Claimed in transit

Chapter Ten: The Safe House

The apartment Kane took her to wasn't home, not in any sense he would have used the word. It was a place he kept for exactly this kind of situation, sparse, unmarked, paid for in cash under a name that wasn't his, the kind of space a man like him needed for the nights his actual life became too dangerous to return to.

Elena stood just inside the door for a long moment after he let her in, arms wrapped around herself, taking in the bare walls, the single couch, the absence of anything that suggested a person actually lived here.

"You don't stay here," she said. Not a question.

"No."

"Then where do you stay."

Kane didn't answer that, moving instead toward a cabinet near the small kitchen, pulling out a first aid kit he kept stocked for exactly the kind of night this had turned into. "Sit down. Let me look at your wrists."

She didn't move at first, watching him with the same wariness she'd carried since the car, and Kane understood it well enough not to push. He set the kit on the counter and stepped back, giving her space, and only when she finally crossed the room and sat did he approach again, slow, deliberate, the way he might approach anything liable to startle.

The rope marks on her wrists were raw, some of the skin broken, and Kane cleaned them without speaking, focused entirely on the task, grateful for a job simple enough to keep his mind from wandering anywhere it shouldn't. Elena watched his hands work, silent, tense, flinching once when the antiseptic caught an open patch of skin.

"Sorry," he said, low.

"You keep saying that." Her voice was quieter now, less accusation in it than before, more exhaustion. "Sorry. Like it fixes anything."

"It doesn't." He finished wrapping the second wrist and sat back, meeting her eyes for the first time since they'd arrived. "I'm not saying it because I think it fixes anything."

She studied him for a long moment, something shifting behind her expression that Kane couldn't fully read. "Then why say it."

"Because it's true." He stood, put the kit away, needing the distance the movement gave him. "That's all it is."

Elena pulled her knees up onto the couch, wrapping her arms around them, watching him move around the small kitchen with the careful, guarded attention of someone who hadn't decided yet whether the room was safe. "What happens now."

"You stay here. I find whoever did this. Once I know it's safe, you go wherever you need to go." He said it simply, like a plan he'd already fully mapped, though Kane knew even as the words left him that nothing about this felt as simple as he was making it sound.

"And if it's never safe."

He didn't have an answer for that, and the silence that followed sat heavy in the room, neither of them willing to fill it with something false.

"You don't have to be scared of me," he said eventually, because it was the only true thing he had left to offer her. "Whatever you think I am, because of how we met. I'm not going to hurt you."

"You already did." Her voice was steady now, quiet but certain. "You knew what was in that trunk before I ever said a word to you, and you kept driving."

Kane didn't flinch away from it, though something in him wanted to. "You're right."

The honesty seemed to catch her off guard more than an excuse would have. She studied him for a long moment, something in her posture loosening slightly, not trust, not yet, but the smallest fraction of the guard coming down.

"Why didn't you," she asked finally. "Just keep driving. Just deliver me and forget it. Why the water. The chase. Any of it."

Kane leaned against the counter, arms crossed, turning the question over because he didn't have a clean answer for it even now. "I don't know," he said, and it was the first time all day he'd said something without already knowing exactly what it meant. "I've done a lot of jobs. Never one I couldn't stop thinking about after."

Elena watched him for a long moment, quiet, something unreadable passing behind her eyes, before she finally looked away, toward the bare window and the gray evening light beyond it.

"I don't know if that makes you better than them," she said softly. "Or just different."

Kane didn't answer, because he didn't know either, and for the first time since the trunk, since the woods, since the wreckage of his own car burning behind him, he let the silence between them sit without trying to fill it with anything at all.