Calculated moves

LYRA'S POV 

I know the voice before he says his name.

It reaches me through the phone pressed to Kael's ear, faint but unmistakable, and something in my body goes still the way it does right before the ground gives out under a person's feet. I haven't heard that voice in three months. I'd started to let myself believe I never would again.

Roman Ashford.

The question arrives before I can stop it. Three months. Three months of running, hiding my scent under pine and cheap soap, sleeping in places no one would think to check, and he never found me. Not once. Not until now, not until the one night I finally let myself believe I was safe enough to stop looking over my shoulder.

How?

I don't have an answer. I don't have room to look for one, either, not with my own heartbeat roaring loud enough to drown out most of what he's saying.

The memory comes whether I invite it or not. His fingers under my chin, tilting my face up like he was checking livestock before a sale. The way he told me to hold still, gentle and terrible at once, like my flinching was an inconvenience rather than a warning. I remember exactly how my skin crawled under his hand and exactly how I made myself stand there anyway, because my father was watching, because there was nowhere in that room that belonged to me.

The last conversation I had with him before I ran, quiet and reasonable and worse for it, him explaining exactly what would happen to anyone who tried to hide me.

He never raised his voice. He never had to. Men like him don't need volume when they already believe they own the outcome.

I'm shaking before Kael even hangs up the phone.

He takes me upstairs. I let him, because I don't trust my legs to carry me anywhere on their own right now. He kneels in front of me, says my name, tells me he's going to fix this, and some part of me wants so badly to believe him that it frightens me more than Ashford's voice did.

"I can't stay here," I tell him. "I can't. I don't want him to get me again."

He promises guards. He promises he'll come back. He says my name like it's a vow, and I know he means every word of it, and none of that changes the fact that Roman Ashford found me even here, even now, even after everything we proved in that circle.

"Let me go," I say. "Let me run. If I'm not here, there's nothing left for him to want."

He says no. He says it like there isn't a version of the world where the answer is anything else, and I don't have the strength left to argue with him the way I should.

I let him think I'm agreeing. I watch him give Darin instructions, and I nod at all the right moments, and none of it changes what I already know sitting quiet and certain underneath the fear.

Guards can watch a door. They can't watch every window, every gap in a fence, every hour I have alone in this room before someone checks on me again.

I start counting without meaning to.

The window latch looks old enough to give without much noise. The fence is high, but I’ve climbed worse. The two-hour gap between patrol rotations Darin mentioned without realizing I was listening for exactly that kind of detail.

If Ashford already found me once, staying here doesn't keep anyone safe. It just gives him more people to hurt on his way to getting what he wants.

Kael pauses at the door. "I'll come back," he says. "I promise you that."

"I know," I say, and I mean the words more than he probably realizes. "I believe you."

I do. That's not the part I've decided to change.

The door closes behind him, and I sit very still for a long moment, listening to his footsteps fade down the stairs, counting the seconds until I hear the front door too.

One of the guards knocks softly a few minutes later, checking on me the way Kael must have told him to.

"Can I get something to eat?" I ask.

My voice comes out steady, almost bored, exactly the voice of someone settling in to wait quietly like she's told.