“You’re not my prisoner, Miss Milan.”
“You sure about that?”
He glances in the rearview and clicks on the hazard lights, despite the fact that there’s no one else on this desolate road—rule-follower till the end—then navigates us to the shoulder. Killing the engine, he glances out the windshield and says, “We’re a good fifty miles from civilization, and I haven’t seen another car pass for two hours. But please—leave, if you must.”
“So you can shoot me in the back? I may be a fugitive, Doc, but I’m not stupid.”
No response from the good doctor now.
I sit there stewing, the engine ticking in the mid-day heat. Without the air conditioning, the smothering desert heat is already creeping in through the vents, sending a fresh trickle of sweat down my spine. Up ahead, the road looks like its melting, the surrounding landscape wavering before my eyes.
I try to imagine the walk, how I’d look marching down the road. Devane’s car, speeding away. Me, with the prison-issued slip-on shoes and fashionable jumpsuit in construction-cone orange. A neon target for the cops or the buzzards.
My shoulders drop. In the face of my piss-poor survival odds, most of my ire drains away.
“You tried to kill me,” I remind him.
“I didn’t try to kill you, Miss Milan. I only made youbelievethat I did.”
“And I’m supposed to believe younow? After you’ve just admitted to messing with my head?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he says irritably, like I’m a petulant child refusing to brush my teeth before bed. Then he grabs my hand and presses it firmly against his chest.
I try to pull away, but his grip is fierce, his heartbeat tapping a strong, steady rhythm against my palm.
It takes me a beat to realize what’s happening.
He’s letting me read him. Lowering his walls so I can feel his vibe.
I stop struggling, relax into his energy. It encircles me like a caress, like a cool night breeze drifting across the ocean, carrying with it the salt of distant lands and ancient secrets. In my mind a picture forms, moonlight shimmering on black waves.
He’s telling the truth. He’s trying to help me. I know it like I know the feel of my own skin. Intentions can be obfuscated, but they can’t be faked, no matter how skilled he is at mental magicks.
I blink hard, shattering the image behind my eyes. When I look at him again, he’s staring at me intently across the small space between us, a wrinkle of confusion drawing his eyebrows together, like I’m a puzzle he needs to solve. His grip lessens, though he doesn’t immediately release my hand. Beneath my touch, his heart beats a little faster now, just like mine.
Did he see it too, I wonder? The ocean, the moon?
“Miss Milan,” he whispers, his eyes holding a thousand secrets but his lips refusing to betray a single one. “I’m sorry. I’m—”
“Not a killer.” I jerk my hand away, buckle the seatbelt. “Just a sadist. Good to know. Can we get some A/C in here now?”
I feel his eyes linger on my face a moment longer, but then his energy recedes, walls back up. The silence is heavy and awkward as hell, but I don’t care. Anything’s better than facing the intimacy of his eyes, the hot touch of his body, the strange pull I’m starting to feel toward him.
“It was a tactical maneuver designed to outwit our opponents by making them believe I assassinated you,” he finally says, turning away and starting the car. The blissful artificial chill blasts out from the vents. “And it worked. Exactly as intended, aside from a minor explosion that’s since been remedied.”
“Assassination?Explosion?”
He clicks off the hazard lights, hits the indicator, eases us back onto the lonely highway as if his biggest concern is a traffic ticket and not the fact that he used impersonation and magick to literally bust a so-called killer witch out of jail and is now cruising across the state with her in tow.
“I was on death row,” I say. “Why would you bother pretending to assassinate me?”
“As much as they love throwing you in lockup, witches actually pose a significant problem for the human authorities. Your execution may have been imminent, but they still have to guard you and keep you alive until then. It’s costly, and as you probably gathered, makes the guards and the other prisoners uneasy. So, with a bit of help from an insider with flexible ideas about law and order, I offered to relieve them of that burden.”
An insider? Business, my tormentor in chief. No question about it.
You got one hour. Get it done.
“But it didn’t go as planned,” I say, remembering the alarm on the watch.
