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The Northway’s Trade Street on-ramp came up way too quickly—and she suspected she had lost consciousness for a minute or two, the angle of the car rousing her as they hit the incline and accelerated. When they flattened out and headed north, she took a shuddering inhale.
“Where . . . going.”
Luke glanced over, his face grim in the glow of the dashboard. “It’s safe, I promise. Try and rest, okay?”
“Three times,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Saved me . . . three times.”
He went back to staring out at the road ahead. “And I’ll do it a hundred times more, if you need me to.”
His words were spoken so softly, she wasn’t sure if she’d heard them right. If she had? Well . . . then he was a criminal with at least some kind of a moral compass, wasn’t he.
About forty minutes after Lucan finally got off the Northway, he pulled the stolen Cutlass onto an overgrown drive and proceeded a hundred and fifty yards off a county road that had had less traffic than a goat path.
As he went along, he kept checking on Rio. She was looking . . . dead. Her skin was gray, her mouth lax, her body motionless except for the kind of rapid, shallow breathing that was not a good thing. Over the course of the trip, which had been longer than it should have been because he’d had to make sure they weren’t being followed, she’d settled against the doorjamb, her torso tilted away from him—though her face had stayed angled so that if she opened her eyes, she could see him.
And now he was worried he wasn’t going to be able to get her out of that seat. Get her the help she desperately needed.
The lane ended at an aluminum-sided farmhouse that had seen better days. Pulling into a single-vehicle, open-air carport, he hit the brakes and killed the engine.
She didn’t move.
“Rio?”
At the sound of his voice, her eyelids twitched and she groaned, but then she seemed to sink back into sleep. Or maybe it was a coma.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Just hold on.”
Getting out, he shut things back up so that she’d stay warm, and walked over to the rear door of what he intended on being their temporary refuge. Unfortunately, the very modest two-story house was just as rough as that apartment building—and he had a thought that someday, he’d take her someplace nicer.
Which, considering where he was starting from, might include locales with such exotic luxuries as running water, reliable electricity, and central heating.
The back entry into the kitchen had an overhang that was barely hanging on, and he tested the door’s lock. When it held firm, he turned his shoulder to the panels—
And broke the fucker open.
The air that wafted out was as cold as the night, and not moldy at all—which meant there were so many windows broken, there was always plenty of breeze going through the rooms. He’d been inside once before, back when the prison camp had taken up its new residence. He’d roamed the landscape constantly back then, his wolven side desperate to get out and move under the moonlight after so many decades of forced, subterranean confinement. He’d always come back to that sanatorium, however.
The Executioner had started right off with the leverage shit.
Then again, when you had levers to pull and stuff you had to get done, you didn’t sit on your ass if you wanted to create an empire.
Lucan stepped into the kitchen. The house had been abandoned sometime in the seventies, he was guessing—because the rusty, avocado appliances and mustard-yellow linoleum floor were in the style that was popular right before he’d been thrown into the prison camp. The windows and walls were a matchy-patchy of faded sunflowers, and without any furniture to speak of, it was like a museum exhibit on rural, aspirational living that had been robbed.
A quick check through the other four rooms on the first floor yielded nothing. Quick walk around of the five-room second story was the same. He wasn’t surprised; his nose had told him up front what it took his eyes six minutes to confirm. But he wasn’t really interested in what was aboveground.
The cellar door was under the stairs and it was shut solid, yet opened just fine. As he looked down into the darkness, his hand went to get inside his jacket—but then he realized he wasn’t wearing his own clothes. And it wasn’t smart to use a phone for a flashlight, anyway. Tracers happened, which was why he’d turned his burner off.
Going over to the cabinets and drawers, he didn’t expect to find anything, but there was a surprising collection of crap left. By a stroke of luck, he found a candle, and lit it with a match from a box marked “Joe’s Steak Shack.”
