I laugh at him because if I don’t I might scream. “You didn’t even let me get to the road.”
“In the time it would take you to get from the door to the road,” he says, “youcould be dead.”
The words hit hard enough to make me want to slap him.
I spin back around and keep walking.
The neighborhood isn’t really a neighborhood. Not the way a neighborhood is in cities like Chicago. Too much land between houses—I can’t even see the next one. Too much money built into privacy. Trees crowding the edges. Marsh not far off, if the air is any indication—salt and rot and wet earth under the heat.
I hear Ever behind me before I make it much further. He’s not close, but he’s not trying to hide, either.
Fine. If he wants to follow me, he can follow me.
“Don’t,” I call over my shoulder anyway and veer off toward the tree line.
“Damnit, Reva, hold up. I’m not wearing shoes.”
“That’s your sign. Go home, Ever.”
I walk faster. Petty? Yes.
Reckless? Also yes.
At this point I’m running on anger and embarrassment and too little sleep to care about anything except making my position clear. He asked me if anyone would miss me if I disappeared. Then he caught my wrist and looked at me like he could read every ugly thing I didn’t say.
So yes, I walk straight into the woods because I want one damn place where nobody is staring at me while I fall apart.
Shade closes over me in strips, sunlight breaking through thin oak branches and hanging moss. The ground goes soft in patches, roots lifting under leaves, scrub palmettos crowding the narrow spaces between trunks.
I keep moving.
My boots hit hard because I want them to.
I am not tactical. I am not stealthy. I am pissed off and trying to outrun the feeling of being managed.
For the first minute or two I can still hear him behind me, cursing as he steps on something—a rock or a branch.
Then I can’t.
I don’t notice right away.
I’m too busy replaying the last twenty-four hours and getting angrier every time my brain lands on a different man. Nash and his rules. Ever and his hands and his warnings. Shiloh and the gentleness in his voice and the way that somehow makes him more dangerous, not less.
They know about Deacon, and the fact that I want him dead.
So what exactly am I to them? A problem? A witness? A stray they’ve decided to collar until they can have me put down?
A thought hits like a spark in dry grass. Maybe they aren’t protecting me from him. Maybe they’re protecting him from me.
I break into a jog before I mean to.
Branches whip at my arms. I jump a root and nearly roll my ankle on the landing. My lungs start burning almost immediately in the wet heat, breath pulling harder, louder. The path—if you can call it that—isn’t a trail so much as a slightly less impossible line through the brush.
I tell myself I’ll stop in a minute.
I don’t.
I push farther than I should, because the idea of turning around and seeing one of them smirking at the edge of the trees makes me want to bite somebody.
