Page 63 of Break Me

“That’s not an answer,” I snap. “He wouldn’t have sent you to get me unless something’s wrong.”

“What’s going on isn’t something he wants you in the middle of,” he says, choosing each word like it might cost him later.

“So you drag me off somewhere instead?” I shoot back.

“It’s safer.”

“For whom?” I ask. “Me or him?”

That makes him glance at me, just once. Long enough to tell me I hit close.

“He asked me to keep you out of it,” Mouse says quietly. “That’s all I can give you right now.”

My chest tightens. “Out of what?”

Silence. Not the awkward kind. The intentional kind.

I look out the window, watching Ashbourne fall away behind us, trees closing in, the road narrowing. “If this is about Ridgeback⁠—”

Mouse’s hands tighten on the wheel. That’s all the confirmation I need.

“Is he doing something stupid?”

“He’s doing something necessary.”

“You tell him,” I say fiercely, “that I’m not a liability. I’m not something to stash away.”

Mouse exhales slowly. “I’ll tell him you said that.”

“And you tell him,” I add, voice shaking now despite myself, “that if he gets hurt doing this alone, I will never forgive him.”

Mouse doesn’t answer.

The car eats up the miles, the trees growing thicker, the road darker. And for the first time since Mouse showed up, real fear settles in my bones.

“Where are we going?” I ask again.

“A place he got outside of town.”

My stomach drops. Sam didn’t tell me that he found a place.

“Is he there now?”

“No.”

That answer scares me more than if he’d said yes.

I press my palm flat against my thigh, grounding myself. “Where is he?”

Mouse doesn’t answer right away. The road curves, trees closing in tighter, shadows stretching longer across the hood.

“He’s handling something,” he says at last.

There it is. The phrase I told him not to use.

I laugh once, short and sharp. “You all use the same words when you’re lying.”

Mouse exhales through his nose. “We use the same words when we’re trying not to scare people.”