The air left my lungs like I'd taken a hit to the chest.
He stared into my eyes and lowered his voice. "I think you were the first person since Marissa passed who didn't look at me like I was broken."
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Alex held my gaze. "I think that's what terrifies me most now. That I'm not broken anymore, but if I lose you, I'll have to break again."
I stood, crossed the space between us, and knelt in front of him.
My voice was barely a whisper. "You're not going to lose me."
"You can't promise that."
"I'm promising anyway."
He reached out and cradled the side of my face with his hand. I leaned hard into the touch.
His thumb brushed my cheekbone. "We don't get forever."
"No, but we have right now. And I swear to God, Alex—I've never wanted anything more than you. I love you."
"I love you, too."
For the first time since we left the cabin, he smiled. It was tired and real.
The tension in my chest loosened, just a notch. Not because the threat was gone—but because, at that moment, I remembered what we were fighting for.
We hadn't escaped. We hadn't won.
But we had time.
And that meant we still had a chance.
Chapter twenty-two
Alex
Ihunchednearthefireplace,scrolling my phone with a thumb that wouldn't stop shaking. National news sites were crashing under the weight of simultaneous viewers, pages freezing mid-load. Outside, the fog thickened among the pines, pressing against the ranger station windows like something alive and curious.
A notification cut through the digital congestion. I tapped it with a fingertip.
"It's happening. Evelyn's giving live testimony."
I propped the phone against an empty coffee mug. Miles abandoned his post by the north window. Marcus set down his weapon cleaning kit. Michael remained stretched across the couch with one arm flung over his eyes, catching a few moments of sleep.
Evelyn appeared onscreen, seated before a semi-circle of microphones. The congressional hearing chamber loomed behind her, all polished wood and marble gravitas. Her transformation startled me—gone were the oversized flannel and knit cap, replaced by a simple charcoal blazer.
Her first words were immediately quotable. "Project Asphodel was a cancer, and we fed it."
Miles leaned closer to the screen, his therapist's focus evident in his stillness. "She's doing it. The psychological impact of this public disclosure will be seismic—collective trauma on a national scale."
Evelyn methodically dismantled the program's architecture—the oversight committee deception, falsified accuracy rates, and the executions disguised as accidents or classified operations.
"They knew the system had a thirty-seven percent error rate in identifications, and they deployed it anyway."
News tickers scrolled beneath the footage:WHISTLEBLOWER CONFIRMS GOVERNMENT ASSASSINATION ALGORITHM. TECH LEADERS DENY INVOLVEMENT. PROTESTS ERUPT IN MAJOR CITIES.
The feed split to show aerial shots of downtown Washington, DC. I swallowed hard. "Look at the protesters. It's everywhere now."
