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For one glorious second, I thought locking that steel door meant we’d made it.

Then I turned around.

Isabella was already halfway down the maintenance channel.

“Fuck.”

She ran without looking back; the concrete chute dropped steeply enough that gravity was doing almost as much work as her legs. The little backpack bounced against her shoulders, and Marcela’s blood still shone wet on the knife in her right hand. She didn’t slow for the bends, check what waited ahead, or bother with any of the caution that had kept her alive inside the compound for twenty-five years.

For half a second, an uglier thought got hold of me.

Maybe she was running from me.

Marcela had spent the last several minutes telling Isabella that everything she’d done for me had been selfish. That she’d used me, used Rafael, and would eventually get me killed too. I’d seen the way Isabella looked at me, afraid I might believe it.

Then she nearly lost her footing on a turn, caught herself against the wall, and kept going as though she hadn’t even noticed. Hadn’t anyone ever taught her that running with a knife was dangerous?

That killed the uglier thought.

She wasn’t choosing to leave me. I wasn’t sure Isabella was choosing much of anything at the moment.

She was running from Rafael’s death, from losing the one person she’d trusted all these years. He’d been her only confidant, the only person in that entire fucking place who had cared about Isabella instead of what she represented or what he could get from her. And only minutes before he died, she’d learned he wasn’t simply the man who had protected her all her life.

He was her father.

She’d barely had time to call him Papá before he bled out beside her.

As if that weren’t enough, Ciro was dead too, and whatever complicated place he’d occupied in her life had ended with a bullet between his eyes. Not to mention that she’d just carved open the face of the woman who had stolen her identity and spent the minutes before Isabella finally struck back, ripping into every bit of guilt she’d spent years learning how to cope with.

Standing still would mean having to feel all of it.

So I understood why she was running full speed into oblivion.

I shoved Rafael’s leather key strap into my pocket, kept Ciro’s pistol in my right hand, and went after her.

The first few strides reminded me that my body had been through a rather unpleasant two days.

My left thigh objected to the downhill grade, my ribs didn’t appreciate the pounding, and apparently everything Isabeast and Ciro’s boys had beaten, shocked, or otherwise abused had decided this was an excellent time to complain.

But none of that mattered because Isabella was getting farther away, so I pushed harder.

Mouse had somehow turned into a fucking jackrabbit, racing downhill with none of her usual caution and far more speed than a woman with legs half the length of mine had any right to manage.

I used one hand against the sloped wall when the channel pitched sharply downward and kept moving.

A muffled scream reached me from somewhere behind the retaining wall.

Marcela.

Then distance swallowed the sound.

Pity.

I’d been enjoying that.

The concrete under my boots grew cracked and uneven before ending altogether. The man-made channel spilled into a natural cut in the mountainside, the bottom carved through black volcanic rock by years of runoff. Dry leaves collected in pockets between chunks of basalt, exposed roots crossed the path at ankle height, and loose dark soil shifted under my boots whenever the grade steepened.

A thin ribbon of water followed the lowest part of the cut. Not enough to call it a stream, just runoff trickling between rocks and disappearing beneath leaves before showing itself again a few feet farther down.