“A little faster,” I say.
She puts her muscle into it. We get up speed; not the kind of speed I had alone, but it gets her out of her thoughts.
“You can smell the leaves? The moss?”
“Yup.”
“Both of them? Right now? All the different notes?” she asks. “Like a wine connoisseur or something?”
“I don’t know about a wine connoisseur, but…it’s right there in the air for anybody to smell.”
She smiles. She’s happy to be with me, I suppose. For the moment, anyway.
“The institute smell must have driven you crazy.”
“More than you can imagine.”
“The antiseptic. Oh my God. You know, that cleaner they used?”
“Right,” I say. “The floor smell was the worst. But really every person and surface had their sharp smells.”
“You have such a sense of smell. It must have been hell.”
“Not when I caught your scent.”
Her face goes red.
“I mean your everyday scent. Clean and spicy. I could be in a place with dozens of people and hundreds of smells and pick it out. I could tell when you would enter the building.”
“Wow.” She paddles on, swishing the water.
“It’s nothing special. Just a skill I developed.”
She perks up. “For hunting?”
My heart sinks. That’s the sort of stuff the professor wanted to know. Would I practice smelling? Did hunger make my smell better? Would I scent and track my prey? Kill it with my bare hands? Feel the life go out of it? Even one of her beautiful deer? Yes. Absolutely.
Her boss Murray called me a caveman during one of their conversations. My face glows hot to think of it. They had a caveman cartoon on the TV at the institute. A figure of ridicule. Dragging women by their hair.
“A skill for hunting?” she asks again.
“Smell is a good skill for hunting,” I bite out.
She purses her lips.
We paddle in silence. I can see the trouble in her eyes. I hate when she looks like that. It’s how she always looked when she thought about the kitten—that mysterious kitten. She’s growing more and more upset now. More upset with each stroke of the paddle.
I pull her out the only way I know how—by giving her a piece of me.
“It always stunned me nobody else could smell things as I did. At first, anyway.”
She’s interested. Alert. “You mean back when they pulled you out of the woods?”
“Yes.”
“You thought everybody had a great sense of smell, but then they didn’t, and you were surprised?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” she says. “It must have been like entering another world.”
“It was.” It’s working. She’s back with me. I tell myself it’s for the best—that the more I can string her along, the less distance I’ll have to carry her.
But really I just don’t like to see her distressed.
“Of course they hadn’t used smell to survive. I understood it when I remembered back to what it was like when I was a boy. I had only to sit at the table and food would appear, or toward the end, in the root cellar.”
“The root cellar?”
“A small room set into the ground on the side of a house—”
“Dude, I know what a root cellar is.”
“So yes, I would hunt by smell out here. It was especially important in winter, but harder then, too, because cold animals have a fainter scent. It was worst of all when there was no snow and cold out. I would have to use my sense of hearing.”
She stills. “Would you say your sense of hearing is as good as your sense of smell?”
“Maybe.”
“Huh.”
“Most often I’d hunt through stillness. Pretending to be part of the scenery. When the rabbit hops by, you snatch it. If you wait long enough, something will scamper by.” I lower my voice. “It was a trick I used at my most desperate. Even a starving kid can wait.”
We’re moving faster now, getting down a rhythm. She’s moving. Focusing on me, on the task of paddling together.
“Why didn’t you just ask for help? Couldn’t you have found campers to help you?”
“Why would I ask for help? The police wanted to arrest me.”
“Wait—I thought you were eight.”
“Yeah, and the police were after me.”
“The police don’t arrest eight-year-old boys.”
“They wanted to lock me up even then,” I tell her. “Just like now.”
“That’s not how it works. A kid out alone? So many people would have helped you.”
“No thank you.”
“What do you mean, no thank you? People would’ve wanted to help—”
“Help me get locked up or killed,” I growl. “Or paraded in front of cameras like a sideshow beast at the circus. Wanting my story.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.” She looks like she really is sorry, like she really cares.
I grunt.
“It must have been…horrible.”
Anger fills me. I want to believe she cares. “I dealt with a lot of predators out here. I’ve been at the mercy of some of the worst ones. But the way those reporters came at me…I was weak from my injury, weak from the drugs. I didn’t understand.”
“I read about the orderly when I was researching your case. The one they paid to get you to come out of the hospital.”
“I thought he wanted to help me,” I say. “He said he would get me outside. I wanted to touch the grass.” Eat the grass. But I don’t say that. “I was so weak and dizzy. The infection made me hallucinate, or maybe it was the drugs. I wanted to go home so badly. It’s all I wanted.” I look at the passing scenery. It’s still like a dream to be home.
“Kiro,” she whispers.
“He took the tubes from my arm and got me a winter jacket and boots. He made me wear a hat—a ski mask—and shoved it over my face. He told me to walk normally. He told me they didn’t want me to leave, but he’d help me get home. He got me out a side entrance. Instead of nature, there was pavement and a mob of reporters, flashing camera lights at me, shouting. I was…bewildered. The orderly tried to take the ski mask off my face, and that’s when I started fighting. I hit him. I hit everyone I could. The flashes blinded me. I could barely stand. I was so weak. Thrashing around.” Like a wild animal. She probably knows. There were lots of witnesses to it.
“I heard about it.”
“I finally braced myself against the wall, fighting just to stand, unable to get away. They kept asking about the wolves—did the wolves raise me? Did they feed me? Where did I live? And the flashes from the cameras…” I breathe in, trying to stay calm. The terrain is changing. I concentrate on that.
“The kind of work those sorts of reporters do dehumanizes people. It’s wrong. But not all reporters are predatory like that.”
I close my eyes, remembering their dark hunger, wishing I could trust her. Wishing she wasn’t one of them.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ann
I feel shitty and stop asking questions.
We hit shore and trudge on. It’s farther than I imagined.
And it really seems far just for him to turn around and bring me back to the truck.
At first I had this idea that I could visit him again. I imagined mapping his coordinates on the phone. I would drive up and hike in.
The longer we go, the more I realize how silly that was.
And little by little I have this sense of journeying into something deep, not just in terms of geography, but something more—like sinking into shifting sands.
It makes me uncomfortable.
I used to say that the story begins where the comfort zone ends, but this feels different. Dangerous. But then I look at him, and he’s so beautiful and wild. And I think how he’s been treated—he’s never met anybody who doesn’t want to hurt him.
Most of all, I’m starting to q
uestion any story about him.
I don’t want to use him like those other reporters did—I won’t fucking do that. But what does that leave me with? The idea of doing his story for his own good? To help him gain economic independence?
This guy doesn’t need economic independence any more than the wind needs it.
I could figure out why he’s being pursued like he is, though. I could arm him with the information about who his enemies are and why. That’s still important. Or is it?
I own this, he said.
This wilderness area is as large as a small state. Maybe he really can get lost in it. Maybe he doesn’t have to literally own land. Maybe I don’t know jack shit about anything.
We head down a river that’s bounded by massive rock formations like a giant baby’s blocks, piled haphazardly. Pines along the sides stretch heavenward, as if to create a cathedral ceiling.
Times when I’ve been deep in the tropics I had this feeling of being somewhere exotic and otherworldly. I never thought about the far north as being exotic and otherworldly, but the wildness of this place is every bit as intense.
What the fuck am I doing out here?
But then I look at Kiro, and I know what I’m doing here. This is the man who reached his hand out to me, who protected me from Donny. And our connection sizzles. It sizzled every time I walked into his room, and it sizzles now.
And I’m seeing him home. It’s just a longer trip than I thought.
He carries the canoe from one waterway to another like it weighs nothing. When I ask to stop, tired, he humors me. I eat a few energy bars. I’ll need to make the food stretch out a day or two longer than I’d originally thought.
I want to take pictures, but I decide to wait. Conserve my battery. We end up back in another stream at dusk. He pushes us off. So much water up here. The stars overhead are bright.
“Can’t we stop? I’m so sleepy.”
“Sleep.”
I resist at first, but finally I give in and curl up with my head against a pack, telling myself I’ll just close my eyes. I drift off to the soft sound of the paddle.
When I wake up, he’s carrying me in his arms.
“Kiro?” I whisper.
“You don’t have to whisper, Ann.” He lays me down on something soft. The sleeping bag. He zips me in and stretches out beside me.
A strange shriek echoes through the dark forest, sending a shiver down my spine. “What is that?”
“Predator and prey,” he rumbles. He draws a finger down my cheek. “You’re safe here. Nothing can get you here.”
“Is this your place? Are you home?”
“It’s an island. Sleep.”
I pull out four slim packets of Starbucks instant coffee the next morning and set them on a log near the fire. Four slim packets from Starbucks. “I need to heat water. You’re lucky I brought extra of these. I’d be a monster without my coffee.”
“You need coffee every day?”
“Hell yeah. Don’t worry. I have four.”
He looks concerned.
“I’m a total addict. What can I say?”
“What happens when you don’t have your coffee?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“You would survive it, right?”
“No.”
He draws nearer and takes a strand of my hair. “Tell me what happens.” It’s kind of a command.
“Why?”
“I just need to know.”
I narrow my eyes. “Exactly how far is your place?”
He winds a curl around his rough, sinewy finger. “It’s far.”
“How far?”
“I can make thirty miles a day.” He watches my face, all-seeing eyes rimmed in rich, chocolatey lashes. “Four more days, I would say,” he adds casually, unwinding the curl now.
“Wait—what?” The air goes out of me. I’m sure he’s joking…except Kiro doesn’t joke. “Four days? You mean two days in and two days out?”
“No, I mean four days in.”
“A hundred twenty miles into the wilderness? That’s where we’re going? We’ll be in Canada.”
He shrugs.
“And then you’re going to bring me back? All that way?”
He observes me curiously, as though he’s waiting for something.
I get this sense that the shifting sands I’ve been feeling really are shifting sands. That things are no longer solid. That I’ve sunk into a different world.
“It’s a long way just to…bring me to your place…”
The birds sing around me. Water laps at nearby rocks.
“It’s a long way just to turn around,” I add.
The way he watches me now, I have this crazy flash of insight—that he’s the predator and I’m prey.
“A long way…”
He drops his voice. “You’re not going back.”
“Seriously, Kiro. Come on.”
“You’re coming home with me.”
“And then I’m going back. I have to go back. You know I do.”
“You won’t go back.”
Something flips upside down in my belly. You won’t go back. He’s serious. Dead serious.
Even so I smile, because it’s so preposterous. “No, Kiro. That’s not going to happen.”
He studies my eyes. We’re awash inside a moment of truth, a strange pivot point between two universes. It’s not a question for him. Maybe it never was. “You’ll be my mate.”
My mouth goes dry. “You can’t just make me come with you and be your mate.”
He observes me with those fathomless golden eyes, waiting to see what I’ll do, thinking maybe I’ll try to get away. Knowing he can stop me.
Because he’s the king out here.
My heart pounds. Is it possible he imagines us growing old together in some cave or something? I hang out the wash on a tree branch? Woodland animals frolicking in the background?
Why not? Kiro’s in control here.
How stupid I was! So blinded by this man’s heartbreaking beauty, so consumed with affection for him, with getting his story, that I let him lead me miles into his world. So deep that I have no way of finding my way back.
Yes, he melts my panties. Who am I kidding? He inspires confusing, aching feelings in me that run way deeper than lust. But I’ve also seen him kill men with his bare hands as easy another man might open a jar of pickles.
“It’s not happening,” I say.
“It already happened.”
“What, you’ll just drag me by my hair?”
A flicker of pain in his eyes tells me the comment stung. “I would never drag you by the hair, Ann,” he says softly, touching my hair again. Watching my lips. “I’d carry you, though. If you forced me to.”
“Are you fucking serious? Listen to yourself.” I push him away. “You would deprive me of my freedom? After the hell of your confinement and the way we fought out of that place, you’d seriously turn around and do the same thing to me?”
He crouches by the small blackened pile of wood and starts working on making a fire by twirling a stick. Because he’s fucking Kiro. “We’ll start out soon.”
“And you don’t tell me until now?”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“I can’t even believe you. You would trick me and take my freedom? Can you get how fucked up that is? How fucked up on every level? You of all people should understand how wrong that is.”
The fire springs to life. “Yes, it would be wrong, wouldn’t it? To deceive a person. To trek with them for miles, never revealing their true purpose.”
I stiffen. He knows.
He glowers up at me, all brutal beauty, wilder and hotter than the fire he made with his bare fucking hands.
My heart pounds as I think about that phone conversation I had in the motel room with my editor. Is his hearing as advanced as his smell? Of course it is! And oh my God, the way I talked to my editor in the truck…
“To trick them,” he continues. “T
o make them think you just want to help.”
My blood races as he rises, as he comes to me. “All you ever wanted was to have the savage’s story. To get the pictures of him that nobody else could get. For your news story.”
“You’re misunderstanding this, Kiro. I’m not one of them—I swear.”
He fingers the collar of my jacket. “Then why didn’t you tell me your true purpose? Your true identity?”
Fuck. “So this is my punishment? To be your conquered woman?”
Another flicker of hurt behind his eyes. I feel like shit.
“Kiro, listen—it was an accident that I figured out who you were. I was there for a different story. And I did want to help you—I still do.”
“Like those other reporters?”
“I’m not like them.”
His eyes are beautiful and golden and totally feral—how did I never see it? He uses the collar of my jacket to pull me to him. He slides a hand down the lapel, and I think he’s going to strip it off—strip me.
I pull the sides together. But instead, he reaches into my pocket and draws out the baggies that hold my phone parts. My lifeline. He pockets them.
I grab for it, but he takes my wrists.
“I thought we were friends.”
His voice is a velvety rumble. “We’re not friends.”
“Why would you want somebody not your friend as your mate?”
He brings his lips to the crown of my head. “You don’t need to be my friend to be my mate.”
“Kiro, think. I’m on your side. You’re being hunted. Why? You need to understand what’s happening out there. You live in the world, and whether you like it or not, you need means, you need knowledge of your situation—I can help you with all of that…”
“I have all I need.”
The gravel in his tone makes me think about the dressing room. He’s thinking about it, too—I can feel it.
Four or five days of travel.
The deeper we go in, the more helpless I’ll become. And he has my phone, though it’s not like I’d have a signal out here anyway.
I really am alone—with Kiro. He’s utterly in charge of my destiny now.
I look over at the canoe. What if I jumped in and just paddled away? I could backtrack…maybe.
He seems to read my mind. “You think you can paddle faster than I can swim? You think you can run faster than I can? And even if you could somehow disable me or lose me, which would not happen, but even if…do you think you could find your way back?” He slides a knuckle under my chin, lifts my head.
Savage Mafia Prince: a Dangerous Royals romance Page 17
