Chained to My Bodyguard Until the Trial novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: What the Key Is For

Vera did not come into the trees.

She stood in the road with the flashlight.

The tall man stood beside her with the rifle, and neither of them stepped toward the fence.

"Dear," she called. "I'm not going to chase you through the woods. I'm fifty-eight."

Nico's whole body was pressed against Ray's side.

Ray could feel him breathing in short, silent pulls, and he put one bleeding hand over Nico's mouth, very lightly, to say, not yet.

"The offer stands until the nineteenth of November. You have my number."

She waited.

A wind moved the pines, and snow slid off a branch.

"You didn't sleep last night," Vera said, softer. "I knew it by your voice. You never do. Don't you want it to stop?"

Ray shut his eyes.

Then the tall man cut the driver loose, put him in the car, and turned it around.

The taillights shrank down the road.

They lay in the snow another ten minutes.

When Nico finally spoke, his voice was small and level.

"We could have gone for her."

"With a rifle on us."

"I know." He swallowed. "I wanted to."

"So did I."

"If we take her, her people tell Kroll the same hour. We need Joan. We need her on tape."

"You've turned into a strategist," Ray said.

"I turned into someone who bit a screw out of his own glasses," Nico said. "It changes you."

They walked the rest of that night.

They found a county road at dawn.

A trucker took one look at Ray's wrists and gave them a ride thirty miles to a motel.

It had a flickering sign and a clerk who took cash and asked nothing.

The room smelled of old carpet and bleach.

It had one bed.

Ray locked the door and put a chair under the handle.

For the first time in twenty hours his legs refused him, and he sat down on the floor.

Nico was in front of him at once, kneeling.

"Let me."

"I can do it."

"I know you can. Let me."

He ran the tap until the water went hot, and then he washed Ray's wrists.

He did it with a motel washcloth, slowly, with a steady hand.

The grooves where the steel had cut were black and swollen.

He dried them and laid gauze over them from the first-aid kit in the bathroom.

He taped it down with a neatness no one else on earth would have used.

"Look at me," Nico said.

Ray looked.

His glasses had one arm and sat crooked, and there was dirt on his cheek, and his eyes were enormous behind the lenses.

"I thought I'd lost you."

"I thought I'd lost you."

"I know. We're stupid." Nico's mouth shook. "We're both so stupid."

He took the steel cuffs out of his coat pocket.

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