Page 56 of Her Silver Fox Firefighters
A few minutes later,Leo and Beck join us in the living room. Chloe is awake and coming out of a heavy syncope, blinking slowly as she nurses a chamomile tea. I sit beside her while Dax paces the room, occasionally looking out the window.
“I wasn’t followed,” Chloe says.
My heart hurts whenever I look at her—her pain reverberating through every feature—but at the same time, I’m just relieved to see she’s alive.
“I made sure of it,” she adds, giving Dax a quick scowl before she softens her gaze on me. “You look amazing, by the way. Freedom really suits you, Olivia.”
“I just… I’m so happy to see you again,” I say. “What the hell happened, Chloe? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. I heard about your parents. I’m so sorry.”
She tears up but immediately swallows it back and takes a deep, stoic breath. “It was horrific. We were in the car, trying to get out of town. Marcus kept coming around our house, dogging me into telling him where you’d gone.”
“Oh, Chloe.”
“It’s okay, I never told him,” she says, while my men listen closely. “Then he started digging into my family. Stalking and threatening my parents. I knew he’d learned about Grandma’s place up here, and I was going to call you about it. I just needed to get my folks out of Devon first. They didn’tbelieve how bad he was until someone tried to break in late one night. Luckily, my dad keeps guns in the house and was able to scare the fuckers off. The next day, we were packed and ready to roll.”
“What happened?” Dax asks her.
She looks up, her brow furrowed. “They ran us off the road. It was a black pickup truck. They rammed into us until Dad lost control. We flipped over and crashed. When I came to, there was smoke everywhere. I could smell plastic burning and gasoline. And I heard them.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Marcus’s people. It had to be. They kept saying, ‘Make sure they’re all dead. Shoot’ em if you have to,’ but they couldn’t get close enough. My parents were already gone, and I couldn’t do anything about it. My survival instincts kicked in. The flames were getting bigger. It was only a matter of time, minutes maybe, before the gas tank exploded. I knew I had to get out of there.
“So I crawled. Every inch of my body hurt like hell, but at least we were on the lip of a ravine. With the car flipped over and burning, all that smoke and the shrubs along the stream, I managed to get away from them,” she says, her gaze darkening as she recalls the horrible ordeal.
I shake my head slowly, my hand gently rubbing her back. The physical touch seems to soothe her, so I continue, carefully watching her expression while Leo tops off her mug of tea.
“Thank you,” Chloe mumbles and takes another sip. “I didn’t move for a while. Maybe a few minutes. When the car blew up, it tore my soul apart because I knew my parents…” She chokes up then, and we give her the time she needs before she’s able to continue. Meanwhile, I see Beck on his phone, texting someone. My bet’s on Carlos. “I heard those fuckers shouting,” Chloe adds. “Their car skidding away. The sirens in the distance. But I knew I couldn’t stick around. Not with Marcus in charge of law enforcement in that fucking town.”
“What did you do then?” I ask her.i
“I moved through the ravine. I must’ve been down there for at least a day in the dirt and the muck, in the shadows, in the darkness of night. I froze my ass off at one point, but for some reason, God wanted me to live, so I kept moving until I got out a few miles down the road,” she says. “I only moved at night. I had some cash in my back pocket, so I used that for a meal and some water. Gas station stuff only. No motels, nothing. Just enough to get as far away from that fucking place as possible. I made it to Pittsburgh, believe it or not.”
“Pittsburgh,” Beck says, genuinely impressed. “That’s pretty far.”
“You’d think so. But in my panic, without a phone, aware that Marcus must’ve figured out by then that I wasn’t in the car when it blew up, and knowing that they hadn’t found my body anywhere, I figured I should keep going,” she says. “So I did the unholy thing. I used your card-copying algorithm, Olivia.”
“Oh,” I whisper, my cheeks burning red.
Dax gives me a curious look. “What’s that?”
“It’s a little subprogram I put together. I had it stashed on a hidden cloud drive. Chloe and I were the only ones with the password. All she needed was the subprogram, a decent smartphone, and an ATM,” I explain. “One of my earliershortcomings, I suppose. Marcus wanted some of the kids he had dealing in the streets to have another tool for extra cash, and cloning credit cards seemed like the fastest way to make that happen. The subprogram works on any ATM that has a touchpad for contactless transactions. Hence the smartphone and the subprogram.”
Chloe chuckles dryly. “This one right here? She’s dangerously smart and wicked-good with computers. It is one of the reasons Marcus didn’t want to let her go.”
“I knew you were good with the stuff,” Leo sighs, ultimately impressed. “Not criminally good, but —”
“It wasn’t my finest moment,” I concede with a heavy sigh. “But I figured it might come in handy at one point or another if I was desperate enough. So I stashed a copy of the subprogram on that cloud drive.”
Chloe chimes in. “I stole somebody’s phone at a diner, wiped the damned thing clean, then hitchhiked to another town. I logged on to a public Wi-Fi at a local library, downloaded the subprogram, and started hitting ATMs. One per town, of course, to keep a low profile. And I only took out precisely what I needed for a motel, for food, the basics,” she says.
“You didn’t call or text me,” I reply, my brow furrowing.
Anger tests the back of my throat with a subtle burn, but I try to put myself in Chloe’s shoes, looking for a good reason. She releases another heavy sigh and covers my hand with hers.
“I wanted to, I swear. But for a while, I really thought Marcus must’ve already gotten to you. At one point, I was so paranoid, so scared, I couldn’t even bring myself to check the news. I only used the phone for the ATM, and that was it. I was isolated and in a dark place. Finally, a couple of daysback, I made it to Glenrock, here in Wyoming. I saw your face on a bulletin board at city hall—on a wanted poster.”
“Ah, yes, Marcus’s BOLO went nationwide for my sorry ass,” I mutter.
