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I sprinted for my door, ducking inside as more motorcycle engines started up. Dani was sitting on the edge of the bed, the blanket wrapped around her, her arms hugging her body tight.
“Are you all right?” she cried.
“I’m fine,” I said, coming toward her. “It’s a message. Just wait.”
She nodded. Messages were a pretty common Black Dog tactic: show up, give a guy a few hits, hopefully scare the hell out of him, and leave again. They weren’t meant to be deadly; they were only meant as a threat, though a serious one.
This one had come from McMurphy. My attacker had made that crystal clear.
I sat next to Dani on the bed, and we waited. Outside, the bikes in the parking lot roared, the lights blaring through our window. Four men, by my count. They took a circle around the lot, and then another, the sound vibrating through the room. One of them finished it off by shooting a bullet into the air, making Dani flinch with the noise, and then they roared away, the motors fading into the distance.
I looked at Dani. She was stoic: chin up, expression shuttered. “They found us,” she said.
I had the impulse to put an arm around her, but it was the wrong thing to do. “Someone did,” I said. “But not McMurphy. One of the satellite clubs.”
When had it happened? I thought back. When we’d stopped to gas the car? When we’d stopped to buy food? When we’d checked into the motel? Dani had been with me then. McMurphy had probably put the word out far and wide on the Black Dog network. And someone, somewhere, had seen Dani and me and made a phone call.
And McMurphy had sent a message.
“He sent someone,” I said to Dani. “I didn’t know this guy. McMurphy didn’t come himself. That means he’s not close.” If McMurphy had heard of our whereabouts, he would have wanted to come himself. That he’d sent someone told me that maybe he wasn’t as hard on our heels as we’d feared. Sure enough, he’d lost us after I’d ditched Dani’s phone in the first motel.
“But he’s coming,” Dani said. She switched on the bedside lamp and turned to me, still holding the blanket around her. She saw my face. “Cav, he hit you,” she said, her voice distressed.
I rubbed the sore spot over my eyebrow. I felt like someone had given my brain a shake, but otherwise I was fine. I’d gotten off easy. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“It’s red. It’ll bruise.” She brushed her fingers over the spot. Then she said the words I knew she was going to say next: “This is my fault.”
I looked into her dark eyes. She was distressed, but she wasn’t afraid. She was worried for me. For a crazy second it almost struck me as funny, because no one ever worried for me. “I can take a hit to the head,” I told her gently. “It’s nothing. And it isn’t your fault.”
She opened her mouth to argue, then pressed her lips together briefly as if biting it back. “What do we do?” she asked me.
“Rest,” I replied. “They’re not going to come back tonight. We’ll move in the morning.” There wasn’t a rush, because we weren’t running anymore. McMurphy knew where we were. It was only a matter of his choosing when to close in.
Except I wasn’t done yet. Far from it.
We turned out the light, and I took off my jeans and got naked in the bed with her. To my surprise she rolled over and tugged my arm, pulling me with her. So I spooned her back, my knees bent behind hers, my arm over her waist. Her sweet, round body was against mine, her ass pressed up against me, and though my body hummed with its own ideas—men are fucking animals—I was content to just lie like that. I’d never slept in bed with a woman like this, and I was twenty-nine years old. What the fuck had I been doing for the last decade? Where had I been?
It took her a while, but she fell asleep. I felt it. But I stayed awake, breathing her scent and thinking.
I’d left the door unlocked behind me when I left the room, but McMurphy’s goon hadn’t touched it. He hadn’t even looked at it. I’d let my guard down, and that asshole could have come right in the room and had Dani. But he hadn’t.
Instead, he’d come for me.
My taunts had worked. McMurphy wanted me dead. Dani was collateral damage.
What he wanted was me.
That made things simple.
As Dani slept, I lay awake in the darkness, making a plan.
Sixteen
Dani
We got up just after dawn and showered, packed, got in the car. We didn’t talk. I put on my jeans, a t-shirt, the sneakers Cavan had bought me. I raised my hands a dozen times to tie my hair back before I remembered each time that I’d cut it all off.
I looked like a different woman in the mirror; I had faint purplish shadows under my eyes, and I wasn’t wearing any makeup. But when I looked at this woman, I realized I liked her better. Her eyes didn’t flinch. The haircut framed her face differently. She looked, I thought, like a woman who was confident. A woman who had started pleasing herself instead of pleasing other people.
