Chapter 45
NOAH
There’s no wind blocks out here, and it fucking assaults us.
It rips through the thin cotton of my shirt, whipping it against the fresh scabs on my chest and the throbbing, mostly healed bullet hole in my arm.
I lean forward over the handlebars of the Knucklehead, trying to cut through the flat, endless plains of the Texas Panhandle, but without a windshield or the protective steel cage of a car, we are entirely at the mercy of the elements.
And the elements are brutal today.
But it’s better to focus on the misery of this ride than the fuckery we just left behind us. God knows what the cops are going to do with that.
I know that house is covered in our DNA. My mind unwantedly flashes with the potential of the CSI teams outside of the house, pulling Bill’s dead body from inside.
Yeah, the fucker was a monster. But we just pointed a big, glaring finger at ourselves, giving away our location.
And that’s bad. That’s so fucking bad.
I throttle harder, pushing the old bike as fast as it’ll go.
As the afternoon bleeds into the blinding, unforgiving glare of the sun, the asphalt turns into a glaring white ribbon. Heat radiates up from the road, mixing with the scorching mechanical heat of the V-twin engine humming between my thighs.
Every bump, every crack in the neglected farm roads sends a shockwave up my spine and straight into my left shoulder. I can feel the stitches pulling. I can feel the warm, familiar trickle of fresh blood seeping into my bandages, but stopping isn’t an option.
I have to get us far, far from here.
Behind me, Rue is plastered to my back. Her arms are locked around my waist like a steel vice, her face buried between my shoulder blades to hide from the stinging wind.
She’s holding on for dear life, but I know she’s slipping.
Back in that hallway, when she pulled the trigger six fucking times and put a hole through Bill’s neck, she was running on pure, feral adrenaline.
She was so eerie and calm, standing over a bleeding corpse and talking about putting him in a chest freezer like she was making a grocery list. But I know how trauma works—it’s a delayed fuse.
The shock is going to hit her, and when it does, the crash will be devastating.
I have to get us to safety before that happens.
I replay those six shots over and over in my head, the crack of the .45 echoing over the roar of the motorcycle engine. I was fully prepared to kill Bill. I was coiled, ready to rip his throat out with my bare hands if I had to, just to keep him away from her.
But she beat me to it.
My sweet, beautiful woman looked a monster dead in the eye and erased him from the earth. And I was instantly reminded of the darkest parts of her.
Still, she did it for me. He touched you. He fucking touched you. That realization sits heavy and suffocating in my chest. A sickening mixture of guilt and possessive pride wars inside of me.
She ruined my life, I ruined hers, but out here, covered in another man’s blood and clinging to my back, she is entirely, irrevocably mine.
I roll the throttle back, begging the vintage Harley for more speed, but the machine only gives me so much.
It’s a mechanical relic, heavy and loud, built for cruising down a coastline, not a breakneck fugitive getaway.
We’re maxing out at maybe eighty-five miles an hour, the engine vibrating so fucking wildly it rattles my teeth and sends a dull, continuous ache shooting up my arm.
And every mile we eat up just feels like a mile we have to earn back.
Hereford, Texas. The realization still makes my gut twist with bitter, suffocating frustration. Bill drove us southeast for hours, locked in the pitch-black belly of his RV. Now, we have to backtrack across the panhandle, slip over the New Mexico border, and push all the way to Arizona.
Without anyone noticing.
We pass through a ghost town on the border that consists of nothing but a single blinking yellow light, a rusted-out tractor dealership, and boarded-up diners.
I don’t stop. I don’t even slow down. The engine roars, a deafening declaration of our existence in a place where we are desperately trying to be ghosts.
Every time we pass a dilapidated farmhouse, I wonder if it’s the one where someone is sitting in their living room, watching my mugshot flash across the screen.
My eyes dart to the cracked rearview mirror, scanning the empty horizon behind us for the hundredth time as I bust the state line.
Paranoia is a living, breathing demon inside my chest. In our blind panic to run, we didn’t check Bill’s television. We didn’t even listen to the radio.
I have absolutely no idea what the manhunt looks like right now.
Did the Marshals expand the perimeter? Are my mugshots still rolling on the twenty-four-hour news cycle? Are there roadblocks set up on the state lines? Do they know Rue is with me now?
We are flying completely blind.
Every single time a car passes us in the opposite lane, the breath catches in my throat. Every distant flash of sunlight off a windshield looks like fucking law enforcement lightbars.
My throat aches, feeling like I swallowed a fistful of the dry New Mexico dirt we’re riding through.
The water we drank from the tap before leaving the farm has long since sweated out of my pores.
I can feel Rue’s weight sagging more heavily against me as the hours grind on.
She’s exhausted. She didn’t sleep at all last night after Bullet died, and now she’s physically exerting herself just to hold on to a vibrating death machine at highway speeds.
I try to shift back an inch, giving her a little more of my body to rest against, but the seat is too cramped.
The sky ahead of us shifts from a pale, dusty blue to a bruised, brilliant canvas of violent orange, pink, and deep purple. Sunset.
How long have we been going? Three hours, maybe?
I have no way to keep time anymore.
As the sun dips below the jagged horizon, the temperature plummets instantly. The desert doesn’t hold heat, and the wind that was scorching just an hour ago turns into an ice-cold whip.
Rue shivers against my back, her teeth chattering so hard I can feel the vibration through my shirt. Her grip around my waist weakens slightly, her muscles completely fatigued from holding the same rigid position for so long.
I glance down at the fuel gauge on the teardrop tank. The needle is hovering dangerously close to the red line. We are running on fumes, and the engine is starting to run hot.
We have to stop. We have to risk it.
I spot the flickering neon glow of a solitary, run-down gas station, a beacon in the encroaching dark.
I pull the clutch in, easing off the throttle, and the roar of the Harley finally begins to dial down to a heavy, rhythmic chug. I reach my right hand down, pulling it off the handlebars for just a second to rest it over Rue’s freezing, numb fingers linked across my stomach.
“Hold on, Little Rabbit,” I mutter into the wind, an unsettling feeling washing over me as I pull in. “We’re gonna stop now.”
And I hope like hell she can hold it together.