Chapter Sixteen – Zane
I hooked my bag over my shoulder and pulled back the curtains to peer outside. The place looked quiet, but I knew not to trust that, not for a moment. One wrong move and all of this could have come tumbling down.
It had been a few days since I had been holed up in his hotel, and I had made my decision—I needed to leave Atwood and get back to LeGuin before anything else happened. I wasn’t even sure what I had been doing here all this time, if I was being honest. I should have gotten out of there the moment the Dogs had tracked me down, but I hadn’t.
I could tell myself, if I wanted to, that it was because I was waiting for my leg to heal a little, enough that I could drive without it feeling like I was being stabbed in the thigh every time I needed to brake. But there was more to it than that. When I left this place, I knew I would be leaving Chelsea behind for good. And I didn’t know if I could handle that.
Which was fucking crazy, and I knew it. I needed to get my shit together urgently, if I was thinking like that. I had kidnapped her, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t like we’d had some torrid love affair. I had stolen her away from her life and her family, and the two of us had wound up having sex a few times. That was all it was.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
Because the truth was, I knew there was more to it than that. She could have run so many times, and she didn’t. She chose to stay close to me. She chose to stick around and unpeel some of the layers I had put up to keep the people around me at arm’s length. And when the Dogs had arrived to break her out, she made sure I got out alive.
Whatever we had, it was unlike anything I’d shared with anyone else before, and it had already burned itself into my brain in a way I couldn’t deny. Which was dangerous, because she was the one person on the planet I needed to be keeping my distance from—given what her family would have done to me the moment they got the chance.
I was leaving tonight. No more waiting around, no more trying to fool myself that I could stay here without landing in even more trouble. No, I was gone, well and truly, and I wasn’t looking back, no matter how tempting it might have been.
My car was waiting outside, and I had a handful of stuff I had crammed into a bag—some food, medicine, fresh bindings for my wound. Within a few hours, I would be back home in LeGuin, and this whole mess would be behind me. Nobody there had any connections with the Dogs that I knew of, and I would get out, home free, no reason to look back or wonder what could have been if things had gone differently.
I left the keycard on the counter and checked around the room one last time. I didn’t know what I was looking for, wasn’t like I could have left any of my stuff here, but I was killing time, trying to buy a little more of it before I had to leave this city once and for all.
I pushed that instinct aside and headed for the door, pulling in a deep breath of the night air and glancing around. Looked quiet here tonight. No reason to think they would have been able to find me here, but I couldn’t be sure of it. It depended on how intent her father was on taking revenge on me. Was getting her back enough, or did he want me to pay with more than just a bullet to the leg...?
I climbed into the car, but there was something hanging over my head. Doubt? Maybe. Something more than that. My gut instinct was warning me that there was something else going on here. I’d cultivated it over a long time of working in this business, and I knew there was a damn good reason it was kicking in. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I searched for anyone who might have been watching me, but there was nothing.
I gripped the wheel, exhaling a long breath and forcing myself to calm down. I wasn’t going to be able to leave this place behind if I spent the whole time in a mess of panic. I slowly pulled the car out of the parking lot and hit the road, taking the path that would lead to the highway out of town and toward my home.
As I drove, I couldn’t help but notice how quiet the roads were, the silence hanging in the air, heavy, as though waiting for something. I kept waiting for a flash of headlights, something to tell me there was someone else out here, but—nothing. That was odd. It was late at night, sure, nearly one in the morning, but there was usually traffic passing up and down these parts at all hours of the day.
All at once, a noise perked my ears—an engine, no headlights, and, by the sounds of it, it wasn’t a car. No, that was a bike engine.
And not just one. Soon, the single engine filled out into a chorus of them, and I put my foot down. The Dogs, the fucking Dogs, they found me—just when I was about to make it out of here.
Shit!
I glanced in the mirror, and sure enough, there were at least six bikes closing in. I slammed my foot down on the pedal, and the car groaned in protest.
I fixed my eyes on the road ahead of me, adrenaline pumping through my system.
I couldn’t let them catch me. It was just a few hundred yards to the highway ahead of me, and if I made it there, then they would have to ease off amongst the rest of the vehicles that were streaking this way and that. This road might have been quiet, but the main highway would be packed, and people would notice if there was a high-speed chase going down.
One of the bikes drew up next to me, the driver in a heavy helmet that obscured his face. He swung the bike toward me, slamming it into the side of the car and sending me spiraling a few feet to the left. I managed to pull control back, spinning the wheel wildly as I guided it back under control, and the driver dropped back a few feet, knocked off-balance by his attack.
They were trying to drive me off the road. I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t. I gripped the wheel—so tight it looked as though my knuckles were about to burst from beneath my skin—and gritted my teeth. Just a little further...
Another thud smashed the car off-center, and my back wheels skidded out from beneath me. I nearly spun out then, but I managed to pull myself back around. How many of them were there? How many more would I have to fight off?
Suddenly, I saw another bike out of the corner of my eye, but this one wasn’t trying to knock me off the road, no. They were zooming ahead of me, dashing to cut me off from making it on to the highway. No! I couldn’t let them beat me there. I slammed my foot down, silently urging the car onward.
“Come on, come on,” I muttered as the bike came to a halt at the head of the road, blocking my path. I could drive around him, but if he...
All at once, the bike revved again, and the driver angled the vehicle beneath him to face me. And then, he began to drive. Fast.
He was closing the distance between us at a terrifying speed. If I kept it up, I would smash into him in a matter of seconds. There was no way I would survive that, but neither would he. He was psyching me out, trying to see if I would go through with it. I stared at him through the window, time slowing for a moment as I tried to figure out what the better option was here...
And then, I screeched the car to a halt. No. No fucking way was I getting into a wreck before I let them take me. If they were going to catch me, then I was going to make sure they did it while I had at least a fighting chance of surviving. An accident like that would leave me in a bad enough way that I wouldn’t stand a chance, much as I hated to hand them this win.
A few seconds later, bikes surrounded the car, cutting me off from making my escape back down the road behind me. My heart sank as the man who had been driving at me rose to his feet and pulled his helmet off, stalking toward me. He had the same green eyes as Chelsea, and I was sure he had to be her father. No wonder he had been so willing to risk his life to get his hands on me.
And if that’s what he’d do just to capture me... I didn’t even want to think what he was capable of when he had me where he wanted me.