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“For what it’s worth, I appreciate everything you tried to do for me,” she said. “I never wanted to hurt you. I understand you’ll probably hate me now, and I am sorry for that. Maybe one day, you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
In the end, I decided not to turn around. Regret made me bitter, and she was right. I did hate her.
MY PHONE RANG FOR THE second time in a row, piercing my concentration as I fiddled around beneath the hood of a big rig that was already overdue for service. Normally, I wouldn’t give two fucks who was calling me when I was in the middle of a shift unless it was Lucian or something going down at the compound. But this time, Trouble’s name flashed across the caller ID, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled.
When I left her there, I knew the situation wasn’t going to go over all that well, but I figured it was best to get it over with. Trouble could usually handle just about anything I threw her way, including Birdie. The two of them had formed a friendship of sorts over the last year, and I hoped that wouldn’t change just because of a little road bump. But when I picked up the phone, my gut told me I might have been wrong about that.
“What is it?” I grunted.
“She escaped.” Trouble sounded breathless, and the line crackled like the wind was blowing into the speaker.
“Impossible.” I shook my head, even as I was reaching for my keys. “The house is locked down.”
“Well, it looks like she found a way out anyway,” Trouble explained. “She shattered the bathroom window and climbed out. I’m not even sure how long she’s been gone because she had music blasting.”
“Her bathroom window?” I squinted as I slung a leg over the hog. “There’s no way she could fit through that. Are you sure she didn’t just trick you?”
“What do you mean?” The breath whooshed from Trouble’s voice as she spoke as if she’d stopped abruptly.
“She probably broke the fucking window and then hid, waiting for you to leave the house so she could walk right out after you.”
The silence on the other end of the line confirmed that Trouble hadn’t checked the house before she left.
“Shit,” she murmured. “I’ll go back there now.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Twenty minutes or so,” she huffed.
“Go back to the house and make sure she isn’t there. Keep an eye out for her along the way and call Kodiak to let him know.”
“I already did,” she assured me. “Every eye in the compound is on the lookout.”
“All right, I’m on my way.”
I hung up the phone with an impatience I didn’t recognize and gunned it out of the parking lot. This girl was out running around in the fucking desert, thinking she was going to find a way out of the compound when most likely she was going to find a whole lot of trouble instead.
The dark thoughts I often struggled to keep at bay wandered back to the forefront of my mind as I considered all the possibilities. There were snakes and scorpions and spiders in the desert. What if she was allergic? What if she’d been bitten and couldn’t move? Or what if she fell trying to navigate the difficult terrain on the northern side of the compound?
The possibilities piled up as I drove, boiling my blood and whitening my knuckles. Goddamn Birdie fucking Blue. It had been years since I felt so helpless. Everything was fine until she came into the picture and rattled a fault line into the infrastructure of my life. Again, I questioned why I ever agreed to it. But then I knew why. Lucian and Gypsy asked me. It was just that simple.
I didn’t have it in me to tell them no. Not when it came to her. For over a year, I’d dissected Birdie’s every move in an effort to understand her, and in the process, she burrowed her way inside my head, contaminating all my thoughts. Now she was in my space. My lungs. On my flesh. I breathed her in, I felt her everywhere. Her scent, her silky skin, her butterscotch hair. She was driving me goddamned crazy, and it had only been a day. One motherfucking day.
As I pulled into the compound, I knew what I had to do. I had to cart her ass back to Lucian and tell him it couldn’t be done. I couldn’t have her around me. It was the only way.
Kodiak greeted me at the entrance, his lips tilted up in a smirk he tried to hide when he saw the expression on my face. “Some of the guys have eyes on her. She’s over by the warehouse, up on the north ridge. She stopped moving about ten minutes ago, so we’re not really sure what the hell she’s doing up there.”
