Page 20

His grip didn’t loosen. The warmth of his fingers didn’t fade. He began to jog straight across the yard, and he did not go around the dead. He went through them. I stepped over a hand. I kept my eyes fixed on the back of his coat, because the alternative was to look.

I ran at the end of his arm, gravel biting into my soles.

And that was when I realised I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Chapter 8

Tau

Even as I stuffed her into the back of the sedan, I was asking myself why. The answer was there, but I refused to acknowledge it.

She weighed almost nothing. Her bare feet were scraped raw, and a pulse hammered against the pads of my fingers where I had held her wrist the whole way across the yard, as if letting go would loose something I could not put back. I snatched the rifle bag from the shadow of the fence and threw it into the footwell. I tossed my coat over her and jumped behind the wheel, engaging the locks.

They thudded down. Beneath the coat, her breath caught, small and sharp. I filed it and did not know why.

“Stay low,” I growled through the thin muslin cloth. I had not yet dared to pull it from my face.

I turned the key and the engine caught. I sped away from the area, gravel spitting beneath the tyres, then forced my foot to ease before the road ahead.

When I glanced in the rearview mirror, I couldn’t see her. Only my coat, a dark mound on the back seat, rising and falling too fast. Even if the car was spotted on any cameras, the plates wouldn’t lead to me. The girl wouldn’t be seen and my face was covered.

I glanced at the speedometer. The last thing I needed was to be picked up for speeding. I played everything back in my mind. Surface roads only. No toll tags. Nothing could lead back to me except Zero.

Everyone worth dying was dead. Only two girls had stood close enough to see the scar and I had one of them in the car with me.

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. There must have been nineteen girls. Perhaps twenty. The likelihood of them being caught was high. Gangs did not like loose ends that could expose their network, and this one seemed well established.

I glanced in the rearview mirror again. At the problem I had accrued.

The problem was shaking so hard I could feel it through the seat.

“Is this a hand grenade in your pocket?” she whispered.

Her voice was hoarse and small, and absurdly steady for someone who had been dragged across a car park. I swerved out of my lane, cursing beneath my breath. A horn blared. I corrected.

“Don’t touch it.”

“This ring—”

Her fingers had found the pin by touch in the dark. Of everything in that car, she had found the one thing that could take us both apart.

I reached back and yanked my coat off her, feeling for the grenade before setting it on the empty passenger seat. The lining came away smelling of her. Copper. Sweat. Something sweet beneath it, berries and shea butter, cheap and ridiculous. I did not breathe it in. I breathed it in.

This is why I preferred to be alone. To work alone. No one interfering in my business.

So why wasn’t I dropping her off somewhere safe?

The honest answer sat in the mirror, in a pair of eyes that had looked at me over the cloth as if deciding whether I was a monster. Bruised and bloodied and furious, they still had some light left in them.

I looped around, taking a longer route back to the motel as the paranoia began to settle in. Every set of headlights behind me was a question.

“Where are you taking me?” she whispered.

Her voice cracked in the middle. She cleared her throat and tried to straighten it, as if it were a matter of pride.

I reached up and tilted the mirror until I met her eyes. They had been fierce in the yard. Now they were wide and soft, wet in the passing streetlights, and harder to hold than I wanted to admit. I focused on the road.

“No part of this state is safe now,” I said. “The man who tried to purchase you was a senator. The people involved will have links to many establishments, including local law enforcement.”