Chapter 15 Off the Grid
Eli’s POV
The trees swallowed the safehouse in the rearview mirror and with it the last illusion that Ward knew how to keep anyone untouchable.
“Head north,” Lucas’s voice crackled in my ear. “Send me your coordinates, we will push updated protocols to the site. Eli, do not freelance this.”
I watched the road ahead instead of the screen on the dash. “We are moving,” I said. “I will keep her off the grid for now.”
“That is not an answer.” His tone tightened. “You know the procedures. We track clients. We coordinate. That is why we do not lose people. Drop a pin.”
“Later,” I lied. “Reception is garbage. I have hands on her, that is what matters.”
“Eli.”
I killed the link. The sudden silence in my earpiece felt like cutting a rope, one I had been holding onto for years.
Beside me Sloane watched my profile, eyes narrowed. “You are ignoring your own command structure,” she said.
“I am adjusting to new information,” I answered. “Namely that our safest boxes have eyes in their walls.”
“And now we are going to a place without any boxes,” she said. There was more fear under that than sarcasm.
“My godfather left me a cabin when he died,” I said. Saying it out loud made it feel more real than it had been in years. “Lake in New Hampshire. Small. Enough power to run lights and a fridge. Generator as backup. No wired internet. No one has ever used it for work.”
“Who knows about it?”
“My parents. They know it exists, not where. Lucas, vaguely. He knows I disappear there sometimes when I need to sleep without sirens.”
“How often do you go?”
“Rarely.” I shrugged. “It is quiet. Too quiet, if I stay too long.”
She turned that over, thumb tapping absently against her knee, eyes on the line where asphalt met trees. For someone like her, quiet was not comfort. It was a lack of data.
“Take me there,” she said finally. Her voice had an edge like breaking glass. “Just do not lie to me about what you cannot control.”
“I cannot control anything out there except what I can touch and see,” I said. “And even that, only up to a point.”
She nodded once, like accepting terms in some ugly contract.
We stopped in a small town a couple of hours later, the kind with one main street and a gas station that sold more lottery tickets than fuel. I pulled into a lot behind a convenience store.
“I will walk the perimeter,” I said. “You grab coffee and anything edible. Use my card, no loyalty apps.”
“So I am allowed to buy snacks without an escort now,” she muttered, but there was no real bite in it. She took the card and went inside.
I drifted along the edge of the property, eyes scanning cars, alleys, windows. Habit. If anyone watched too long, I marked them. Today, most people were too busy buying cigarettes and morning sugar. For once, it almost felt normal.
When she came back, face a shade tighter, she dropped into the passenger seat and shoved a paper cup into my hand.
“You good?” I asked.
“Board spokesperson was just on TV,” she said. “Apparently I am temporarily focusing on security and recovery. Funny, no one told me I had decided that.”
They had taken her voice and used it like a prop. I filed that away for later. Right now, getting us somewhere they could not stage manage mattered more.
Dusk smeared the sky purple and gold by the time the lake came into view. The cabin sat back from the water, wood weathered but solid, a narrow dock stretching into still, dark glass. No horns. No engine noise. Just wind in the trees and some bird calling out its own name.
Sloane stepped out of the SUV and the quiet hit her like a wall. Her shoulders, always held like they were supporting an invisible weight, shifted uncertainly.
“I will sweep,” I said. “Stay in the car. Doors locked. If anyone but me knocks, do not open.”
“Not my first rodeo,” she replied, but her fingers curled around the door handle a little too long before she shut it.
Inside, the cabin smelled like dry wood and old dust. I moved through it room by room. Living space. Small kitchen. Two bedrooms, one barely big enough for a bed. Attic hatch, empty. Closets, clear. No click of camera housings when I tapped fixtures, no hum of hidden routers when I held my little scanner up. No signs anyone had been here but me and the occasional mouse.
For the first time in forty eight hours, my shoulders eased a fraction.
Outside, she was standing by the lake, arms wrapped around herself against the chill. I went back to the car, opened her door.
“Nothing obvious,” I said. “We keep it that way.”
Inside, I laid out the rules. Limited device use. My hardened laptop only, on a hot spot we controlled and only during scheduled windows. Pre set times to ping Ward and Harper from a known clean patch in town, always with checks on either end. No wandering into the trees alone. Doors locked whether we were inside or not.
She listened, jaw set. “So this is a very pretty prison,” she said.
“Out here,” I said, stepping out onto the small porch with her, “it is not Ward between you and the world. It is just me.”
The line hung in the air, heavier than I meant it. Promise and burden in equal measure. If anything went sideways now, I could not blame compromised infrastructure or someone else’s bad decision. It would be mine.
She looked at me, something unreadable in her eyes. Fear, yes. Anger, always. But underneath, a thin vein of trust that scared me more than any gun.
Then she turned and stepped over the threshold into the cabin.
For the first time, she had willingly walked into my world.
I prayed I was not about to show her it was made of the same thin glass as hers.