Chapter 1 #3
She looked at his outstretched hand. Across the backs of his knuckles, round scars caught the fluorescent light.
They gleamed silver, too neat and measured for any accident, arranged in a way she recognized instantly—a pattern she carried, too, hidden inside her own sleeves, put there years ago by a different kind of monster.
Her gaze lifted to his face. Dark hair falling across his forehead. Blood on his hands—some of it his, most of it Rux’s. He didn’t look like a savior. He looked like a man who’d done this before, and would again, and wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over it.
Her fingers were shaking when she reached out. But she reached out anyway, because some part of her had already decided the moment she recognized those scars. Not that he was safe—he clearly wasn’t—but that he understood something about the inside of her that no one else in this room could.
“Your guitar,” he said.
She blinked. The guitar. It lay on the stage floor where it had fallen, the neck angled toward the amp, strings still humming faintly from the impact. She’d left it. She’d been ready to leave it. That realization hit harder than Rux’s fist had.
She bent and scooped it up, cradled it against her chest like the lifeline it had been for as long as she could remember. The body was scratched, one tuning peg bent, but it was whole.
The stranger hit the fire door shoulder-first and the night came at her, all that high dark sky, and the dog came through a half-step behind, and she ran because he was running and because there was nothing left behind her but a body and men who wanted her dead.
They went off the back of the stage through a door marked STAFF, into a short hallway that smelled of mop water and old grease, with one bare bulb overhead.
She expected a bullet. A shout. Anything.
Nothing came.
A fire door sat at the end, its push bar glowing red under the EXIT light. Behind them, a voice finally went up, shouting something she didn’t catch over the blood in her ears.
He reached the old Ford truck first and yanked the passenger door open. He pulled the seat forward, and the dog leaped up without being told.
It startled her. She hadn’t even noticed the dog was following them.
He shoved the seat back in place and looked over at her.
She stopped short. Was she really going to go with this man, this stranger with blood on his hands because of her?
Every rule she’d ever made for herself said, don’t get in the vehicle. It was safety on the road 101. You don’t ever get in the vehicle. She’d listened to enough episodes of Cold Truth, her favorite true crime podcast, to know that.
“Get in or don’t,” he growled. “But I’m not sticking around long enough for those bikers to rub their two brain cells together and come after us.”
She looked back at the bar. Somewhere, a door banged, and a voice carried—the back, he took her out the back—and she made the only choice left.
She threw the guitar into the backseat beside the dog and climbed in.
He pushed the door shut behind her and went around the hood fast, jumping in behind the wheel.
The engine caught on the first try even though she was pretty sure the truck was older than either of them, and they were moving before she’d even found the seatbelt.
He backed up sharply and then swung out onto the gravel road, headlights cutting white across the roadhouse.
She twisted to look. The back door hung open, a square of yellow light, and two figures stood in it. One of them lifted an arm, pointing a gun…
Then they were gone around the bend and the trees closed in.
She waited for the growl of bikes. Held her breath for a solid minute before she remembered to breathe.
But none came.
Why weren’t they following?
Her hands shook. She pressed them flat to her thighs and made them stop and breathed despite the sharp ache in her ribs.
The highway unspooled black in the headlights. She stared at it, but didn’t really see it.
Her rescuer drove without talking. After a while he turned off the highway onto a road that was barely a road, a cut through the pines that climbed and climbed, and she should have been afraid of that—a strange man taking her off the highway into the dark—but she didn’t have any fear left over for it.
She’d spent it all. There was none in the account.
No lights behind them. No sound but the truck’s engine and her own breathing, still too fast, still too shallow, still refusing to go all the way down into her lungs.
A man was dead.
She kept circling back to it the way her tongue kept finding the cut on the inside of her cheek, the one she didn’t remember getting.
Rux was dead, and now she was in a truck with a stranger and a dog and no gas and no plan and no way to call the one person she was supposed to call.
River.
She closed her eyes against it and opened them again fast, because behind her lids she kept seeing the knife go in and the way Rux had looked down at himself like he couldn’t comprehend what happened.
“Who are you?” Her voice came out rough, and she cleared her throat. “Why did you help me?”
He kept his eyes on the road and didn’t answer.
A man who wouldn’t say why he’d kill for you was one you should be afraid of…
So why the hell wasn’t she more afraid?