Miles of Malice - Bone & Briar, #2

She wasn't supposed to get in the truck.

Harper Quinn is running. From a man who spent four years dismantling her piece by piece. From a life that shrank until the only thing left was the sound of his voice telling her she was wrong, she was crazy, she was nothing without him. She has a dying car, a duffel bag full of everything she owns, and a direction — west — that feels like freedom for the first time in her adult life.

Then the car dies on a stretch of Wyoming highway where the cell towers don't reach and the darkness goes on forever.

He appears like an answer to a prayer she didn't say out loud.

Cade Lawson is six-foot-three of silence, diesel grease, and absolute certainty. He drives an eighteen-wheeler with no company logo and no set route. He doesn't ask questions. He doesn't make small talk. He offers her warmth, a ride to the next town, and the kind of calm her nervous system hasn't felt in years.

Harper tells herself it's just a ride.

But Cade doesn't do anything by accident. He knows her name before she gives it. He knows her car was going to die — because he made sure of it. He's been watching her for weeks, studying the fractures another man left behind, and he has a plan for every single one of them.

The thing about Cade's cage is that it doesn't feel like a cage. It feels like the first safe place she's ever known. And by the time she finds the notebook — by the time she reads the entries and understands what he's done — she has to answer a question no self-help book ever prepared her for:

What do you do when the monster is the only one who makes the nightmares stop?