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No, I shouldn’t be thinking about that at all.
“How old are you?” I hear myself ask, and then immediately bite back the question.
He smirks slightly, but it’s gone as quickly as it comes. His eyes are focused on the road.
“Strange question to ask a man you just watched execute somebody,” he murmurs.
“Dobry deserved to die,” I flare, my words sharp with conviction. “What he was going to do to me …” I shiver, the possibility gripping me with icy hands “But that’s not even the worst of it. I heard about some of the other things he did. He was pure evil.”
“Forty-one,” he grunts.
“Huh?”
“You asked my age. I’m forty-one years old.”
“Oh,” I murmur.
My eyes are dancing up and down him, tracking the way his muscles press through the fabric. I try to still this insane compulsion inside of me—to grab onto his arm, feel the stony security of it.
This must be a fever dream.
Any second I’m going to wake up with Dobry standing over me, leering, sweating, grinning in his twisted desire to …
The tears attack me as if from nowhere, sobs punching painfully up my throat and causing me to make choked gulping noises. My mind floods with the past month, the constant fear, the animal paranoia that any second some predator – a bad predator, not like Damian – could leap out and attack me.
Damian glances at me, jaw tightening for a moment.
“We can’t stop,” he says gruffly. “They’ll find his body soon.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to stop,” I sob.
“I mean … never mind.”
“No, what?” I press, wiping at my tear streaked cheeks.
“Nothing,” he growls.
“What?” I persist.
That smirk again doubled in the night-dark glass in front of him.
“Jesus, you’re persistent, aren’t you?”
“Maybe I am,” I say, somehow able to inject some fieriness into my voice. “So are you going to tell me or not?”
He sighs darkly. “I was just going to say we can’t stop. I can’t comfort you. So if you’re going to cry, you’ll have to take care of yourself.”
“I didn’t say you had to comfort me,” I say icily.
“There we go then,” he says. “We agree.”
Handsome hunky jerk.
I almost laugh at the words whispering in my mind, so out of place in this setting, the lights of the city consuming the horizon but the darkness of this country road all around us.
I just saw a man murdered, and here I am letting near-flirty thoughts into my mind.
God, Damian has me all kinds of confused.
“What happens now?” I whisper. “Are you going to kill me?”
“What?” he snaps. “Why the fuck would I do that?”
“I’ve seen your face. Isn’t that how it works?”
“I don’t know, is it?”
I shrug. “In the movies …”
He shakes his head, a subtle powerful gesture. The crazy urge to run my hands through the moon-silver of his hair touches me, and I fight it, fight it hard. It makes no sense. It’s the adrenalin, I tell myself, not the desire to have this man take me as I’ve never been taken before, to have him shoot his life-essence inside of me and put a baby there, start a family, and …
Quiet, I order my cluttered overactive mind. Just … quiet.
“Life isn’t a movie, Dakota,” he says. “What happens now is we go and get my dog, Sparky. And then I take you home to your folks.”
“I don’t have folks,” I murmur.
Something passes across his face, an emotion I can’t read.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “But you must have somebody.”
“Not really,” I admit shakily. “Not many of us did. I guess that’s why they targeted us because we wouldn’t be missed. I was reported missing, I’m sure. But without anything tying me down …”
“It’d be easy for the police to chalk it up to you just skipping town.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
He sighs with a husky sound.
“So I guess you’re stuck with me, huh?” I say, meaning it to come out as a joke.
He glances at me briefly, icy eyes blazing blue flames.
“You shouldn’t joke about that,” he snarls. “Maybe I’ll take you seriously.”
Something sizzles over my skin, up my thighs, over my belly, and around my nipples. I feel them tweak and harden and bite down to fight it off, all of it, the overwhelming craziness.
“I’m nineteen, by the way,” I murmur into the silence.
“Eh?”
“You told me your age, so I think it’s fair you know mine.”
He nods shortly. “Good to know, Dakota. But you’re wrong.”
“About my age?”
“No,” he says, with that infuriating, magnetic smirk. “About you not being missed. I find that hard to believe. I think—shit, I don’t know. I think a person like you would make an impression.”
I grip onto my thighs, trying to puzzle out his words. His tone is so husky, so deep, so damn unreadable. He stares ahead, seemingly wanting the conversation to end there.
I turn back to the night and rest my forehead against the cool glass, the pitch black drifting by.
