“Why can’t we stay here and call the police?”
“Just trust me here.”
I had no reason to trust him. I clearly didn’t know him well enough if he was someone who carried a gun with him all the time and knew to look for things like trackers in my purse.
But there was no time to think on that as he tucked the gun away, threw open the door, and ran out onto the street, still holding onto my wrist.
I had no choice but to follow unless I wanted to be dragged.
Each step felt like a hot poker to the blisters on my soles.
Down one street.
Up the cross.
Down the next block.
Another.
“Please,” I begged, tears pricking my eyes. “I need to stop.”
My chest hurt, each breath feeling like drawing in icicles directly into my lungs. And my feet. God, my feet.
“Babe, we have to keep going,” Venezio said, slowing his pace, but still pulling me along.
“Why?” I panted. “Why? Why can’t we go to the police?”
“Look, babe, I—fuck.”
The tone in his voice, the look on his face, they had me running without another question, knowing how close the first bullet had come to hitting him, how near the second one had been to me.
My body was attuned to Venezio’s, sensing the shift in his muscles before he turned toward a cross street or down an alley between buildings, allowing me to be prepared and move in unison with him.
My thigh muscles screamed, making me wish I’d been a lot more dedicated to a regular workout routine than I’d been in a long time. My lungs were just as angry. Though, whether that was due to a lack of cardio, or trying to draw in freezing cold air was anyone’s guess.
My feet…
No. We weren’t going to talk about my feet.
“Okay. Breathe,” Venezio demanded when he pulled me down a claustrophobically small alley between a busy bar and a bodega. “Here,” he added, finding several plastic crates and lining them up so I could sit down and take the pressure off my burning feet.
I sucked in deep, greedy breaths, ignoring the pain in my lungs as I did so.
My whole body felt hot and cold somehow at the same time.
Venezio, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be struggling to breathe at all.
“I don’t… how…”
“Any fool, once they found the tracker, would have circled back in the other direction,” Venezio said.
Okay.
That made a certain kind of sense.
And maybe I would have come to that conclusion myself as well, given a few moments to think it through.
I glanced at Venezio, finding him looking down the long alley, his hand poised over his waistband where I now knew a gun was hiding.
