Chapter 11
BIANCA
Owen takes a corner so hard the scalpel skips off my neck.
Weller jerks the blade clear before it finds me again. “Owen.”
Owen’s eyes flash in the mirror. He doesn’t apologize, but the car stops trying to throw us into one another.
There is no room for any of this. I’m half on Tristan’s lap in the middle of the backseat, plastered against his chest, his palm spread over my scalp.
My hair is wound around his fist to keep it off my neck.
Weller is pressed against my side with Winston’s medical kit open on his lap, everything inside rattling when Owen finds another pothole.
Up front, Freddie has bolt cutters wedged beneath his collar, one elbow braced on the dash while he twists for an angle that does not exist.
Above the houses, the black drone that appeared after we cleared the woods banks through the turn with us. It is not even pretending to hide.
“Do it,” I say.
Weller tears open another antiseptic wipe. “I need you still.”
“I’m being as still as the getaway driver allows.”
The car bounces over a dip. Weller barely raises his voice when he says Owen’s name again, which is worse than shouting.
“If I cut her because you are driving like an idiot, we’ll have a big problem.”
“Oh, a big problem, hm?” I smile into Tristan’s throat. “That sounds kind of hot.”
His arm tightens until my chest is flush to his. Every breath I take fills my head with mint and burnt amber.
I’m running from a psychotic doctor, getting a tracker cut from my neck, and my body thinks this is an excellent time to daydream about dick.
Focus, bitch.
There’s a metal crack. Freddie whoops, then rips the broken collar from his throat and hisses at the red line beading beneath it.
“Ready?” Weller asks, but the blade goes in before I answer.
Pain pinches my face. Tristan sees it, shifts his grip on the back of my head, and kisses me. Surprise barely makes it out before his tongue strokes inside. I bite his lower lip, he groans into my mouth, and Weller gets the stillness he wanted by letting Tristan make me forget about the knife.
“Almost,” Weller murmurs.
The tweezers clink, and he draws out a bloody sliver of metal half the size of my pinky nail, holds it to the light, then drops it into an empty vial.
Blood runs warm down my back. Weller presses gauze to the cut, then twists open a tube from the kit. “This will hurt.”
“A little pain can add to the experience.”
My fingers lock around Tristan’s thigh when Weller pinches the skin closed and paints liquid bandage across it. Tristan’s mouth brushes mine again, gentler now, which somehow makes me shiver worse.
Weller holds the wound closed until the glue sets, his breath moving through the loose hair at my nape. Maybe it’s the champagne. Maybe adrenaline, blood, and a car full of sweaty male pheromones have done something to my brain. He’s oozing comfort through the bond.
“It might need stitches,” he says. “We’ll have it checked when doing so doesn’t require walking into an emergency department with a picture of your face in the break room.”
“It’ll be fine.”
His thumb comes away red. The look he gives me says I’m not qualified to make that determination, but Owen has already pulled onto an empty side street and yanked at his collar.
“Me next. Get this fucking thing off.”
Freddie fits the cutter’s jaws beneath the band while Tristan leans between the seats to add pressure. When the metal gives, Owen pries it apart with both hands and drags in a deep breath.
Weller and Tristan remove their collars. Owen starts to throw his through the window, and I slap his arm.
“Don’t litter.”
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, but he still stops beside a trash bin so we can dump the collars and my tracker before taking off again.
Tristan watches through the rear window. The drone doesn’t follow around the corner. When Owen doubles back, we catch one glimpse of it hovering above the bin before the houses swallow it.
“It still saw the car,” Weller says.
We run the scanner over every inch of skin to be certain. Nothing beeps.
Weller takes one of the new phones from Winston’s bag and turns it on. He types a message, sends it, then pulls the battery.
“What did you just do?” I ask.
“Mason has been waiting for our signal to set everything in motion.” Weller slides the loose battery and phone into a side pocket in the bag.
For a few miles, nobody speaks. Freddie rubs the raw line around his throat. Owen drives with the windows down and one hand reaching into the backseat for mine. Tristan is still holding me tight, and Weller keeps checking the glue at my neck.
“Sooo.” I stretch the word until all four of them look at me, or in Owen’s case, find me in the rearview mirror. “Whitney is alive.”
“I’m not sure how, Princess,” Owen says. “You were thorough.”
A laugh catches at the back of my throat. “She made me look like a lunatic. They attacked me. She cut out all the parts where they were trying to kill me first.”
“Obviously,” Tristan agrees. “And you didn’t look nuts to me. I was hoping to get a copy.” Owen grunts in agreement.
“Ugh. You’re impossible.”
I don’t know why I’m so relieved that they don’t seem disgusted by me. I don’t feel bad exactly, but I know it didn’t look pretty.
Weller takes out a pad of paper and a pen from the bag and starts making notes. “Whitney is alive and unaccounted for. We don’t know who put her on those screens, and we can’t assume the shooter was separate.”
“She was dangerous before,” Tristan says. “But now...”
“I don’t want to have to kill her again.” I twist my hands together. “I want this to be over.”
I let the quiet run until it starts to feel too heavy. We have three hours left until we reach the safe house Ezra has ready.
“So. Tell me all the shit you’ve been hiding from me.”
“Winston’s accident,” Weller says. “We found a payment stub and articles about two accidents on Whitney’s drive. The driver who hit Winston died in another collision shortly afterward.”
“Winston could’ve died... How long have you known about this?”
Tristan answers first. “Right before the gala.”
“I didn’t know either,” Freddie says, shooting a look behind him at Weller.
“Or me,” Owen adds.
It doesn’t make me feel any better.
I look from Weller to Tristan. “Okay. What else?”
Weller breathes out through his nose. “Mason found another TruScent file. It looks like our fathers knew we were matched to you before graduation and tried to make us respond to Whitney before they forced it.”
“What the fuck do you mean they knew we were matched to her?” Owen growls. “How old were we?”
“Sixteen.”
All that time, I thought I was the only one who knew the truth, other than Whitney.
Owen hits the steering wheel. The horn blasts through the sleeping street and makes all of us jump. “Those fuckers are so goddamn dead.”
I sit up and put my hands on the two front seats. “New rule. When one of us knows something, we all know it. Not when it’s safe. Not when somebody decides I have the right disposition for the information.”
Freddie immediately agrees. “She’s right.”
“If you want to know the reason I didn’t tell you,” Weller says. “You bit a guard’s ear half off because he shoved me. You wanted to run back into danger to find Owen. You act as if something happening to you would only affect you.”
Ezra used to go quiet on me in exactly that way.
“I’d do it again. That’s the point of a pack. We look out for each other. Don’t do the math for me and call it protection. If you’re scared, say that. Argue with me. I can take it.”
Up ahead, the road is flashing blue and red. There’s a line of taillights stacked behind a delivery van, with cones directing traffic.
“That’s for us,” I say.
Tristan is already twisted toward the rear glass. “Does anyone see the drone?”
Nothing black moves above the road, but it doesn’t matter. The likelihood that we’re being tracked somehow is high. Owen takes a turn down a residential street. Dark houses slide by, recycling bins at the curb and a basketball hoop where someone gets to be a kid and have a normal life.
Every road on this side seems to feed back into the checkpoint.
“Okay, we’re fucked. We need to cut across, but it will add hours to the drive. And the car has already been seen.” Owen bangs on the dash.
Tristan leans forward. “I have a place.”
Weller turns to look at him.
“A place,” I repeat. “Connected to the heir of a psychopath, or are we getting creative?”
“It’s isolated, not in my name, and should be relatively prepared for us.”
“Tristan, what place are you referring to?” Weller asks.
“Wrecker’s Point. Four hours east.”
Freddie twists in his seat. “Well, that’s vague. Can you elaborate? Is it a treasure hunt excursion? A bunker? An island you purchased secretly?”
“Not the whole island.”
“That’s not a complete answer,” Weller says.
Tristan holds me tighter, infuriatingly calm. “I’ll explain when we get there.”
“Or Weller can cut it out of you. He still has the scalpel.” I pinch his arm, getting his attention.
“He can try, sweetheart.”
“Tristan.” I tilt my head back against his shoulder so he has to look at me. “The rule is twenty minutes old and you’re already breaking it.”
“The location isn’t a threat to anyone in this car.” The lazy edge stays in his voice, but his eyes drop it. “And I’ve waited a long time for it to be a surprise. Fine me later.”
Tristan’s thumb stops against my ribs.
I let my head fall back against his shoulder. “Fine. Keep it.”
“Generous little tyrant.” He presses his mouth to my hair.
Asshole.
Fields replace houses once Owen finds an old highway moving east. There’s not much traffic and I get sleepy despite our circumstances. Freddie turns the radio down low.
Owen reaches back on every straight stretch. If I don’t catch his hand quickly enough, his fingers tap against the back of the middle console until I do.