I rarely let anyone touch my computer, but she was interested in keeping her brother alive. She wouldn’t dare put him in danger by fucking me over.
“By all means.” I slid my open laptop over to her and watched her fingers fly across the keyboard. She watched the screen, then turned it back to me so I could see.
“Funds will hit the first offshore at midnight. All they’ll see is a denial-of-service, like they’ve got a worm but no infection.”
I nodded. “All the accounts?”
“They have several. This is just the first. It will happen in a sequence. The first tonight. The second tomorrow and the last the next night. They’ll be so busy trying to figure out what went wrong on the first, they’ll never see the next.”
I almost smiled. “Good. You know you’re the only reason I haven’t killed your brother yet?”
She looked at me, flat. “I know. That’s the reason I’m doing this.”
That got a real smile out of me. “You value family, Parker. I like that.”
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “What happens after the transfers? Am I done?”
I watched her. She wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but her left hand kept clenching and unclenching, like she was rehearsing a punch she knew would never land.
“No,” I said. “You’re not done. Not until I say.”
She glared, and for a second her wolf surfaced, pupils wide and black. “I’ve done everything you asked.”
“And you’ll do more,” I said, voice low. “You want your brother alive? You do what I say.”
She stood up, hands balled into fists. “Fuck you.”
I was on my feet before she knew it; the chair clattering against the wall. I moved faster than she thought I could. I caught her by the throat, my hand inside the turtleneck she wore, and pressed her up against the cinderblock wall, squeezed just hard enough to see her eyes bulge, my mouth close enough to feel her breath. “You’re mine,” I said. “You have been since the moment I first laid my eyes on you. I was just waiting for you to figure it out.”
She clawed at my wrist, but it was a show. I could feel her pulse, could feel the wolf in her wanting to bite and run. “I hate you,” she said, voice ragged.
I leaned in close enough to bite the shell of her ear. “You hate yourself more.”
She shuddered, then went limp, not submission but something closer to resignation. I loosened my grip, let her slide down the wall. She didn’t fall. She didn’t cry.
I waited. She caught her breath, put her hand on the bookshelf to balance herself, wiped her mouth, then glared at me with new hate. “If you touch my brother—”
I cut her off. “You’ll what? You’ll kill me? Try it. You won’t be the first.”
She laughed, bitter. “I’ll do worse.”
For a second, I believed her.
I decided it was best at this moment if I let her leave. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. She could go back to her lonely little house and stew all by herself and enjoy her last days of freedom. There was nowhere she could run that I wouldn’t find her.
“You’re dismissed, Parker. Remember, you can run, but you can’t hide.”
Chapter 14
Parker
Imade it as far as the county line before the shakes hit me. By the time I turned off onto the gravel, I couldn’t feel my hands. I tried to flex the wheel, but all the strength was gone from my arms, eaten up by the memory of Silas’s hands around my throat and the echo of his words in my skull. Every time I blinked, I saw his office, his face, smelled his breath on my cheeks.
The drive to Wrecker’s house was muscle memory. I don’t remember the turns, just the splinters of old fear that caught on every rut in the road. The sky was dark; not even the moon was brave enough to show its face; the fields wet with frost. I pulled into his side yard at a crawl, headlights barely illuminating the low shape of his truck in the drive. For a second, I just sat there, sweat freezing to the insides of my jacket, the urge to disappear stronger than anything I’d ever felt. But there was nowhere else to go, and I’d already crossed the point of no return a hundred times tonight.
He was on the porch before the engine cut. The porch light haloed his head, making him look less like a man and more like an executioner or an avenging god. He was barefoot, hair sticking up in a wild storm, and he crossed the yard with the kind of stride that made the ground look like it was trying to get out of his way.
I didn’t even get the door open. He ripped it wide, reached in, and unbuckled me with one hand. The other arm scooped me up and out before my feet could hit the dirt. My head lolled onto hisshoulder. He carried me, not like a lover, not like a child, but like he was rescuing something half-dead from a burning building.
