even her runners. Brooke always smelled of perfume, but today she smelled of nothing. Not even soap.
She pulled her backpack off and opened the front pocket. Dumping passports, phones, and money, she pointed at it. “Kai is leaving for Milwaukee, and whether Levi is going too or if he’s being shipped in a different vehicle, I don’t care. I just know my man is with him, and whatever move he’s making with the man I love, I’m going to be there.”
She looked at me. “You can make people disappear. It’s your turn to disappear, and you’re taking me with you.”
“But…” I was already looking through everything she’d dumped on the bed.
We had different IDs. Plenty of cash. I stopped counting after I saw ten rolls of hundreds. I picked up one of the phones. “Burners?”
“You got it.” She folded her arms over her chest, raising her chin.
My mind raced, but I wanted to go.
Something sparked inside of me.
This. This was right.
This was what I did.
“Your brother has people in the Network. We can’t call them.”
“Already on it.” She pulled out her phone and showed me a screen of text messages.
I recognized an alias Blade had used one time. Just once. It’d been him, Carol, and me, and we’d snuck out to a nightclub and didn’t want the Network to know. He was a goddamn genius.
I felt myself smiling.
“I’m in.”
She looked up and made a praying motion. “Thank God.” A quick squeal, and she was on her phone. “Okay, your friend is two miles from here to pick us up. We need to trek two miles through the woods in an hour.”
“Why an hour?”
I was off, running to the closet to change. There was no time for modesty. Brooke was about to see me naked, and I tore through the clothes, throwing them into the room.
“You have a bag for me too?” I called.
“Of course.”
“Put those in there.”
“Okay.”
I felt my heart in my throat. The clock had started ticking the second Brooke entered the room. I was wasting time, and we needed all the time we could get.
I pulled on a shirt. “You work out?”
“Yes…”
I held back a groan. She sounded hesitant. “What do you do for conditioning?”
“I swim. Sometimes.” She snorted. “Hardly ever.”
Fuck. If it was just me, I’d run there in under twenty minutes, give or take a few because of the foreign terrain.
Which reminded me, “Why an hour, Brooke?”
“Because that’s all the time we have before the next shift of guards switches at the security cameras.”
I wasn’t going to ask.
Shit.
I had to know. “What happened to the other guards?”
“I might’ve drugged ’em.”
I paused, one second, then yanked on my pants. Socks. Shoes. I had an extra set of clothes in the bag now.
“And I gave one an entire bottle of laxatives.”
“What?!” I popped my head out.
She cringed, standing with both bags over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure he’ll have to go to the hospital.” She brightened up. “But bonus! That might help us.”
I glared. “No, it won’t. Protocol will be to check on both of us before they dispatch a team to the hospital. We have less than an hour now.”
“How long do you think?”
I led the way to the back patio. I paused before opening the door. “It depends on when someone finds him or he finally calls for help.”
“Oh.” She cringed.
“What?”
She dug inside her bag and pulled out a radio. “I figured we could use it to listen to them.”
Oh. My—I grabbed her face and kissed her on the cheek. “Sweet Jesus, you’re brilliant.”
She shrugged. “Just tried to think what you’d do. You helped me the first time, so I thought we could help each other this time.”
I took a breath. I didn’t think the door was alarmed. I had stepped outside the other day and nothing happened. Then again, Kai had been with me, but it was now or never. Outside was our best shot. We’d run into guards inside.
“Wait.” Brooke pulled out her phone and showed me a map. “This is where we’re supposed to meet your friend.”
“Okay.” I showed her as much as I could. “There’s a small window outside here where I never saw a guard walking. We’ll have to go north, then swing to the right.”
“I’m ready.” She gave me a nod, letting out a breath. Her bottom lip trembled, but we weren’t running for our lives here. We weren’t running for freedom, not really. We were running to follow Kai to Milwaukee. There was irony in there somewhere, and I