AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Before we go anywhere, you need to tell me who the fuck you are,” my savior commands, controlling the anger in his voice now that we’ve found relative safety.
“What? Why are you so worried about who I am?” I ask, feeling an unwanted confrontation growing between us. “I go to school in the city. I’m here on a scholarship. I’m nobody.”
He scoffs. “Yeah, I wish it was that easy too, sweetheart. But if you want this to be easy, we need to cooperate with each other. You understand?”
The switch between compassion and hostility is alarming to me, and a brand-new series if knots begin to form in my belly like a crowded pool of angry eels.
“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not anyone special,” I reply defensively. “I was ditched by my friends at the fair. Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know?”
He looks over to me with confusion and frustration in the lines of his face. “I just think it’s weird that I was waiting for my contact to arrive, and then you showed up like some kind of damsel in distress. I’m not saying you’re behind this, but maybe you’re with someone who is.”
My mouth drops open, and I stare at him in disbelief. “What the hell are you talking about? You think I had something to do with the shooting? You literally came to the state fair with a fucking gun in your jacket! That puts a hell of a lot more suspicion on you than it does me.”
Every time I raise my voice, my splitting headache worsens. I should have known that this was going to be a difficult situation to get out of, but I do wish he would consider how much pain I’m in right now.
His fingers grip the steering wheel like he’s trying to prevent it from escaping. “Well, it’s a damn good thing I was prepared, isn’t it? Where the hell do you think you’d be if I hadn’t been carrying a gun?”
“I have a feeling that the shooting would have never happened if you weren’t there. I should be asking who the fuckyouare,” I reply, regretting having raised my voice as pain sears through to the middle of my brain.
Instead of replying in an accusatory fashion once more, my savior turned captor pauses.
No more road rage, no more hellfire in his eyes.
Just a cold, blank stare.
And I know it means trouble.
6
Ruslan
If I wasn’t positive of my mistake before, I certainly am now.
I should have kept my head down, choosing to point her in a vague direction toward any cluster of carnival rides. She would have found it all eventually, and I could have handled this the way I know how to.
With raw brute force.
But instead, this girl is grilling me as my patience begins to wither.
I grit my teeth so hard that they squeak. “There’s a lot you don’t know, and even more that I’m not going to tell you. But I can assure you that, as long as you don’t cause problems, you don’t need to worry about a thing. Do you understand?”
She slumps down into her seat even further, holding her head as though she’s been beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat.
I didn’t see what happened to her, but it’s apparent that she’s not just overreacting to the loud noise of the shots ringing out.
Taking her to the hospital would be a death sentence for me after such a huge group of people saw me firing into the crowd. I have to deal with her in a different way.
“My head is fucking killing me, and you’re refusing to get me any help for my injuries, so I’m wondering why you can’t just dump me at the nearest ER and be done with me,” she says.
Her eyes are closed now, presumably to avoid the nauseating effect of the world swirling around her.
“Not happening,” I reply, although I do feel sorry for her.
She groans. “I don’t know anything about you. We didn’t even exchange names. You can bring me to St. Luke’s and forget about me there.”
“It’s not that simple. I know that you’re probably not equipped to handle being shot at, butpleasetry to cooperate with me,” I say.
I hate the sound of my voice when I’m negotiating with someone. Typically, I’d be the one calling the shots with no concessions for anyone. Nobody in my fleet would be giving me this much backtalk.
