The old farmhouse creaked like it knew their names.


It stood hidden among mesquite trees and dry grass, miles from the nearest paved road. A forgotten place in a forgotten corner of Texas. Clyde and Layla had bought it under fake names with cash years ago — a contingency. Just in case everything went wrong.


Everything had gone wrong.


Clyde lay on the bed, barely conscious, lips cracked and dry. The bullet had torn through his upper shoulder, clean but deep. Layla worked with trembling hands, sterilizing a sewing needle with a lighter and pouring whiskey into the wound.


He grunted, his eyes fluttering open. “Thought you said no more sewing lessons.”


“Shut up,” she whispered, biting her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. “You’ll live. You have to live.”


He reached up and cupped her face, fingers shaking. “You saved me.”


She brushed her cheek against his palm. “We save each other. That’s the deal.”


The next two days passed in silence, thick and suffocating. Layla nursed him the best she could. Kept pressure on the wound. Fed him soup when he could sit up. Sat on the porch with a pistol in her lap at night, scanning the horizon for flashing lights.


She barely slept.

She barely breathed.


On the third night, Clyde was strong enough to sit beside her on the porch. The moon cast silver light across the fields, and the wind smelled like dust and rain.


“You ever think we were just born wrong?” he asked quietly.


Layla took a slow drag from her cigarette. “No. I think the world just didn’t know what to do with us.”


He nodded, wincing. “I meant what I said. After Mobile, we disappear. No more jobs. No more running.”


She turned to him. “I’m not leaving you behind, Clyde. I’ll carry you across the damn border if I have to.”


“I know,” he said, resting his head against her shoulder. “That’s why I love you.”


The next morning, she burned everything.


IDs. Burner phones. Clothes. Maps. Anything that could connect them to the life they were leaving behind. The Chevelle, too — she drove it half a mile into a dry creek bed, poured gas on it, and lit it with a flick of her lighter.


She watched it burn with tears in her eyes. That car had been their whole life on wheels — their first getaway, their first kiss in the backseat, a dozen stories she could never tell again.


The flames danced in her pupils. She didn’t look away.


That night, Clyde held her hand in bed.


“You scared?” he asked.


She nodded slowly. “Not of leaving. Just of being followed.”


“We’ll go dark. Quiet. Cross at night. Take only what we need.”


“And after that?”


Clyde smiled faintly. “After that, I build you that house on the beach. You open your little diner. I fix boats for tourists. We get a dog. Maybe two.”


Layla blinked hard. “You make it sound so simple.”


He squeezed her hand. “Because it is. If we live through it.”


In the silence that followed, they both knew the truth:


This life had already taken pieces of them they’d never get back.

But what was left — the bruised and bloody heart of them — was still beating.


And it beat for each other.