Chapter 6

Neve

There’s a particular kind of quiet that comes right before you lose everything.

I’ve heard it twice in my life. Once on a highway when I was sixteen, in the second after the headlights stopped and before the doors opened. Once in a hallway that smelled of lemon polish, when I realized the door wasn’t locked and that I was going to walk through it.

I hear it now, under the flickering sign, with snow falling between us and Dominic Kane standing three feet away, blocking the only road out.

I don’t answer him. I’m already looking past him. The dark station. The ice machine. The empty highway stretching away in both directions, white and endless.

Nowhere to run. Nobody to hear.

Headlights swing around the side of the building. An old pickup with a trailer behind it rolls to a stop at the edge of the light, and two men get out. The one from the diner, the one Dominic called Kip. And Asher.

Asher doesn’t look at me. He looks at Dominic,