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His thumb pressed into my palm.

“Easy, Mouse.”

Then the wheels left the ground.

I knew it before I looked. The hard vibration beneath us changed, smoothing as the runway fell away.

I released Lachlan’s hand and turned toward the window, clenching my fingers around the edges of the frame as I stared outside.

“Oh my God.”

Chapter thirty

The only home I’d ever known fell away beneath me.

The airport disappeared first. Then the roads and buildings became too small to distinguish from one another, swallowed by fields and stretches of green. The mountains rose into view as we climbed, their ridges folding one behind another in every direction.

Somewhere among them was La Cruzona. I searched even though I knew there was no chance I could find it from here.

For twenty-five years, that compound had been the center of my entire world. Every room I’d slept in, every meal I’d eaten, every book I’d read, every person I’d loved or feared—all of it existed somewhere below me.

Then the first wisps of clouds drifted past the window.

Within minutes, the mountains were gone too.

White stretched beneath the wing where my entire life had been.

I’d read about airplanes and flight. I’d watched them pass high overhead and tried to imagine what it would be like to sit inside one, looking down instead of up.

Nothing I’d imagined came close to this.

I was thousands of feet above the earth, hurtling toward a country I’d never seen, wearing an outfit from a donation box with my mother’s locket beneath my blouse and everything else I possessed stuffed into the small backpack at my feet.

With an Irish mafia man sitting beside me.

The thought should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

The rush from the FBO was still tearing through my body. We had run through gunfire, climbed onto an aircraft while armed men covered us, ignored whatever airport authorities had wanted us to do, and launched ourselves into the sky before anyone could stop us.

My heart hadn’t seemed to understand that the danger was over.

It continued pounding far too fast while my fingers dug into the window frame.

And as the clouds erased the last glimpse of the country below, something worse than adrenaline took hold.

Doubt.

What the hell had I done?

I trusted Lachlan, I really did.

He had given me every reason to trust him. He’d kept his word when doing so had hurt him, protected me when abandoning me would have made his own escape easier, and never once used his strength against me.

But trusting Lachlan wasn’t the same thing as knowing what happened next.

I’d been so focused on getting out of La Cruzona that escape itself had become the entire plan.

Had I done the right thing by betting everything I had on a man from New York I’d known for only a few days? Had I jumped out of the frying pan and straight into the fire, as the women in the kitchen used to say whenever someone solved one problem by creating another?