by Dakota West
We have nowhere to run, she thought. What are we going to do, circle the car until he gets bored?
Then Vince called out.
“Quinn, sweetheart,” his voice rang out. “Get outta there, will you?”
Quinn’s stomach turned over, and she thought she might vomit up her dinner.
Lights flicked on in the motel, but no doors opened.
“Go,” Hudson said.
“I’m not after you,” Vince called again, his voice like fingernails on a chalkboard. “You can escape, no problem.”
“Go,” said Julius.
“I’m not going,” she said, her teeth clenched. “He’s not supposed to shoot me, I can keep you safe.”
Vince moved again. In a couple of seconds, he’d be able to see them, huddled behind the car, and then what?
“He’s going to shoot you,” Hudson said, his eyes roving the empty parking lot, looking for any escape. “He’s not your parents. He doesn’t care about you. Go.”
There has to be some kind of weapon, Quinn thought frantically, looking down at the three of them. Something we can do.
“Can you throw a pocketknife?”
Hudson just shook his head.
What else? Belts, wallets, my purse, keys...
She blinked, holding her breath.
Keys.
Vince won’t shoot at me, she thought. Right?
Quinn didn’t let herself think any more. She grabbed the keys from Julius’s hand and pulled herself up and into the SUV before either of them could stop her.
She’d gotten them into this mess, and she was going to get them out.
Please don’t let him shoot me, she thought. He knows who I am, after all.
She could see Vince through the windshield, and watched him hesitate, the gun slightly lowered.
“That’s right. Just come over here and then I’ll take care of these animals that took you.”
She slid into the driver’s seat, jammed her foot on the brake, and started the car, her palms slippery with sweat
Vince frowned.
“Quinn?”
The passenger door flew open and Hudson’s face was there, half furious and half terrified.
“What are you—”
Quinn gunned it. She screamed her best war cry as the SUV flew forward, straight toward Vince.
He stood there, shocked. At the last second he shot, but the shot went wide, smashing through the windshield and missing Quinn herself.
The last thing she heard was the crunch of metal against the brick of the motel and then a long, horrible scream.
Then everything went black.
Chapter Thirteen
Julius
“Fuck!” shouted Hudson as the car flew forward, yanking his hand along with it. “What the fuck is she doing?”
It seemed to happen in slow motion. Quinn steered the car right at the shooter, and Julius could hear her screaming as she went.
Both of them took off after her.
No, thought Julius. No, no, not Quinn, please not Quinn...
There was one more shot, the sound of glass, and then the SUV hit the wall of the motel, pinning Vince.
“QUINN!” Julius screamed, yanking open the door of the SUV. His screams mingled with Vince’s, but Julius couldn’t have cared less about the man.
Her face was bloody, her nose broken, the airbag fully deployed.
But she was breathing.
The windshield had a single hole in it, and Julius could see where the bullet had punched through the seat.
On the other side of the car, Hudson had picked up Vince’s gun, checking the ammo and backing himself against the SUV, just in case.
Quinn’s steady heartbeat under his fingertips, Julius felt awful for Hudson for a moment. When he’d gotten out of the Lost Souls, he’d thought he’d never be shot at again.
Motel doors started opening and confused, sleepy people spilled out, murmuring to each other. Someone said they’d called the cops, but most took one look at Hudson and backed away.
“He had the gun,” Julius said, desperately, pointing at the pale, bloody Vince. He was still breathing in ragged gasps.
Then, two faces came around the corner of the building, took one look at the small, unconscious form inside the car, and began screaming and running.
“Quinn!” her mother shouted, galloping forward in her nightgown, Quinn’s father close on her heels.
“Oh, my god, what have you done to her?” she shrieked, her voice pure panic. “No, no, my baby...”
She shoved Julius away from Quinn with a surprising strength and tried to take her daughter in her arms.
“What did you do?” she shouted hysterically.
Julius couldn’t take it any more.
“What did we do?” he asked, furious. He pointed at Vince, bloody and still pinned in front of the car. “He tried to shoot me, and your daughter saved my life.”
She wasn’t paying attention, just standing on the running board, cradling Quinn’s head in her arms and crying.
“My baby,” she said, over and over. “My baby, my baby...”
Her father went up to Julius and shoved him in the chest, and Julius put his hands up in the air. He wanted absolutely nothing more than to beat this man to a pulp, or better yet, shift and tear him into a thousand pieces, but he forced himself to stay calm.
Let the law do its job, he thought.
Arthur Taylor shoved him again.
“You think you can use young girls to do your dirty work, you animal?”
Julius growled.
Then, just in time, two police cars came speeding around the corner and came to a full stop. Seconds later, an ambulance arrived.
Two cops got out and shouted.
“Put the gun down!” they called to Hudson, who very calmly raised his hands and put the gun on the ground. Seconds later, he was against the SUV, getting handcuffed by one cop as the other called for more backup and another ambulance.
Everyone was screaming. Vince was still screaming, Quinn’s parents were screaming. A baby was crying somewhere in the motel, and Quinn was still unconscious.
“Arrest these men!” Quinn’s father shouted.
“My baby!” wailed her mother.
Finally, there was nothing Julius could do but watch.
It was almost two in the morning before he got finished giving his statement to the police, sitting in a small interview room, drinking cup after cup of shitty coffee until his hands nearly started shaking from the sheer force of the caffeine mixed with his total exhaustion. He gave the same answers over and over again, for hours, until finally, the officer questioning him stopped, looked down at his notes, and sighed, rubbing his temples.
He kept asking about Quinn and Hudson. They told him Quinn was alive and in the hospital.
They wouldn’t say anything about Hudson.
“All right, I think that’s everything,” the officer said said.
“Can I at least go sit in the lobby?” Julius asked. “These lights are giving me a headache.”
It probably wasn’t the lights, though one over in the corner was flickering. It sure wasn’t helping.
“Not just yet,” the officer said apologetically. “I gotta talk to the boss first.”
“Come on, Rick,” Julius said. He knew everyone at the station by name, after all. “You know where I live.”
“Give me ten minutes,” Rick said. “Sorry.”
It was twenty until he came back and poked his head in the door.
“You’re free to go,” he said. “We’re not charging you with anything.”
“Where’s Hudson?”
Rick’s face went carefully blank. “They’re still talking to him,” he said.
Julius put his head down on the table for a moment. He’d managed to stay calm and cool for the five hours of questions, but this was enough to nearly make him give up. He needed Hudson to go free, and he needed to get out of the police station, call the hospital, and see ho
w Quinn was. She’d woken up as the medics loaded her into the ambulance, but he was still worried sick about her. She was only human, after all.
“Rick, you know him,” Julius said, his voice echoing off the table. “You know he didn’t do anything.”
Rick sighed. Then he entered the room and closed the door, a slightly guilty look on his face.
“Listen, we can’t question the other two witnesses just yet, because they’re in no condition to talk,” Rick said.
Julius sat bolt upright.
“Is Quinn—”
“Heavily sedated and sleeping, yes,” Rick said. The corner of his mouth twitched into an almost-smile. “Hunter and Cora are at the hospital with her, and Ash has been getting updates.”
Julius slumped back in his chair.
“The guy she crashed into got airlifted to Redding,” Rick said. “No word on him yet.”
Julius felt bad about Vince for a split second. Getting pinned between a car and a brick building had to be incredibly painful, and most of his bones were probably broken or worse. He might not survive.
He’d tried to kill Julius, though, so he didn’t feel that bad. And even if he woke up, it wasn’t like he was going to admit to trying to murder the two of them.
“Just between the two of us, there are a couple other witnesses,” Rick said, leaning over the table and speaking quietly. “Gunshots have a way of getting people to peek out of their blinds. Nobody saw the whole thing, but plenty of people saw the second and third shots before Quinn got into that car.”
Cautiously, Julius let himself feel relieved. That meant that Hudson, at least, would be cleared fairly quickly.
They could still press charges against Quinn, but Julius had his doubts. It was a pretty clear self-defense case, and besides, he knew an excellent lawyer.
“What about the Taylors?” he asked.
Rick exhaled, his cheeks puffing out slightly.
“We can only hold them for another day or so without charging them with something,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got nothing besides the fact that Vince was in their organization, but they’re claiming he acted alone. So someone who knows something either needs to step forward or wake up.”
I guess I hope Vince survives, thought Julius.
“Thanks,” he told Rick, and the two of them walked into the police station’s lobby to wait for Hudson.
Chapter Fourteen
Quinn
When Quinn opened her eyes, she thought she was back in the clearing with Julius and Hudson, lying in the grass and staring into the bright sky. There was the gentle rush of the creek, the sound of the wind through the trees, the intermittent beeping of the...
Quinn blinked. Then she blinked again.
“There you are,” said a female voice she didn’t recognize.
Quinn tried to look at the voice, but there was something that kept her from moving her head.
Suddenly, things came back to her in flashes: getting in the SUV, screaming as she stomped the gas pedal, the terrified look on Vince’s face right before the crash.
She was somewhere with a lot of beeping and bright lights.
“What,” Quinn said. She meant to ask more questions than that — What’s going on, where am I? — but she couldn’t get her body to cooperate. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and her tongue was so slow to respond that she thought it might have come disconnected somehow.
Then there was a straw at her lips and a friendly but unfamiliar female face hovering over her.
“It’s water,” she said. “Drink, you must be thirsty.”
Quinn managed to close her lips around the straw and take a couple of sips, getting almost as much water down her front as into her mouth.
“You’re in the hospital,” the woman said.
Duh, thought Quinn.
“You’ve got some fractured ribs, a broken nose, two black eyes, and some pretty bad whiplash, but the doctors think you’re gonna be fine,” she went on. “I’m Cora, Ash’s mate, by the way.”
Quinn swallowed and tried to control her face. She just felt so out of it.
“Yeah, you’re supposed to put on your seatbelt before driving into brick walls,” said an unfamiliar male voice. Quinn patiently waited for him to enter her field of vision, and in a few moments, there he was, a guy with chin-length hair also leaning over her.
“I’m Hunter, Ash’s other mate,” he said. “Welcome back.”
Quinn tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work.
“Juliudson?” she managed to get out.
“Julius and Hudson are still at the police station,” the man said, exchanging a glance with Cora. “They’re fine.”
Someone’s hand reached out and stroked Quinn’s hair, gently.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Cora said, her voice soft and soothing. “Get some more sleep. We’ll be here when you wake up again.”
“Thank you,” Quinn managed to whisper before slipping under.
She woke again hours later, a sharp pain in her side making her eyelids fly open. This time, sunlight streamed in the windows, and the room looked almost completely different than it had previously.
“Quinn!” said a male voice.
It was Julius’s voice.
In moments, Julius was on one side of her, Hudson on the other, both holding her hands. Someone held the water to her lips again and she sucked at the straw, getting most of it in her mouth this time.
Then she took a deep breath, looking from one of them to the other. Her ribs protested and she cringed.
“Hey,” she said.
Hudson grinned and Julius kissed her hair very, very carefully.
The next few days at the hospital blurred together in Quinn’s mind. Some police officers came in and questioned her. They seemed oddly concerned with how she’d gotten the keys, but she insisted again and again that she’d just grabbed them from Julius’s hand.
At some point later, she heard Ash and Julius in her room, quietly discussing how the police had found two bullets embedded in the outside of the SUV and one in the passenger seat.
“It’s pretty clear he was shooting at you,” Ash said. Quinn didn’t hear Julius’s response.
From the moment she could talk, Julius and Hudson wouldn’t hear of any plan that didn’t involve her recuperating at their house. Quinn protested weakly for about thirty seconds, and then caved. After all, her parents were being charged and held, mostly because she’d told the police what she’d overheard and they’d subpoenaed phone records, and she was in no shape to take care of herself. She had a neck brace, hard bandages around her ribs, and had to move like some kind of robot.
For some reason, she was surprised when Julius drove the Prius up to a beautiful Victorian house in the nicest neighborhood in Granite Valley. She didn’t know why, but she’d imagined something else for them — maybe a cabin way out in the woods.
“Wow,” she said.
“I know, right?” said Hudson, hopping out of the car and stretching a little. Then he opened the passenger side door and helped Quinn out very, very slowly.
“This is beautiful,” she said. “Did you guys do this?”
“Mostly me,” Hudson said, her hand on his arm, just in case. Julius unlocked the front door. “Turns out mechanical skills translate well to home repair. I’ve still got the garage out back for tinkering.”
“Watch the step,” Julius said as Quinn walked into their front room, both men watching her every move, just waiting to swoop in and help.
She wondered how she’d gotten so lucky.
The trial had been pushed back a week, due to circumstances, and it was a week of freshly squeezed orange juice, breakfast in bed, reality TV marathons and sitting in the garage, talking to Hudson as he fiddled with motorcycles. For the week, he’d asked his clients to bring their bikes to his garage instead of the shop so he could watch over Quinn.
There was no more sex, at least for Quinn, though she could heard Hudson and J
ulius sometimes in the master bedroom. She was the tiniest bit jealous, mostly that she couldn’t join in — even walking too fast still made her ribs scream in pain.
By the day the trial rolled around again, Quinn insisted on coming out.
“You’re still not healed,” Julius said doubtfully.
Quinn gulped her orange juice, sitting at the kitchen counter.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll just stand there. I won’t even carry a sign.”
The two men looked doubtful.
“Don’t make me call a taxi,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“You really can be stubborn,” Hudson muttered. “Fine.”
She grinned.
Two hours later, she stood on the courthouse steps again, but on the other side, surrounded by shifter, humans, and their kids, all shouting and holding up pro-triad-marriage signs. She held onto Hudson’s arm as he waved a sign that said LET LOVE RING.
Quinn had been worried that the people over there might hate her. She wouldn’t have blamed them, honestly, but instead they treated her like any other person. It probably helped that she’d taken down ShifterSexManiacs.com, and now the page simply read, “We support triad marriage rights.”
Across the steps, there were considerably fewer people holding up anti-marriage signs, and they were less enthusiastic than before. Whereas her parents had thought that an assassination would galvanize people to their cause, it turned out that the opposite had happened — no one wanted to be on the murdering side.
As she watched, a triad — two men and a woman, plus their adorable kid — walked up the steps, grinning and waving at their supporters, totally ignoring the other side of the steps.
Then Julius walked up the steps, looking through the crowd for Quinn and Hudson.
Quinn’s stomach knotted, remembering what had happened last time.
What if there are other shooters, she thought. Maybe there was a backup plan.
He waved at the two of them, and they waved back. Then he walked up the steps and entered the courthouse, the heavy door swinging shut behind him.
