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“Are you sure he’s coming?”I asked Becca for the second time, my fingers tightening on the wheel.
I squinted into the growing dawn light outside of her father’s Thorn Valley office building, trying to find signs of life. We were sitting ducks here. It was possibly the worst fucking place Becca could have asked her father’s driver to pick her up, but she’d hung up my cell before I could tell her to make alternate arrangements.
“I’m sure.”
I vibrated in the seat, muttering to myself. “Come on. Come on.”
“Aves…can we please talk about—”
“There!” I interrupted her, jerking forward to point at the sleek black sedan pulling around the building. “Is that him? Do you know the plate number?”
I unsheathed a blade and sat up straighter, watching as the car inched closer.
“No, but…” Becca leaned forward from the back seat, her body fitting easily between the two front seats. “That’s definitely him.”
I relaxed, though not entirely. I could feel Becca’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. Didn’t want her to see how much her betrayal had shattered me.
“You need to go,” I said, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “Do exactly as I said. Your driver has your passport, right?”
I caught her slow nod from the corner of my eye. She’d asked him to bring it during their call.
“Good. Then you go straight to the airport. Go to your dad’s vacation home in Europe—”
“It’s in Paris, you should come—”
“Shhh,” I hushed her sharply, my body flushing with heat. “Don’t say anything else. I don’t want to know where it is.”
“Do you really think they’ll come after me?”
At the fear in her voice, I finally cracked, turning just enough to see the gleam of it in her brown eyes. “I don’t know,” I told her honestly.
She inhaled shakily and cleared her throat as the black sedan pulled up beside the Rover in the empty backlot of the building. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked in a watery voice.
“I don’t know that either,” I admitted. “But I’m done running. It’s time for these Saints to pay for their sins.”
Becca’s grip on the seat tightened until her knuckles were white. “I can’t talk you out of it?”
“No.”
She hung her head. “For what it’s worth…I really am sorry. I should’ve—”
“Should’ve doesn’t help me, Becks,” I snapped, completely unable to keep a leash on myself. She needed to leave now before I became the danger she needed to run from.
Hurt could turn to fury in the blink of an eye, and if I let myself go there…
“I need you to go. Now. Call me when you land, and again when you’re settled in the house, but don’t call from a landline. Get a burner at the airport.”
“Okay.”
I nodded, and she hesitated for only another few seconds before she pushed out the door and shut it behind her, climbing into the back of the sedan. I waited until it left the lot and then followed it, trailing it to the edge of town. Once it left the limits of Thorn Valley, I let the Rover’s engine slow and pulled onto the shoulder, my throat burning until my vision blurred with tears.
I slammed my open palms on the steering wheel, and when the sting settled something inside of me, I did it again. And again.
Until the tears were gone and my palms were red and throbbing. Only then did I even bother trying to slow my breathing. Only then did I do a quick sweep of the Rover for any GPS trackers and then ease off the shoulder and back onto the highway, pulling a tire-squealing U-turn to head down the side-road a few miles back the way I’d come.
Toward the Docks. Where Vick would no doubt already be awaiting my arrival.
I couldn’t let myself think about what I was going to do when I got there. Not about what I would say either. I’d lose my nerve.
