Page 14 of Beckett
She drove away, taillights disappearing into the darkness. Maybe I was making too much of this, but it didn’t make sense for her to come all the way back out here from town.
I headed back to the house, but even hours later, sleep felt impossible. Instead, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop, staring at the cursor blinking in the search bar, wondering if I should do a search on Audra. I could ask Lark for her last name. I could find out who she was. Run her plates, do a background check, uncover whatever she was running from. It wouldn’t take me long.
Hell, I could ask Travis Hale, Warrior Security’s reclusive tech guru, to do it, and he’d have it for me in under a minute, probably.
My fingers hovered over the keys.
Then Rodriguez’s voice echoed in my memory:You can’t save everyone, Sinclair. Sometimes you just have to watch and be ready.
But I’d failed at that once already. Failed to watch close enough, react fast enough. Rodriguez had died because I’d missed the signs.
I closed the laptop without typing anything. Whatever Audra’s story was, she’d earned the right to tell it in her own time. Or not tell it at all.
But I’d be watching.
I just had to figure out why she felt so familiar. And why looking at her made my chest tight with guilt I couldn’t name.
Chapter 5
Audra
The scream tore from my throat before I could stop it. My eyes flew open in the darkness, chest heaving, shirt plastered to my skin with cold sweat. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was. The shed. Right. The shed on Lark’s property.
Not Seattle. Not the motel in Portland. Not my car parked behind some abandoned building.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to push away the images from the nightmare. But they clung to me like smoke—his shadow in the doorway, the sound of his breathing, that whisper that had haunted me for a year now.
An eye for an eye.
I moved my hand to the back of my neck without thinking, fingers finding the raised tissue of the burn scar. The memory tried to claw its way up, but I shoved it down hard. If I let myself go back there, if I let myself remember that night in detail, I’d shatter into pieces I might never put back together.
I forced myself to take slow breaths. In through my nose, out through my mouth. The technique a therapist had taught me years ago, back when my biggest problems were normal things like work stress and bad dates.
Back before a faceless man decided to make my life his personal hunting ground.
A year. It had been a year since this had started in Seattle. Six months since I’d finally run. Three months since I’d figured out he was tracking me electronically somehow—through my credit cards, my phone, something. I’d ditched everything then, gone completely cash-only. Made life infinitely harder, but at least I’d stayed ahead of the stalker for a while.
Until the money started running out three weeks ago. Until I’d had to start sleeping in my car, taking whatever under-the-table work I could find. Jobs that paid cash meant employers who didn’t ask questions, which usually meant employers who weren’t exactly following labor laws either.
But then I’d found this place. Found Lark, who’d been desperate enough for help to pay cash without too many questions. Found this shed that almost felt like…
No. I couldn’t think of it as home.Homewas dangerous.Homemeant staying still long enough for him to find me.
The darkness outside the small window had that particular quality that meant dawn was coming soon. Good. I needed to get moving anyway, get off the property before the sun came up. Before Beckett noticed.
Beckett. Even thinking his name made my stomach do something complicated. He watched everything with those dark eyes, noticed things other people missed. In the two days since Lark had left, I’d developed a routine—sneaking back here after dark, leaving before dawn, parking my car even farther down the road than usual. I couldn’t risk anything else.
The cold hit me as soon as I pushed off the sleeping bag. October mornings in Montana had teeth. By November, December, what would it be like? I couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t think about where I’d be or how I’d survive sleeping in my car when snow started falling. Because surely I wouldn’t be in this shed. As much as I liked it here, I couldn’t stay here indefinitely.
I had to take it one day at a time. That was all I could handle.
I rolled up the sleeping bag with practiced ease, folding the two flannel shirts I’d been using as pillows. Everything went into my backpack in a specific order—sleeping bag on bottom, clothes in the middle, the few toiletries I had left on top, where I could grab them quickly. My wallet with my remaining cash—forty-seven dollars after what Lark had paid me—went in the inside pocket. The knife I’d bought at a truck stop went in the outside pocket where I could reach it fast.
My stomach cramped with hunger as I pulled out my last two slices of bread and the nearly empty jar of peanut butter. I scraped what I could onto the bread, trying not to think about how I’d need to go into town soon for more food—today or tomorrow at the latest. The thought made my chest tighten. Town meant people. People meant cameras. Cameras meant a trail.
But forty-seven dollars and very little food meant I didn’t have a choice. I’d been sneaking in some of the horse’s apples to supplement my caloric intake, but it wasn’t enough. I was hungry all the time.
I shouldered my backpack and eased the shed door open. The hinges didn’t squeak—I’d oiled them my second night here with some WD-40 I’d found. The air outside was sharp enough to make my lungs ache. I pulled my jacket tighter and started the trek through the woods.
