The hideout was a crumbling estate buried in the hills above Lyon—abandoned, half-burned, its iron gates twisted by time. Sasha claimed it was once used as a weapons cache during a war no one remembered. Now it was theirs—for the night, maybe two, before Roth’s shadows found the scent again.
Orla didn’t trust it.
Didn’t trust the moss-eaten stone walls, or the creaking floors, or the way Sasha refused to meet her eyes after they crossed the threshold. Jakob was asleep upstairs. Stanley had posted a watch on every point of entry, his gun never more than a breath from his hand.
But the tension wasn’t just outside the doors.
It was between them. Tangled in glances they didn’t hold long enough, in words they didn’t say. In the growing, suffocating silence that came from secrets thickening
