Page 44 of Riggs
Brice stands frozen in the alley, face white, streetlight ghosting his shock. It’s like watching a man realize he’s done something terribly wrong. He steps forward like he might grab me back. Kellan slides the door shut and Brice’s face becomes a fraction through tinted glass, and then the world is engine and forward.
I roll onto my side, wrists grinding against plastic. The gag tastes like him. I want to vomit. I don’t. I breathe. Four. Four. Four. The highway thrum starts beneath us faster than it should. He planned a route, a gap, a schedule, and a stupid little story he’s been telling himself for months.
“Where are you taking me?” I try through the fabric. It comes out mush and I don’t care. “Kellan, where?”
“We’re going somewhere nobody can find you,” he says. “You’ve forgotten me. It was always best when it was just you and me. Before managers. Before handlers. Before Beard Mountain made you think you needed him.”
“I do need him,” I try to say.
Brice’s voice is gone; the city is gone. The driver turns the radio up to a stations-fuzz hum that eats sound. The AC cranks. I should be making notes, but my thoughts are all jumbled into a frantic mess. I try to count. I try to memorize smells, and listen for sounds. But it’s useless. I can’t do anything but sit here and wait. Wait for Kellan to tell me his plan so I can try to unravel it.
“Please,” I make it soft, not because he deserves it but because people like Kellan love this word. “Don’t do this. You’ll ruin your life.”
“I’m making it,” he says, delighted. “You forgot who found you. Who made you art. I made you brave,” he adds, and the lie is so large I want to scream.
Riggs’s face glows in my mind, steady and stubborn and beautiful, the way he saidI don’t regret a second of you. The way he saidsleep. The way he kissed my knuckles under string lights and turned a crowd into a witness for us instead of to us. Fear surges and I ride it like a wave.
He will find me. He will. But he’s not magic. He’s a man with a plan and the way plans win is with data. I stare out the tiny back window. Billboards flip by—BBQ, a lawyer with a cowboy hat,DOLLAR TIREin red. A water tower etched with a wildcat.Out past the loop, and onto a stretch fringed with scrub and warehouses.
I test the zip ties. Too tight. I twist my wrists against them, not to get free now, but to mark them—blood is a breadcrumb. I drag the heel of my shoe along the carpeted wheel well until fabric frays. I wedge the broken heel tip under the mat. If Riggs gets this van—and he will—he’ll read the room like a book. I write in a language he taught me: details.
Kellan leans back between the seats, one hand on the headrest, the other reaching for me like this is a car date and not a kidnapping. I scoot my hips an inch away. He pouts. “Don’t be like that. You know I love you,” he says, as if love is claim, not care.
“I don’t,” I say, or try to, and he laughs because he hears what he wants.
“Riggs can’t protect you from the story,” he says. “I can rewrite it.”
I close my eyes. I think of a silver car and a road and his hand warm on my knee at 70 mph. I think of chili and movies and the way he saidminelike it was the only thing that mattered. I think of the night he taught me to breathe in fours. I breathe now, the way I promised him I would if it ever came to it.
One: Kellan’s cologne—cheap citrus you buy in a grocery line. Two: the driver’s knuckles—scar on the right, tattoo dot on the left ring finger. Three: the rosary—wood beads, knot frayed at the tenth. Four: the air vent—rattle at high, quiet at low. Five: the squeak every time we hit a seam—rear shocks shot on the left.
The van takes a long curve, exits into a quieter street—no median, scrappy storefronts, a mural of a longhorn with blue stars. There’s a warehouse with a roll-up door painted turquoise and I almost laugh because the universe is mocking me with breadcrumbs no one else would see.
We turn right. We turn left. We pass a chain-link fence with a sag I can feel more than see. We pass a field of cars half stripped for parts.
The driver kills the radio. The AC clicks down. The silence shifts.
“Almost there,” Kellan croons. “Then we can talk.”
I am terrified. My hands hurt. My heart is an animal. And yet underneath, coiled and ready, is something that wasn’t there before Riggs: a line that doesn’t waver, a voice that saysnolike a blade. I am not a story to be written by men who need a mirror. I am a person who leaves trails. I am a person who fights and buys time and believes in the man who said he’d bring me home.
The van slows. Gravel crunches. We pull into the shadows.
I lift my chin and inhale hard, dragging air into my lungs. “Four by four,” I tell myself, and I can hear him, calm and stubborn, counting with me even if he’s not here.Yet.
In. Hold. Out. Hold.
I look at the door. At Kellan’s grip on the handle. At the thin slice of light that will become a place he thinks he controls.
“Riggs,” I think, fierce. “I’m here. I’m leaving you a map.”
And hewillfind me.
15
Riggs
I don’t like the wordprivate. I like doors I can see and curtains that stay open. Brice says “two minutes, designer’s request,” and every muscle between my shoulders goes tight.
