The engine caught on the first turn. I pulled out of the garage heading west, jaw set, hands steady on the wheel despite the split knuckles and the warm slick of blood between my fingers.
The cleanup team was already en route to the garage. The video feeds from the building’s internal cameras had been flagged for wipe thirty seconds after the first howl registered.
Every contingency I’d planned for and hoped not to need was now running in parallel, and the weight of it settled across my shoulders with the heft of something I had been carrying for longer than I cared to admit.
I merged onto the highway and calculated where Declan’s sedan would be when the on-ramp delivered me to the westbound lanes. The math was not comforting.
He had three minutes, maybe four. Enough to establish a lead that would require pushing the SUV past speeds that attracted attention, which meant police, which meant complications I did not have time for.
The wolf paced behind my ribs. The dominance pressure had banked to a steady hum rather than the white-hot conflagration of the garage, but it was still there, still live, still pushing me to drive faster than the vehicle was designed to go on a public road in daylight.
I did not let it. Control was not something I practiced. It was something I was. The certainty settled into my chest as the city began to thin around me. Not a resolution. Not a vow. Something simpler and more fixed: the fact that I was not going to let Declan Morrow get between me and my mate.
The word had weight. It had always had weight. But standing in a garage full of blood and broken men had crystallized it into something that lived below thought, below instinct, in the place where the oldest parts of me made decisions that the civilized parts merely executed.
The SUV carried me west. The shoulder wound had stopped bleeding, or the jacket had soaked through enough that the wet no longer registered as separate from the fabric. My knuckles had begun to stiffen. The split skin along the ridge of bone would need cleaning.
None of it mattered.
What mattered was the road ahead, and the fact that somewhere on it, Declan Morrow was driving toward the same destination with the confidence of a man who believed he had already won.
He was wrong.
I had known that since the moment Jai Flynn walked into my office with a baby from a cardboard box and looked at me like I was a problem he intended to solve whether I cooperated or not. Some truths arrived fully formed. This was one of them.
The wolf settled. The road opened. I drove.
Chapter Fifteen
~ Jai ~
The highway ate the miles in the dark, and Ashe drove like the speed limit was a suggestion that had personally offended him. I sat in the back with Grace strapped in beside me, one hand resting on her car seat buckle, not because it helped anything, but because it gave my fingers something to do besides shake.
The engine hummed at a pitch that lived just below a growl, constant and low, the kind of sound that vibrated through the leather seats and worked its way into your bones. Heated leather. Tension. The faint chemical smell of the air freshener Ashe had clipped to the vent, doing battle with the cherry blossom residue that clung to my skin no matter how many times I washed it.
I lost track of how long we’d been driving. The dashboard clock said forty-three minutes.
It felt longer.
Grace was quiet. Not the good kind of quiet. The kind that made my chest tighten every time I looked at her—small face pinched, brow furrowed, her tiny fingers curled into fists so tight the knuckles had gone white.
She’d cried for the first ten minutes after we left the garage, the full-volume, catastrophic wail of an infant who had opinions about SUVs and intended to express them at length, and then she’d gone silent. Just like that. Volume off.
Which was worse.
“You’re okay,” I murmured, my voice low enough that Ashe wouldn’t hear it over the engine. “You’re fine. We’re going somewhere safe. Braham’s coming. He’s coming, and he’s probably breaking every traffic law between here and Portlandto do it, which is his problem, not ours. His insurance premiums are definitely his problem.”
Her eyes were open. Alert. Too alert for a two-week-old, tracking the red glow of the dashboard lights with the focused attention of someone conducting important research. She didn’t make a sound.
I kept talking. Nothing with meaning. Just sound. Just the signal that I was there, that the world hadn’t ended, that the SUV was still moving and the road was still under us and somewhere ahead was a place with walls and locks and a man who wore custom suits and could probably bench-press this vehicle if the mood struck him.
I talked about the manuscript. About Petra’s inevitable semicolon rage. About the fact that Drew and Eli were now so transparently in love that the entire publishing industry was going to know exactly what had happened to me, and I was going to have to change my name and move to Argentina.
Ashe checked the rearview mirror. Once. Twice. Three times in the span of thirty seconds, his eyes cutting to the glass with the focused intensity of a man running calculations he hadn’t shared. Each time, his jaw tightened by a fraction I wouldn’t have caught if I hadn’t been watching for it.
“We clear?” I asked.
His eyes met mine in the mirror for half a second. Flat. Assessed. Then back to the road. “For now.”
