Go. Don’t stop. Faster.
I turned the corner of the service road and hit the sidewalk running. Downtown Albuquerque at… what time was it? Late. A few cars drifted past on the cross street. A streetlight buzzed overhead, casting a cone of yellow that I passed through and out of.
Where was I going? I had no wallet, no phone. They’d been in the pockets of the leggings I’d been wearing on the mountain but might have tumbled out during my fall. My hospital gown was doing less for my modesty with every passing second, the left side flapping open where the latch had torn it. I had an IV wound on the back of each hand, both oozing thin lines of blood. I looked like an escapee from a psych ward, which, given the way my last conversation with Detective Cole had gone, was probably exactly what anyone who found me would assume.
I crossed an intersection without looking and a car honked. The driver yelled something I couldn’t hear through the window, but I kept running.
Then I heard it.
Heavy, fast, bare feet on pavement. Behind me, but closing the distance with a speed that suggested the person attached to them was either training for the Olympics or hunting for something far more primal than a gold medal.
I paused for a split second, breathing in deep. Partly to catch my breath, and partly to decide on my next move. My first thought was that whatever was chasing me had to be the thing that had been wearing Mark and then the nurse. But this felt different. There was no charred sage smell, no sense of dread. In fact, some part of my mind even seemed towantme to be caught.
That couldn’t be right, though. I kept running.
I veered left down an alley between two buildings, then immediately realized it was a stupid choice. Was Itryingto get raped or eaten or whatever on top of everything else? I skidded to a stop and spun, pressing my back against the brick wall, and whatever was chasing me came around the corner at full tilt and stopped six feet from me.
It was the man from the sketch.
He stood in the alley breathing hard, his chest heaving… and he was as naked as I remembered. Completely, unapologetically unclothed. The streetlight at the mouth of the alley caught the planes of his body in intense detail. The ridged terrain of his abdomen, the heavy slab of his chest, the thick cords of muscle running along his forearms and the dense, scarred landscape of his shoulders.
His eyes were amber, like pine resin held up to sunlight. Exactly the shade I remembered. Exactly the shade I’d described to Chen.
He looked like he was in pain. Like the pain you get from running too fast, but deeper. His jaw was clenched so tight the tendons stood out in his neck, and his hands were fisted at his sides. A vein pulsed visibly at his temple. The muscles across his back and shoulders were seized up, rigid, as though his body were fighting some internal war that had nothing to do with me.
“You,” I said, which was maybe not the most articulate opening I’d ever produced, but given the circumstances I felt it covered the essential ground.
“We need to go.” His voice was the same one from the ravine, deep, rough-edged, stripped of pleasantries. “Now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me?—”
He closed the distance between us in two strides and scooped me up. Not gently, and definitely not romantically. He grabbed me around the waist and threw me over his shoulder like a sack of feed corn, and then he was running.
I reacted like a feral cat that had just been dropped in a bathtub.
“PUT ME DOWN!” I hammered my fists against his back, which was as effective as hammering them against a boulder. His skin was furnace-hot and slick with sweat, and the muscles beneath it didn’t so much as flinch under my blows. “What the FUCK is happening? Who ARE you? Put me down RIGHT NOW or I swear to God I will?—”
His right hand came off the back of my thigh and landed on my ass with a crack that rang off the alley walls. The sting bloomed across my bare skin—the torn gown had left absolutely nothing between his palm and my backside—and I yelped, more from shock than pain.
“We don’t have time for this.” His voice was tight and strained, but the authority in it left no room for negotiation.
I punched him in the kidney. Or what I hoped was his kidney. It was hard to aim while bouncing upside-down over the shoulder of a running man.
Another smack landed on my bare ass, harder this time, precise and stinging and placed on the exact same spot as the first, and I gasped as my body betrayed me with a flush of heat that had no goddamn business showing up at a time like this.
“Settle down,” he said far too calmly, his feet pounding the pavement with steady rhythm, like he could run for miles and intended to.
“You’re kidnapping me!”
A third spank fell, this one lower, catching the sensitive crease where my ass met my thigh, and I gasped. That one had really stung.
Why the fuck was I getting wet?
“I’m not kidnapping you. I’m saving your life. Be still.”
I was not still. I kicked, I squirmed, I grabbed at his waist and tried to leverage myself upward, which accomplished nothing except changing my viewing angle.
And that was when I noticed his cock.
