“We need to go back to the room. We’ll be locked in.”
I shook my head. “We need to draw them off.” I found her hand in the darkness and squeezed three times. “Do you trust me?”
“Implicitly.”
“Take your shirt off. Right now. Stay here until the train leaves the station, and then go back to our room. If I don’t make it back, stick to the plan. Get off in Arizona and take the bus to the Strip. I’ll meet you there.”
“What?” she shrieked in a whisper.
“Do. You. Trust. Me?”
She paused and stammered, then nodded and stripped off her shirt, leaving her in a modest sports bra.
There was no time to waste. I took the shirt from her, fisted the back of her hair, and kissed her hard.
I kissed her like I should have been kissing her this whole time. Desperate and insatiable. I kissed her like it was the last time I ever would.
I kissed her like I loved her, then slipped out of the closet, grabbed my coat from our room, slid it on, and put my hood up.
Timing was everything.
I needed to lure them off the train. I needed to find a new mark. Two, if I was lucky.
And I needed to make it backonthe train.
Pent-up energy raced through my veins as I lingered by the exit, waiting for Jeremiah and Al to turn around and do another sweep this way.
The moment I saw the side of Jeremiah’s head, I locked eyes with him, smiled like a motherfucker, and jumped off the train.
An announcement blared overhead, reminding passengers that the train would be departing soon. I ducked through crowds of people milling about on the platform.
Shouts rose up as Al and Jeremiah bolted off the train and hustled through the people waiting to board, shoving them aside.
I pulled my arms out of the coat sleeves and kept my pace quick. That’s when I spotted my first mark.
A guy about my height with long, dark blond hair. “Hey,” I said as I shirked off my coat and held it out to him. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you give me your hat, put this on, and walk that way.” I pointed in the direction that Al and Jeremiah would approach from.
He just stared at me like I had lost my goddamn mind.
“Forty, then. Longer you wait, the lower it’ll get.”
His eyes narrowed. “Make it seventy-five.”
“Sold.” We quickly made the swap, me taking his hat and him putting on my coat. “Hood up, head down. Money’s in the pocket.” I donned his Chiefs cap without a second thought andwalked away. Finding someone to be Amelia would be slightly more difficult.
Blonde hair was all I really needed. They didn’t know much about her appearance apart from what was most noticeable.
They didn’t know the way her eyes went from crisp sky blue to stormy slate when she was angry. They didn’t know about the little mole she had behind her ear. They didn’t know that her nose wrinkled when she laughed or that she was wickedly funny.
They didn’t know how big she loved and how much she cared, even when the people she cared for didn’t deserve it.
I was at the top of that list.
They didn’t know that she loved baseball or that she thought poetry was stupid because it could follow the rules or defy them in free verse. Math didn’t have that option. Math had to follow the rules.
They didn’t know how cranky she was when she first woke up or how quickly she could transform into the put-together, well-spoken version of herself that she let everyone else see. The version that I got was crass, irreverent, and one hell of a clever girl.
There was a reason “little fox” had popped into my head the moment she outwitted me to get into the Four Horsemen. She was clever, sly, shrewd, mesmerizing, and so fucking adorable that I was never mad when she got the best of me.
