16. Chapter 16 #2
Dark honey. Bigger than she remembered. She had been looking at amber eyes for days, but these eyes had gold underneath the amber, and the gold was on fire.
Jace's wolf was on them before the driver had processed that the roll-up door was gone.
She didn't see the bite. She felt it. The wolf bit down on the driver’s arm around her front with so much force that it spun the driver off and away from her. She felt the draft of air where the wolf moved past her to take the man.
The driver went down behind her.
Maren didn't turn to look at what the floor looked like.
The man at the man-door, broken nose, had seen what Jace was and decided against becoming like the driver. He moved toward Cliff's body at the pillar. He had Cliff under the arms before Jace's wolf had its head up.
Jace's wolf watched him.
Jace's wolf let him.
She understood later that the wolf had let him because taking him at that range would have required crossing her, and the wolf wasn't going to cross her.
The man dragged Cliff out the side door at a stumble. The door swung behind them.
Jace's wolf turned back to her.
Jace had spent the last five hours desperate to reach her.
He shifted in a single rushing breath. Fur darkening, slicking, the wolf-bulk pulling tight into the human shape of him in the time it took her to blink.
Jace was on one knee in front of her with his hands coming up to her face, and they weren't careful.
They were the hands of a man who had needed to be touching her for five hours.
“I've got you.”
“Okay.”
“You're safe now.”
“Okay.”
Jace was looking at her the way a man looked at a woman whose face he had thought he might not see.
His breathing was the breathing of an animal coming down off a run.
He went to the broken plastic still hanging off her wrists and worked it loose with his hands, the way a man worked things loose when his body still had the wolf a half-inch off the surface.
Her arms came around.
Her hands went to the front of his shoulders.
They shook.
She couldn't tell which one of them was shaking.
“Up,” he said. “We go.”
She got up.
Jace growled as he shifted back. “Out of reach,” he gave one last glare at where the men had disappeared, then reached for her. She fell into his arms like they were made for her, breathing him in.
“Let them go,” Jace said, reading her read of him. “I don't want to spend the next two minutes on him. I want to spend them on you.”
He walked her out through the hole where the bay door had been, with his palm at her back.
She didn't know which SUV it came out of.
He was in pants and a t-shirt he'd pulled out of a duffel in the back of one of the SUVs.
The wolves who had been in the back seat with him at the block were formed up around her as they crossed the gravel, not looking at her, looking out.
They were in the back seat of the Blackridge SUV before the door closed behind him.
A ranked wolf she didn't recognize was in the shotgun seat.
Maren was in the middle seat. Jace was on the outside, between her and the door. His arm was around her. Her head was on his chest. The coat he'd wrapped her in was the one she'd had at the pharmacy. His.
Her hands hadn't stopped shaking.
Jace’s arm tightened around her. The bond against her ribs went hot and stayed hot.
He pulled his phone out of his coat with his free hand. Theo answered before the first ring finished.
The driver slowed for the turn onto the main road.
She didn't think to look.
She looked.
A black three-car convoy was coming the other way, slow, the kind of slow that meant turning in, not passing through.
The middle SUV's back window passed hers at ten feet.
A man was in the back seat.
A man who thought the world was his because he had the money to buy his way to whatever or whoever he wanted.
She had seen his face a few days earlier on Freya's screen.
Before that she had seen his face in countless internet photos over her years on the run, at this gala or that charity event.
That face had replayed through her mind thousands of times for three years.
Brock Bastian.
He was the man driving past her now.
His eyes found her at the same second hers found his. Through two panes of glass, through ten feet of winter air, at the mouth of a gravel drive in Montana, three years of her running and his money and his patience came to rest in a second of eye contact she didn't turn away from.
He didn't either.
In the edge of her vision Jace's free hand went white on the door handle. His jaw was locked. His wolf was at the glass. The grip he had on her was the only thing holding it back.
Bastian’s SUV kept going one way.
Hers kept going the other.
The eye contact broke because the two vehicles moved past each other, not because either of them had blinked.
Jace's arm around her didn't loosen. The hand on the door handle stayed where it was for another ten seconds. Then it came back to her shoulder.
The phone in the cupholder up front buzzed once. The driver thumbed it to the speaker.
“I heard it's over.” Declan, coming through the dash. “Luna okay?”
The driver glanced back. His eyes went to Maren tucked into Jace's chest, then back to the road. “She will be.”
“Man. I miss all the fun stuff.” A beat. “Tell Jace Tyler's responding to the medicine. Rachel says he'll be okay.”
Maren felt Jace's shoulders release a tiny bit of the tension they carried.
She pressed her face into his t-shirt a half-inch closer.
In the front seat the ranked wolf kept his face pointed at the road.
She fell asleep on Jace's chest somewhere on the county road north, without having meant to. The adrenaline crash came through her like weather. Jace's palm stayed at her shoulder. His chin stayed on the top of her head.