He threaded the car through another opening between the other vehicles and into the leftmost lane. “Are you injured?”
The mob of cars lockstep-marched through the night ahead of them, and she shook her head negative.
He said, “Our first priority is shelter for the night and food for you. After that, we will consider our next move to ensure your safety.”
Sarah’s grip on her belt and handle tightened. “I’m not safe anywhere. Even my aunt and my brother want me dead. There’s nowhere I can hide.”
Logan, her brother—Logan had been worried about his sister—Logan had told Blaze to head to Iowa to protect Sarah.“Shit, I need you to do something.”
“I don’t know how I’m useful in the flippin’ slightest, but okay.”
“My phone is in my trouser pocket nearest you. I need you to turn off location permissions. Logan has been tracking us with my phone.”
“Are youserious?”Sarah’s light fingers tapped his hip to find his phone in his pocket.“That’show my aunt’s mobsters knew we were at that hotel in Cleveland?”
Well, yeah, dammit.
Blaze tried very hard not to be aroused by her hands caressing his groin region. The middle of an operation was not the time to divert blood from his brain, but even the phone’s metal case slipping inside his pocket and shivering against his skin underneath made him grind his molars together.
She asked, “Why the heckers did you let Logan track you?”
“When Logan called me to go back to Iowa to rescue you, he was worried I’d get into a car accident and no one would be there to protect you. I thought he was my closest friend. I usually turn off the location permissions for those guys only before I leave for a mission. It’s normal for him to track me and me to track him, and both of us are tracking Micah and Twist.”
She stretched her arm over and held the phone below his chin to open it. “I haven’t shared my location with anybody since high school. Anyone watching me go back and forth to the barn and fields all day would be bored out of their mind. Okay, there. I turned off your location sharing with everyone. It doesn’t look like they were sharing their locations with you, anyway.”
Another static snap of betrayal jolted Blaze. “They must’ve turned them off at some point. Otherwise, I might have noticed Micah and Twist were in Logan’s apartment, though I would have interpreted it as a party, not an ambush.”
In the constantly shifting mosaic of the traffic around them, a few cars had allowed a gap between them and the vehicles ahead of them, so Blaze spun the wheel and jammed the accelerator. The engine roared as he crossed all three lanes to the right edge of the road and shunted them down an exit ramp.
Sarah asked, “Do you know where you’re going?”
Blaze didn’t look away from the road and the red-glowing lines of taillights leading into the night. “I’m heading for the George Washington Bridge to take us into upstate New York. We need to get off the island of Manhattan and not take the Lincoln Tunnel to do it.”
Sarah’s phone pinged.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She looked at it and shrugged. “Nothing important. So, what are our options?”
Blaze liked her straightforward practicality. “We’ll have to improvise. Open the texting app on my phone. You are looking for a group chat called Bully Boys.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Blaze could see her head bent over his phone and light from the screen reflecting on her plush lips and nose.
She asked, “What’s a Scholarship Mafia?”
Anger coarsened Blaze’s voice. “That’s just a group chat for some people I used to know. Don’t even open that one.”
“Found Bully Boys. It was a-ways down there.”
“Type in, ‘Gentlemen, I have fouled up, and the situation is FUBAR.’”
Sarah asked, “How do you spell that?”
He told her and continued, “‘I am in Manhattan, NY, USA. I need a bolt-hole and supplies. Do any of you have assets in Manhattan or within fifty klicks?’ That’s the end.”
“Got it and send.” She paused and squinted at the phone. “You’re already getting texts back. Are these guys actually bullies? I had a problem with a bully in high school.”
“It’s a Navy term that literally means something like beef-eating boys. Back in the days of the Colonial Navy, sailors at sea ate horrid dried, salted beef. It’s generational trauma. Who answered, and what did they say?”
