drainage channel — concrete, dry, barely wide enough to fit one person turned sideways. She dropped into it and waved me down after her, then put her back against the wall and crouched, left hand pressed over her right shoulder. The blood didn't show much on her dark jacket, but it was seeping through her fingers.

Above us, the gunfire thinned out. Then stopped. Then there was an engine.

I crouched in the channel. There was a shallow cut on my knee, not deep, grit pressed into it. I ignored it. I watched her reload one-handed with her left, the motion running about three seconds slower than it should have, but she got it done. Then she looked at me — less than a second — and made one gesture: stay.

I stayed.

The brush on the slope blocked most of the sightlines. I could only go by sound — metal impacts from the road above, voices, an engine turning over and pulling away. I had no way of knowing what happened to the two people in the follow car. I filed that away and focused on the cracks in the concrete wall in front of me, tracing them, because it was easier than anything else.

My breathing evened out slowly. There was something strange about it — crouching in a drainage ditch next to a woman with a bullet in her shoulder, and underneath the fear finding something that felt almost like stillness. Not real stillness. That died at the motel. Something colder. More stripped down. The fear was still there, but I'd put it in a box and labeled it for later. What I needed right now was to observe, record, and wait for the next variable.

Time moved slowly.

She held her crouch, right arm against her side, left hand on the gun, eyes on the top of the channel wall. Blood dripped from between her fingers and hit the dry concrete, darker than I expected. I thought about Marco. I thought about what tone he'd use dealing with a wound like that — then I stopped myself before I got any further down that road.

About twenty minutes later, footsteps came from above — heavy, fast, the kind that knew exactly where they were going.

Her shoulder pulled tighter. Just slightly. I noticed.

I didn't move. I stayed crouched against the concrete wall, fingers pressed to the necklace, waiting to see who it was. Could be friendlies. Could be whoever tried to kill us coming back to confirm the job. I didn't know which one to hope for. That's not true — I knew. I just wasn't sure I'd earned the right to hope for anything.

The footsteps stopped at the guardrail above.

Then silence. I slowly raised my head.