She couldn’t tell the color of the eyes that scrutinized her from below the chestnut slashes of his brows. Banked embers lit his irises, their heated glow leaving no question that he was somethingother.
As if the sharp, pearly white tips of his fangs weren’t enough to remind her what she was dealing with here.
A cold, emotionless killer.
She’d seen him in action as she’d played possum and watched from under her lowered lashes while he dispatched Gordo and the other two thugs. He was ruthless. His methods swift and brutal, without hesitation. She’d made it a point to stay as far away from his kind as possible, but every species since Earth’s creation had serious menaces like him. The kind of guy no one wanted to run into in a dark alley because you knew only one person was coming out and odds were it wouldn’t be you.
And now, here she was, defenseless and alone with this enormous Breed male in the middle of the Mojave, the unmarked burial ground for countless hookers, runaways, and card cheats. Nowhere to run and no one to hear her screams, even if she could muster the juice to attempt either one.
She glanced up at him again, trying to judge his intentions. The rough-hewn face staring down at her was unreadable, but there was conflict in his eyes. As if standing there with her was the dead last place he wanted to be too.
“You’re bleeding,” she pointed out, her gaze flicking to his chest. “Gordo shot you.”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I am Breed. It will heal in a few hours.”
“I know what you are.”
She didn’t mean for it to come out sounding like an accusation, but it was too late to call it back. To be fair, she hadn’t met a man of any stripe, mortal or otherwise, that she could truly trust in all her twenty-six years. Well, except Michael. And he hardly counted because he’d been more like a brother to her since they were both orphaned kids running loose on the streets.
Shit.Michael.
He must be worried sick about her.
By now, her phone was probably blowing up with calls and messages from her best friend asking for her status. Not that she could answer even if she wanted to. Her phone was buried in a dumpster back at Moda, tossed there along with the fake student ID Leo Slater’s hired help had taken from her in the moments before they stuffed her into trunk of the sedan.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Zoe,” she replied, letting the lie fall off her tongue as easily as it had when the trio of goons came to escort her away from the casino floor. She had scores of AKAs, so many it was sometimes difficult to remember her true given name. The one her mother, Aiko, had given her on the day she was born. The one she hadn’t heard spoken since she was eight years old.
Her unlikely savior grunted, studying her in unsettling silence for a long moment. “You don’t seem like a stupid child, Zoe,” he remarked. “So, what kind of trouble were you in with men like those three and their boss?”
She swallowed, trying to decide what would serve her best with this dangerous man who seemed to have fallen for her teenager disguise as readily as her original captors had. But this Breed male was no steakhead like Gordo and Company. His shrewd, glittering gaze was fixed unblinking on her, and she felt with a cold certainty in her marrow that he would know if she tried to feed him any more lies.
“I tried to steal something from them tonight. From a casino.”
He grunted. “Money?”
She nodded, wincing at the resulting pain that small movement caused. “Yeah, I took a little bit of money from a slot machine that went on the fritz. They caught me before I could make it out the door with it.”
His square chin lifted, then he gave a faint shake of his head. “Maybe you are stupid. Greed and bad choices are two of the main reasons people end up out here in the middle of the night.”
She had no doubt he was right. And although she was giving him a small helping of honesty, she saw no reason to explain that the “little bit of money” she attempted to steal tonight was in the neighborhood of two grand, nor that the fact she’d even gotten close to that sizable amount of cash was because she’d managed to finesse one of the machines in a way only she could, then bribed another player a hundred bucks to collect her winnings for her and hand them over.
Instead of the gray-haired old lady from Kansas meeting her at the elevator with her payout as agreed, Naomi had been intercepted by Moda security.
She refused to call her motivation greed, but she supposed she had to cop to the fact that it had been a poor decision to take such a big risk. From here on out, she wouldn’t rely on go-betweens when it came to collecting her takes at Slater’s casino. She’d have to start getting more creative.
She rubbed absently at her wrists as she tried to think clearly.
Everything hurt. It had been a long day and an even longer night. Her brain was scrambled and she just wanted to go home, climb into her bed and lie down for an hour or ten. Even though some dim logic reminded her that a long sleep was just about the worst thing she could do for a concussion, she was so exhausted it was all she could do to remain upright. If she didn’t get out of this desert soon and back on the road to Vegas, she was liable to collapse right where she stood.
With her brain fogging over and her legs growing weaker underneath her by the second, her capacity for clever plans and daring moves was fading fast. Along with her options. She had to rule out her original plan to run and seek shelter until she could hoof it or hitch her way back to the interstate. In her current condition, she’d never make it anywhere on foot.
Which meant she was not only in this Breed male’s debt tonight, but at his mercy too. Since both fight and flight were off the table so long as he was looming over her, all she had to work with was her negotiation skills. And chutzpah.
She might as well grab onto both and roll the dice.
God, she liked it so much better when those dice were loaded in her favor first.
