Page 21 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

Camille

I’m mixing lake blues again—three parts ultramarine, one part phthalo, a breath of Payne’s gray—when my phone buzzes face-down on the studio table.

I ignore it at first. The morning light slants across my canvas, turning the wet paint into a slab of water I can almost step into, and I don’t want to be tugged back to reality where reporters hunch outside our gates and my life is an itinerary of camera angles and safe words.

The phone buzzes again. And again.

I wipe my fingers on a rag and flip it over.

Dad.

Dad: Pumpkin, come meet me in the garden for tea. I miss you.

I scan the studio’s corners—windows latched, door ajar to the corridor where Rae’s footsteps just passed five minutes ago. I can still smell Sawyer’s cedar-and-wool ghost from when he popped in earlier to kiss my hair and promise he’d be two rooms away in the security den.

I type back On my way , then hesitate. Protocol whispers: Text Sawyer. Pride answers: It’ll be sixty seconds. My thumb hovers over his name. A second message arrives before I decide.

Come alone. Quick.

That prickle climbs my spine, the one my body learned somewhere between the first threat letter and the bomb. It’s ridiculous—I’ts dad. And yet…

I grab my phone, my small pocket pepper spray, the slim palette knife I’ve used as a box opener, and slip into the hall.

“Be right back,” I call toward no one, hoping Rae hears it through the open command room door.

Stupid. I know better. But the south garden gate has always been the least formal place to talk—delivery drivers, dog walkers, Gregory’s spontaneous meetings.

The house is quiet as a museum. The blue runners swallow my barefoot pads. At the conservatory, the air shifts—cooler, fragrant with damp soil and crushed geranium leaf. I push through the glass door to the terrace. Sunshine hits me like a cymbal crash.

Beyond the rose arbor, the south lawn unspools in clipped emerald, dotted with white garden chairs we never remember to bring inside. The breeze carries a thread of diesel, faint and wrong among jasmine.

The service drive.

“Hello?” I call, rounding the hedge toward the wrought-iron side gate.

A white panel van idles nose-in at the curb cut, unmarked except for a magnetic orange hazard triangle slapped haphazardly on the back. The garden service sometimes uses rentals when a truck goes into the shop. Normal. It’s normal. The driver’s side door stands open, no one visible.

I step closer, heart rate flicking upward like a metronome cranked too fast. “Hey? Have you seen my father?”

The van’s sliding door snaps open so fast the sound knifes through the air. Two figures burst out—coveralls, caps, masks that aren’t masks so much as cheap PPE—the kind everyone wore in 2020. One grabs my elbow, the other my waist.

Every nerve I honed in the safe house lights up.

Wrist rotate, heel stomp, knee.

I twist toward the thumb, wrench free, slam my heel onto the instep of the one on my right. He swears, grip loosening. I drive my knee toward the other’s groin with everything Sawyer drilled into me.

“Get off me!” I shout, lungs ripping. It’s an ugly, desperate sound, not the polished charity-gala version of me, and I don’t care. “Help?—!”

A hand clamps over my mouth. The chemical tang of nitrile gloves and something like solvent fills my nose, stinging.

The heavier one bears down, shoving me toward the grass.

I pitch sideways on instinct. I twist and bite.

My teeth meet rubber. He yelps. I use the moment to jam my thumb into the soft corner of his eye socket. His head snaps back.

I try to sprint.

The third shape materializes from behind the hedge.

I didn’t even see him exit the driver’s seat.

He takes me at the knees—tackle perfect enough to make a football coach weep—and I hit the lawn with a breathless whuff .

The sky fractures— blue, hedge, van, blue—as the world spins.

My phone flies out, cartwheels across the grass, and skids under the van.

I lunge, and a hand wrenches my wrist back hard enough to send lightning up my arm.

“Stop fighting,” a voice snarls, low through fabric. “Don’t make me break it.”

They flip me. Grass blades stick to my cheek. Chlorophyll and panic flood my mouth.

“Help!” I scream into the glove. The word dies against latex. “Saw?—”

Another palm smothers the sound.

They haul me upright. The heavier one yanks my arms behind me, plastic biting—zip tie ratcheting down too fast. My watch digs into bone. I thrash. From somewhere far away, a dog barks. Closer, the fountain keeps burbling.

The third guy slaps a strip of tape across my mouth. Silver—industrial, stale adhesive reeking of dust and glue. My stomach flips.

I kick—wild and ugly. My bare foot connects with a shin. A hiss, a curse. Hands tighten in retaliation.

“Move,” the driver says. The syllables are so ordinary they terrify me more than a growl would have.

They half-drag, half-carry me to the van.

My heel clips the lip of the step. Pain explodes up my calf.

My eyes water, and the world blurs. I register details because that’s all I have left: a scratch beside the handle, paint worn to primer; a sticker inside the door— Maintain proper load distribution. As if this were about cargo.

They shove me inside. The metal floor is ridged and cold under my thighs. The air reeks of oil, old coffee, something chemical like bleach half-rinsed from mops. There are no seats, just tie-down loops and a few plastic crates bungeed to the wall.

I squirm to my knees, aiming for the far door. Someone’s forearm slams across my back, pinning me. The sliding door whispers shut. Darkness swallows light like a wave crashing.

The engine deepens. We lurch, tires thumping over uneven pavers, then smooth out as we hit asphalt.

No.

No.

I slam my head back into whoever’s bracing me.

My skull connects with a chin. Another curse.

I scoot sideways, trying to wedge my shoulder into a seam to lever up, to do something .

One of them grabs my ankle and yanks. The world tilts, and I sprawl.

A knee presses into my hip, hard enough to bruise.

I force my jaw to work against tape, feeling the sticky edges lift and reseal and lift with every ragged breath.

My tongue tastes like glue. I picture Sawyer’s hands, the careful way he freed me from zip ties when we practiced, the way he said you don’t have to win; you just have to break the script .

I will not give them compliance. I will announce a mess.

I roll my wrist as far as the zip will allow, hunting for the small metal nub on my smartwatch—panic function. Sawyer made me promise to wear it. Triple-click, hold.

I mash. Once. Twice. Three times. The haptic motor flutters against my skin like a trapped moth. No tone—silent mode—but there’s a feel to it, a stuttering like a heartbeat. Please. Send. Please.

The van accelerates. Through the thin metal I feel the change in road surface. The soft-thud rhythm of expansion joints says we’ve hit a major boulevard. A second later, a higher whine—freeway merge.

The driver mutters something I can’t catch over the engine.

The others shift as they settle in. My captor’s knee eases off my hip a fraction.

I let my body go limp, counting silently.

Thirty heartbeats. Forty. The tempo of tires changes; we hit a patch of rougher pavement, then smooth again.

A faint curve presses my shoulder against a wheel well—banking right.

The air tastes drier, dustier. Not the moist breath of the bay.

Inland? Or am I inventing that to feel less helpless?

My cheek is mashed to the rubber mat. Every vibration rattles my jaw. Tears leak sideways into my ear. I bite them back. I’m not crying for them. I’m crying because this body I’ve been trying to love is now cargo.

I inch my chin, trying to scrape the tape on the ribbed floor. The adhesive peels a millimeter before smearing back down. I freeze when one of them shifts, then try again. Peel. Press. Peel. The tape stretches invisibly. My skin stings.

A hand fists in my hair, yanking my head up so much the pain stars me. “We can make this easy,” he says through the mask. “Or we can make it loud.”

Make it loud, Sawyer said once about defiance. I stare at the eyes above the mask—pale, the lashes gloved with sweat. I can’t speak. But I can stare. I make my gaze ice.

He lets go with a shove. My scalp screams.

I shift my shoulders and feel the slim ridge of my palette knife under my tank, tucked into the waistband where I shoved it without thinking.

God. Hope is a blade with dull teeth. I wedge my wrists against my spine, fishing for it with the tips of my numb fingers.

The zip tie eats skin every time I flex.

I find the knife’s handle with my pinky, but the angle is wrong; my fingers won’t close.

I try to roll, to change the geometry. Someone’s boot thumps my ribs—warning, not full force, but enough to tell me they’ll escalate if I keep wriggling.

I stop. Breathe through my nose. We exit—downshift rumble, a hollow slap as tires cross a raised seam—then a left, immediate right.

I try to build a map in my head. It unspools like a bad drawing, lines looping in the wrong places.

Panic eats at the corners of it, nibbling. I shove it back. One line at a time.

When I close my eyes I see Sawyer in the hallway feed, calm in a storm, hands steady on a ticking thing that wanted to erase us.

I imagine him now, radio crackling, eyes going to the south camera feed when Rae says the word ping in that tightly contained voice she gets.

I imagine him running. It helps and hurts, both.

They talk over me like I’m a package. “Fifteen out.” “Traffic’s clear.” “The device?” “Stashed.” Words drop like pebbles into a lake, leaving ripples of meaning I can’t fully catch.

My arms burn. My jaw aches. A sob tries to elbow up my throat.

I choke it down with bile and glue. My mind starts doing awful arithmetic again: what I didn’t say to Vanessa this morning because I was in a rush; the shade of blue I’ll never finish if I don’t get back; the portrait of my mother I started when I was fourteen and abandoned because the line of her mouth made me cry.

I force my brain to think of stupid things.

The hum of the tires modulates like a wrong-key lullaby.

The floor smells like nine hundred coffee deliveries and three broken bottles of cleaner.

There’s grit pressed into my cheek. I lick it from the tape edge with the tip of my tongue; it tastes like salt and dirt and the inside of a toolbox.

Time gets liquid. It stretches, snaps back, stretches again. At some point the van slows. The brakes squeal in a way rental fleets never fix. We turn—left, I think—and roll onto gravel. The van rocks. The engine idles, then cuts.

Silence lands so hard I think I’ve gone deaf. Then a door bangs open and heat roars in where the cold had been, dry and baked. The doors slide. The world glares white. I squint.

“Out,” someone says.

Hands hook my elbows. I plant my feet and make my body the heaviest thing I can.

It doesn’t matter; they’ve done this before; they swing and I stumble, knees catching, skin tearing on grit.

They yank me upright again. The horizon is a smear past the rectangle of brightness.

It could be anywhere—industrial yard, back road, storage facility.

A white wall looms, blind and featureless.

I crane my neck, searching for the sky. It’s a hard cobalt with heat pulsing off it in waves. Somewhere a plane needles its way across, a tin speck. I want to scream up at it that I’m here, I’m still here, find me.

A hand shoves between my shoulders. I go forward into shadow—another interior, cooler, stale with the ghost of solvents and dust.

As the door clangs shut behind us, a single thought knifes cleanly through the noise.

Make it loud.

I inhale as deep as the tape allows, then slam my heel down and back with every ounce of rage in me.

I don’t feel contact; I hear it—the ugly thunk of heel to shin, a grunt.

A hand whips across my cheek, knocking my head sideways, bright spots popping.

Pain blooms. I stagger. They shove, and I trip. The floor rises, and the world tilts.

In the flash before I hit, I picture Sawyer’s gray eyes, savage soft, the way they looked when he said after .

I picture the little white line he painted on my canvas, the shield hidden under chaos, and I glue myself to that memory the way the tape glues my mouth, the way the zip tie glues my hands.

I hit the ground.

I don’t break.

I don’t give.

I don’t stop counting turns. I don’t stop cataloging sounds. I don’t stop being the wall and the door in my own small, bound, shaking way. I force breath in and out through my nose, slow and controlled.

Because he is coming. Because I am not a package. Because color is louder than blood. Because the story isn’t done.

And because someone, somewhere, is going to regret underestimating an artist with paint under her nails and a soldier in her heart.