Page 68 of Beckett

“Safer from what?”

She pressed her lips together, shaking her head again. But I could see it—the emotional exhaustion beneath the fear, the weight of whatever she’d been carrying alone for too long. The same look I’d seen in my mirror for months after coming home.

“Audra.” I gentled my voice, the way I would with a spooked animal. The way Coop had talked to me when I’d been at my lowest. “What are you running from?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. It matters to me.”

“Why?” The word burst out of her, raw and desperate. “Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Because you matter,” I said simply. “And whatever’s got you scared enough to abandon everything, to leave Jet—it’s not something you should face alone.”

She laughed, but it was all broken glass and no humor. “You don’t understand. I’ve been facing it alone for a year. Running is the only thing that works.”

“A year?” The pieces started clicking into place. Not something recent. Not a bad breakup or a debt or a mistake.Something that had been hunting her for a year. “This isn’t about an abusive ex or something like that, is it?”

Her silence was answer enough.

“Audra, what’s really going on?”

She looked away, toward the darkness beyond the property lights. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. “I have a stalker.”

The words hung in the air between us as the pieces fell into place for me. A stalker. Someone who’d been hunting her for a year. Someone who’d driven her to sleep in her car, to take cash-only jobs, to be ready to run at a moment’s notice.

Someone I wanted to find and systematically take apart.

“Tell me everything.”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell. He finds me wherever I go. Seattle first, then every small town I tried to disappear into. I move, he follows. I run, he finds me.”

“The police?—”

“I tried that.” Bitterness crept into her voice. “At first, there was no overt threat they could act on. He was too smart. Too careful. Never did anything they could prosecute.”

I caught the emphasis immediately.At first.“So there was no physical violence at the beginning. What about later?”

She touched the back of her neck, an unconscious gesture I’d seen her make before. Always when she was stressed. Always quick, like she was checking something was still covered.

“Later…things escalated.”

“He hurt you.”

Not a question. I could see it in the way she held herself. Someone had put their hands on her. Someone had hurt her badly enough that she’d been running ever since.

The rage that rolled through me was cold and focused, the kind I’d learned to channel in combat zones. Pure, lethal intent.But I couldn’t let her see it. Not when she was already on the edge of bolting.

“Is the stalker why you were living in your car when you got here?”

She nodded, arms tightening around herself. “I’ve used everything I had trying to stay ahead of him. Sold my car for a different one he wouldn’t recognize. Stopped using credit cards, stopped taking jobs that required paperwork. The cash Lark paid me yesterday is all I have left.”

Christ. She’d been surviving on nothing, constantly looking over her shoulder, never able to rest. And she’d still managed to smile, to work hard, to care for the animals. To let me close enough to?—

“Jesus, Audra.”

“I know how it sounds. Paranoid. Crazy. But he always finds me. Always.”

“What happened today?” I kept my voice carefully neutral, even though inside I was mapping out exactly how I’d track this bastard down. “Something set you off. Made you think he’d found you here.”