My dad texted me at 2 am and shattered everything I thought I knew: “Grab your sister and run. Don’t trust your mother.” So I did — and what we found outside that window... still haunts me.

"Get down!" Blake hissed, drawing his sidearm from its holster in one fluid motion.

He lunged across the small room, catching me by the shoulder and dragging me behind the cast-iron woodstove just as the front window shattered inward in a shower of glass and splintered wood.

Ivy screamed, waking instantly into complete chaos.

"Ivy, crawl! Crawl to me!" I shouted over the deafening pop of suppressed gunfire tearing through the cabin’s timber walls.

Rounds zipped through the pine logs, sending clouds of cedar dust and insulation flying into the dark room. Blake didn't fire back blindly. He stayed low, pulling Ivy by her collar until all three of us were wedged into the dead space beneath the heavy oak kitchen island.

"Thermal scopes," Blake muttered, his eyes cold and focused despite the onslaught. "They aren't shooting to kill us. They're pinning us down to breach."

"Who found us?" I cried, wrapping both arms around Ivy, whose small body was shaking violently. "How did they track this place?"

"Federal safehouses are encrypted on classified servers," Blake said through gritted teeth. "Which means Eleanor has someone inside the Boston Field Office feeding her coordinates. Keep your heads down!"

Blake kicked open the bottom panel of the kitchen island, revealing a hidden floor trapdoor built into the subflooring. He pulled a pin, hauled the hatch upward, and pointed down into a damp, stone-lined cellar crawlspace.

"Move! There’s an old drainage culvert that empties into the creek bed behind the ridge. Go, Lyra! Take your sister!"

"What about you?" Ivy cried, tears streaming down her soot-streaked face.

"I’m right behind you. Move!"

I shoved Ivy through the opening first, dropping three feet into frigid, muddy dirt, then dropped down after her. The crawlspace was narrow, barely three feet high, reeking of stagnant water and decaying leaves. Above us, the cabin floor shuddered under the impact of heavy tactical boots kicking in the front door.

*Pop-pop-pop.*

Blake returned fire from above, the sharp bark of his service weapon echoing deafeningly through the floorboards. A man grunted in pain above us, followed by the heavy crash of furniture overturning.

"Go! Move down the pipe!" Blake's voice boomed down the hatch.

I grabbed Ivy’s waist and pushed her ahead of me through the corrugated steel culvert. Ice-cold runoff water soaked through our jeans, numbing our knees and hands. Behind us, a concussive blast rattled the underground tunnel—a flashbang grenade detonating in the living room above.

We scrambled on hands and knees through thirty yards of pitch-black pipe until the round opening framed the dark, moonlit woods. We tumbled out into the rocky bed of a freezing creek, the water rushing around our sneakers.

A second later, Blake dropped out of the culvert behind us. His coat was torn, blood dripping from a shallow graze along his cheekbone, but his eyes were blazing with adrenaline.

"They brought six operators," Blake whispered, catching his breath as he scanned the ridgeline above. "They’ll realize the crawlspace exit in sixty seconds. We can't use the truck. They've got the road blocked."

"Where do we go?" I asked, my teeth chattering uncontrollably from the freezing water.

"My personal vehicle is stashed two miles west in an abandoned hunting barn," Blake said, holstering his weapon and pulling Ivy onto his back. "Hold on around my neck, kiddo. Lyra, stay on my right heel. If I go down, you don't stop. You run until you hit Route 101. Understand?"

"I'm not leaving you," I said fiercely. "And I'm not leaving Ivy."

Blake looked at me for a split second, something like fierce respect flickering in his eyes. "Then run fast."

We sprinted through the dense, thorny underbrush, branch tips whipping across our faces. Every shadow looked like an ambush; every rustle of dry leaves sounded like a contractor moving to flank us. Behind us, the orange glow of flames rose above the trees—they had set fire to the cabin to burn away any trace of the raid.

By the time we reached the rotting wooden barn hidden in a hollow off Blackwood Ridge, my lungs felt like they were coated in broken glass. Blake punched a keypad hidden inside a rusty electrical box, hauled open the weathered barn door, and guided us inside.

Parked under a canvas tarp was an unassuming, ten-year-old blue Ford Crown Victoria.

"Old police interceptor," Blake panted, stripping off his bloodied overcoat and tossing it into a steel barrel. "No digital navigation, no onboard GPS modem, no cellular telematics. Mechanically bulletproof and invisible to modern tracking."

He unlocked the doors. Ivy scrambled into the backseat, curling into a tight ball, clutching her knees. I climbed into the front passenger seat.

Blake fired up the heavy V8 engine, which roared smoothly to life in the quiet barn. He backed out slowly without lights, navigating the overgrown dirt path until we reached the secondary county highway, turning south toward Massachusetts.

The dashboard clock read 5:35 a.m. The sky to the east was bleeding from deep charcoal to a bruise-like purple.

"They compromised a federal safehouse within three hours," I said, my voice hollow as I watched the dark trees blur past the window. "We can't trust your agency, can we?"

Blake drove with one hand on the wheel, his other hand resting near his sidearm. His expression was grim, chiseled from granite. "No. Not until I know who sold the address."

"So it's just us."

"It's just us," Blake agreed. "Which means we go to the only place Eleanor won't expect us to be."

"The public library," I said.