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On a sigh, I pulled the truck off to the side of the road and got out.
Then fuck if the slip of a woman was none other than Lo's little hellion protege, Janie. I met Janie helping Reign save Summer from a skin trader about a year before. She had been a distant, calculating, hot-headed piece of work who had the respect from all the other men and women over at Hailstorm. And, given the sheer amount of criminal and ex-military talent that place sported, it went without saying that she must have been something special. I'd seen the way she'd wielded a gun, sure of herself. Maybe not the best shot I'd ever seen, but a cold, calculated killer when she needed to be.
She was young. I'd put her at twenty-four or five though she looked younger being short and so skinny that she barely had any curve to her at all. Even in her usual tight black tank tops, her breasts were barely more than a suggestion and her hips non-existant. That wasn't to say she wasn't hot. She was just her own kind of pretty with her long dark hair, big blue eyes, and colorful tattoos. Janie's biggest appeal was the confidence she wore, like she didn't give a fuck whether you thought she was hot or not. Which, well, made her all the hotter.
She didn't look so hot knees down in the dirt, her face twisted in a way that suggested she was fighting a losing battle with tears. But she came up spitting when she realized it was me. That was until I mentioned Lo's name and she jerked back like I'd struck her. She didn't want Lo. And that was some weird shit because from what I understood, those two were practically attached at the hip.
Then my eyes did a quick scan, taking in the tear in the knee of her right pant leg, the dark spot around the thigh of her left leg which I couldn't know for sure, but would bet good money on it being blood. Then, finally, the pale skin of her right arm that was usually just a nice piece of brightly colored artwork, but instead was violently red and peeling viciously. My hand curled around her wrist, pulling it up slightly.
It didn't take a genius to figure out how she got it. She was on a road that led away from Lex's estate. She set the bombs there. Why... I had no idea. And obviously it wasn't with Hailstorm and Lo's blessing that she did it, otherwise she would have been calling Lo herself instead of insisting I didn't. So I didn't know what was going on. What I did know, though, was that she needed to get the fuck off the road, not kneeling down beside it. She needed to get out of sight before the cops, crooked and inept as they might have been, started sniffing around. And she sure as fuck needed to get her arm taken care of.
After all of that, then I would get some answers.
"Fuck woman..." I said, releasing her wrist. It fell to her side without her so much as flinching. She should have been in massive amounts of pain. I'd been burned a fair amount of times in my life and the pain was a fierce and unyielding thing until you got the right creams on it. Maybe she was in shock. That would explain her unusual tight-lipped mood. "Come on," I said, waving a hand out to my truck.
"I'm not going anywhere with you, Wolf," she said, her chin jerking up defiantly. On a good day, everything about Janie screamed: I don't need help from you or anybody else for that matter. This was not a good day and the usual fierceness seemed dimmed under something else I couldn't explain: regret or fear or grief. I couldn't place it. But it was something strong that made her lip tremble slightly and her shoulders slump forward. It was a startling change that I didn't like. Women like her, strong women, don't take no shit from no one women, should never look so lost and unsure of themselves.
"Woman..."
"No," she said again, brows raising like she couldn't believe I wasn't taking no for an answer. "I'm fine. I'm great. I don't need your help."
"Cops are coming," I tried, jerking my head down the hill where the sounds of sirens were both stationary and moving... our way.
Janie looked over her shoulder for a long minute, her breath hissing out. "A ride," she said, turning back to me. "That's it. No questions. No explanations. Just a ride. Got it?"
I felt my lips twitch at her tone but nodded my head. She brushed past me, throwing her small frame into the passenger side of my truck and slamming the door.
I would give her the silence she wanted.
I would give her a ride too.
I just didn't tell her that where she was getting a ride to wasn't wherever she wanted me to take her. No, she was getting a ride to my place.
Like it or not.THREEJanie"I said pull the fucking truck over right now, Wolf," I shouted, the sound reverberating back at me in the enclosed cab of his truck.
"No."
We'd been having the same conversation for five minutes, me yelling, screaming, cursing, slamming my hand on the dash. Him giving me the same one syllable answer, calm as a cucumber which was only making me all the more angry. He'd child-locked the friggen door so I couldn't open it. Then he just... kept on driving.
Only a handful of people knew where Wolf lived. He was private to the point of reclusive. The only reason I had any idea of his cabin in the woods (horror movie worthy, truly secluded) was because when I couldn't sleep, I screwed around online, digging stuff up about the people of Navesink Bank. I never slept. So I had come across the information about Wolf's land a good ten months before. So knowing this, I knew that was the exact direction Wolf was driving us in.
