“You’re hurt,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” She sniffs. “I saw what happened to you.”
“I will be. Fine. Eventually.”
She steps closer. Cups my jaw with both hands, tilting myface to check the damage, and her touch is so careful it almost breaks me worse than anything Graves did.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I say.
Her eyes snap to mine. “They don’t get to put you in a cage and get away with it, Lance. Not anymore.”
Something cracks in my chest that has nothing to do with my ribs.
I pull her into me, one arm around her waist, the other cupping the back of her head, and I hold her in the dark while somewhere underground, the world I’ve been trapped in for six years burns.
She presses her face into my chest, still bare from the fight, and she holds on like I’m something worth keeping.
“Boston,” I say into her hair. “Tonight.”
She nods against me.
“We can’t stay here.”
“Then let’s move.”
Chapter 39
Lance
Somehow, we get away and into an untraceable car that Paxton had ready to go for us—clothes included.
Genevieve falls asleep somewhere around hour two.
I don’t blame her. The adrenaline crash was bound to hit eventually, and after what we just ran from, I’m surprised she lasted this long. Her head’s tilted against the window, her breath fogging the glass in slow, even puffs.
She looks soft like this. Unguarded. Nothing like the woman who told me move while the Lye was tearing itself apart around us.
My hand is on her thigh. I should move it, let her sleep without me pawing at her like some desperate guy who just blew up his entire life, but every time I pull away, her leg shifts closer, like even unconscious she doesn’t want me to let go.
So I don’t.
The highway stretches out ahead, gray and mostly empty this time of morning. We passed the Connecticut border twenty minutes ago, and every mile puts more distance between us andRosebrook Falls. Between us and the Lye and Art’s face in VIP and a dead man on a concrete floor.
My hands are still steady on the wheel. That bothers me more than the shaking would.
I should call Paxton. We were supposed to go straight to the address he gave me, no stops, no detours. That was the plan, and Paxton doesn’t do well with deviations from the plan.
But I’m running on three cracked ribs and a face that looks like a Pollock painting, and the woman next to me hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, and I just killed someone with my bare hands in front of witnesses, and if I don’t stop moving for one goddamn second, I’m going to come apart at the seams.
I pick up my phone and dial.
He answers before the first ring finishes. “Where are you?”
“Ninety minutes out. I need to stop.”
“Lance.”
