Chapter Fourteen
It was a long, exhausting drive. Rusty went with them, taking turns behind the wheel with Savannah, and Austin squeezed into the back seat of the pickup truck with his brothers to keep Roy under control.
Savannah and Rusty tried to nap when the other one was driving, but with Roy waking up on a regular basis and wrenching them from sleep with his howls of fury, they were both groggy and tired by the time the sun came up.
No matter how many times they knocked him out, he woke up again within an hour or two, and the battle started anew.
They had three cars full of the Bronson Pack’s members following behind them, but if Roy broke out, they wouldn’t be able to help much. Austin suspected that Roy would be able to kill every last one of them without breaking a sweat.
There was no safe way for them to drive faster. The road wound over mountains, around hairpin curves, and down steep slopes. Every time they passed another car, they had to hug their side of the road and creep along at a snail’s pace, wheels on dirt, rubbing up against underbrush and tree branches.
“Road trip from hell” had been way too optimistic a description.
As the sun rose, they pulled over at a rest stop to fill up on gas and take a bathroom break. Savannah slumped in the passenger seat, napping. Roy was unconscious…for the time being.
Austin kept a careful eye on him and nursed an extra-large black coffee as he leaned against the side of the truck. The hot, bitter liquid burned its way down his throat.
Cliff and Grant were standing about twenty feet away from him, talking to each other irritably, in low, angry voices. Austin was too tired to bother eavesdropping.
His brothers were just too Alpha to be living in the same territory. They loved each other as much anyone in their dysfunctional family could, sure. But force them into close proximity with each other for too long, and somebody was going to bleed.
Not his problem. He was part of their family in name only.
Or was he?
They’d come through for him. They’d saved his life. Cliff seemed to be trying to make amends for past misdeeds, with his attempted explanation of his behavior back when Austin was a teenager.
He couldn’t tell if Cliff was running some kind of con on him, but if so, what was it? There was nothing that Cliff needed from him, so why would he be trying to trick him?
But then again, why the hell was Cliff still keeping secrets? How could he fully trust his oldest brother if he wouldn’t come clean?
It really seemed as if Cliff had come out here to help him. If Cliff had wanted to kidnap Austin and lock him away, he’d had every opportunity when they’d freed him from the concrete bunker.
Savannah wouldn’t have been able to stop them.
He nursed his coffee and rubbed his temple with his free hand, trying to clear the fog from his brain.
Had things really changed? Did Cliff really believe that he was a Seer, rather than a lunatic, and if so, how did he know?
It wasn’t impossible to believe that Korbin had betrayed his oath as a Healer and deliberately mis-diagnosed Austin. But then, why wasn’t Austin seeing real visions? From what he’d always been told, Seers could see snippets of the future. They were rare, so he didn’t know a lot about them, but he’d certainly never heard of them seeing crazy warped visions like what he’d been cursed with.
There was something about that…the implications of Austin being a seer…something wrong, somehow. Austin was too tired to think about what it was right now, though.
And Roy was stirring in the back seat of the truck again.
Fuck.
Austin gulped down the last of his coffee, shuddering at the burn, then walked around and opened the door.
“Hey,” he said to Roy. “Listen. I’m sorry about what I said about your mate. That was off-limits, and it was uncalled for.”
Roy’s eyes flew open and he stared up at Austin. “You really think that’s going to save your hide, boy?”
“No, you fucking asshole,” Austin snapped. “I don’t even think it’s going to make you behave with the slightest bit of decency, because that’s clearly beyond you. I’m apologizing because since realizing that Savannah is my mate, if, God forbid, I lost her and someone spoke about her that way…well…I can’t even think beyond the horror of losing her. It was a dick thing of me to say, especially when you were chained up and couldn’t defend yourself. I’m apologizing because…well, because Savannah makes me want to be a better wolf, honestly.”
Austin looked at her, lying there with her head resting on the window, the strain of exhaustion showing on her beautiful face. She had circles under her eyes, and even in sleep, her brows were pinched with worry. That made him feel like crap. She was his. He should be taking better care of her.
Austin expected Roy to start hollering, to start threatening, to wake her up. He braced himself to call his brothers for help.
