“Ours,” he says. “Something gave you an idea that someone else lives in the hospital?”
I blink at him.
“Very funny. I just haven’t seen this one before, and it looks… how do I put this… a little out of your price range? And extremely suspicious, might I add.”
He doesn’t even glance at me.
“The guys dropped it off before heading to the meet-up.” He shifts the car into gear.
“They dropped it off?” I repeat.
“We’ve got a few stashed around the city for emergencies. Makes trips into town safer when we need to blend in. They went to retrieve it, parked it, and left.”
I swear, I learn something new about their shady little network every day.
I slide into the seat slowly, still half-convinced I shouldn’t leave fingerprints on anything, but knowing I don’t have a choice. The interior smells like gunpowder, cedar, and something metallic underneath it all—blood, probably.
“Still,” I say as we pull away, “it’s kind of weird you guys have a car like this. It’s bound to draw attention.”
“It was the closest one,” he says, unfazed. “And I’m not thrilled about it either. But when Talon gets one of his fucking ideas…”
He trails off. After a beat, it’s clear he’s done talking, so I decide to drag the rest out of him.
“What happened?” I ask. “What did Talon do?”
“He bartered for it.”
As if that explains anything.
My eyes narrow. “Bartered?”
He hesitates. Just for a beat. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of pause from him. Cassian likes to keep things close to the chest. He weighs every word before letting it out, and besides the fact that he’s one of the reasons I’m stuck in this postmortem slavery or whatever it is, he also knows I have a tongue, a face, and a body now that can be seen by other people.
I’m probably a threat in his head, even though a quiet one, for now.
But something shifts. Whether he wins the inner fight or loses it, I don’t know. Either way, he decides to spill.
“He trades favors for shit,” he says finally. “The bigger the favor, the better the loot. He thought this one was a good deal, so now we have it.”
I can picture it easily, Talon wheeling and dealing in some smoke-filled alley, flipping a coin, striking bargains with men who don’t live to tell the tale. Hell, I can practically hear him sealing the deal with one of those too-smooth grins, shaking hands, and leaving someone in a trunk. He might even kiss both cheeks over a car like this.
And that same mouth was just buried in your pussy…
The thought slams into me so hard it knocks the air from my lungs.
I blink, once. Twice. Try to shake it off like a spiderweb, but it clings. Lodges into my brain like a splinter dipped in heat.
I shift in my seat, suddenly aware of every inch of skin, every breath between my thighs. It’s stupid. It's so stupid. This isn’t the time or the place. But the image won’t leave. It morphs, sharpening, intensifying. That half-smile he gives when heknows exactly what he's doing. The heat of his breath against me. The way he looked up when he noticed me watching him.
My thighs press together on instinct.
I look out the window, hoping the cool glass might leech some of the heat from my face, but all it does is reflect my expression—flushed, distracted, caught somewhere between arousal and shame.
God, he’s like a drug, that man.
No, scratch that.
They all are.
