After a few minutes of walking, they followed a bend in the road and came upon an old gas station that looked like it had been abandoned at least a decade ago. A nondescript sedan was parked to one side next to a rusted dumpster. Hunt shoved her toward it and she had to take quick, stumbling steps to keep up with his long-legged stride.
He unlocked the passenger door and pushed her inside the vehicle. A pair of handcuffs appeared in his hand and she wondered if he’d been carrying them around this entire time.
Never know when you might need to tie someone up against their will.
The thought inexplicably made her want to laugh, which probably meant she was in the beginning stages of a complete meltdown.
Hunt looped the handcuffs through a metal bar of the seat’s frame. The chain on the handcuffs pulled taut when she tried to raise her arms higher than her lap. Anybody looking through the window wouldn’t be able to tell that she was handcuffed inside. And she couldn’t signal for help.
Smart. It made her think he’d done something like this before.
Once satisfied that she was completely secure, Hunt slammed the door shut and walked around to the driver’s side. He settled into the seat with a weary sigh. She wondered if she could take advantage of that. He had to go to sleep sometime.
A hard knock on her window startled her. Savage must have followed them. His manic smile looked even more eerie through the dirty glass. Hunt rolled down the window.
“We meet back here in forty-eight hours,” Hunt said. “There’s a set of burner phones in the glove box. Let me know if you find anything or run into any trouble.”
“Yes, sir.” Savage’s smile was more like a baring of teeth. His eyes moved down her body, lingering on the handcuffs on her wrists before returning to her face. “If anything happens to him, I will hunt you down, little girl. And you’ll get a lot worse than a bullet in the head. Understand?”
She swallowed hard against the painful lump in her throat. “Yeah, I understand.”
“Good.”
He put his hand in through the window and she instinctively flinched away. He laughed and just reached for the glove box above her knees. He pulled out two prepaid cell phones that were still in their packaging. If you bought them with cash, calls on those things were almost impossible to trace. Favored by drug dealers, gang members, and terrorists the world over.
That was what the news had called them—terrorists. Maybe it wasn’t too far from the truth.
Savage was illuminated in the headlights as Hunt backed up the car. His eyes glowed like they were lit with a demon energy. For a flashing moment, she saw him differently. Reddened flesh that was thick and scaled like a reptile with more muscles swelling under the skin than any human should be capable of producing.
When she blinked again, the vision was gone.
And all that she knew was that if she ever saw that again, it would be last thing she would ever see.
Chapter Eleven
Hunt didn’t trust her.
But he also didn’t want to kill her.
Those two conflicting thoughts had been at war inside him almost since the day they’d decided to snatch her up.
This whole thing was a mistake. It would take an idiot not to realize that. But he was in it now and there was no turning back.
And he realized that the story about the storage locker was very likely complete and utter bullshit. When you put a gun to someone’s head, they’ll say pretty much anything to save their own skin. The desperate urge to survive was just a part of human nature. Otherwise, they wouldn’t exist as a species. He couldn’t blame her for that.
Hunt watched her out of the corner of his eye as he drove. Predawn light was just starting to rise over the horizon and it set her features off in a soft glow that made her look almost ethereal. She was like a butterfly trapped under glass and slowly suffocating—fragile, beautiful, and uselessly clinging to life.
He was deliberately not thinking about what had to happen next. Whether the storage locker turned out to be a stalling tactic or not, the road they were on only led to one place. He couldn’t send her back home, not if it meant putting her entire team at risk.
She hadn’t fallen asleep despite her silence, eyes wide open and staring off into space. Her head rested against the window. The unnatural position of her arms probably made it too difficult for her to get comfortable enough to sleep. The handcuffs were a necessary evil. She’d already proven that she couldn’t be trusted.
“You ever gonna tell me what you’re looking for?”
Her voice surprised him after nearly an hour of silence. It was soft and husky, like she had just smoked a cigarette and scorched her throat. He bet that was how she sounded when she first woke up in the morning. He desperately wanted to know what she would look like rolling over in his bed after he kept her up half the night doing all the things that one person could do to another. That thought had him hard instantly and he had to tamp down on the sudden surge of desire before it took him to a dangerous place.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“If I’m going to die for something, it only seems fair that I know what it is.” She shifted in the seat. “You don’t seem much into fairness, though.”
“You’re right about that, sweetheart.” His tone was flippant, but inside his emotions were seething. It wasn’t like she’d believe a word he had to say, anyway. “Maybe you should focus on worrying about yourself.”
His eyes stayed trained on the road ahead of them, but he felt her gaze move over him. Her attention was like the stroke of a feather, so soft that he almost missed it.
“Which branch of service were you?” she asked.
He glanced at her, surprised and a little dismayed. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“Your hair, the way they all call you sir, even how you walk. And then there are those combat boots you always wear that look like you’ve owned them for a decade, except the soles are brand-new because you just had them replaced.” Her voice stayed soft but there was a hardness to it that said she was done being messed with. “My uncle was in the Navy, but I wouldn’t guess that about you. Army or Marines, probably. Maybe Special Forces?”
He fought the urge to gape at her. Clever little bitch. “You’re smarter than you look.”
The ghost of a smile crossed her lips. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“How does a senator’s daughter get so good at reading people?”
“What do you think is the point of a campaign event?” The handcuffs made a soft jingling sound as she shifted so her back rested against the door. “You’ve got to be able to tell at a glance who’s a blowhard about to waste your time and who’s just one more crappy speech away from cutting you a gigantic check. You’ve got to be good at figuring people out. I spend more time listening than I do talking, which makes it easy. If people forget you’re there, they’ll reveal almost anything.”
They were two people caught on the fringes for entirely different reasons, deliberately trying to be overlooked. Maybe he had more in common with this girl than he thought, not that it was going to save her.
“Is that what you do for your father, help him figure people out?”
“I’m just a sweet, innocent girl from a good, Christian family.” Her voice was sarcastic. “People don’t pay attention to me. I’m boring. Which means that I can do a lot of listening and observing without anyone realizing that I’m even there. It’s a good skill to have.”
He raised an eyebrow. “But you like computers better than people.”
She deliberately rattled her handcuffs. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I see your point.”
It took an effort to keep his gaze fixed on the road. His eyes kept moving toward her like they were stuck in a gravitational pull. Every time he tried to sneak a glance, he found her watching him. He had to admit that her sudden interest was a little unnerving. It made him feel like he wasn’t the one in control.
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��Is that where you all met, in the military?”
She might be the most persistent girl that he had ever met. “You ask too many questions.”
“Nothing better to do.” She shrugged, but the look in her eyes was shrewd. “Did something happen to you? Something bad?”
Freezing cold ran through his veins. His fingers went sort of numb and tingling where they gripped the steering wheel. He could feel the beast rising up inside of him, threatening to show this girl with too much soft flesh and no defenses entirely more than she wanted to see.
Hunt was not doing this. Not with her.
“Leave it alone.”
She was still watching him, obviously alert for anything that his face might give away. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
The country road they drove seemed to stretch on forever. He was suddenly very aware of the fact that they were stuck in a car together for several hundred more miles. Maybe he should have just stashed her in the trunk.
“Why do you keep asking?”
“Maybe I just want to know what made you like this.” She swallowed a little too hard and he realized that it wasn’t all bluster. Some of this was the fear talking. “You’re planning to kill me at the end of all this, right? What’s the harm in talking?”
He realized in that moment that she wanted to understand him. Maybe she’d convinced herself that the monster under her bed couldn’t possibly be real. There had to be a human man behind the curtain. It was the only way for her to keep making sense of the world. She was desperate for him to not just be the evil kidnapper with no redemption story.
But whether he was the good guy or the villain, this could only end one way.
“Nothing happened to me.” He lied because telling the truth wasn’t an option.
“Did someone hurt you?” Her voice is small, like she was forcing herself to barrel forward. “Was it torture?”
Something must have flickered across his face because she immediately seized on it.
“It was torture, wasn’t it?” She studied his face. It made him feel like a specimen she was trying to catalogue for her collection. Who was this girl?
“No,” Hunt snapped.
“It was torture,” she mused, almost to herself. “But not just you, others as well. You’ve seen terrible things which is why violence doesn’t bother you. It can’t anymore or you’d fall apart.”
He’d had about as much of her mouth as he could take. “Drop it or I’m putting you in the trunk.”
“You think my father was involved, right? With whatever horrible thing you don’t want to tell me about.” She bowed her head to stare down at her trapped hands. The cuffs had already left a ring of reddened skin around her wrists from the friction. “But you’re wrong. He’s a good person…a good man.”
His voice was grim. “There are no good men in war.”
“Does that make it easier?” she asked, gaze penetrating. “Absolving yourself of all responsibility?”
Hunt found himself inexplicably angry—at the senator, at the responsibility that was weighing down on him like a funeral shroud, and at her.
“You think pissing me off is a good way to stay alive?”
“Is there a good way to stay alive?” Her tone was biting. “You did have a gun to my head a few hours ago.”
Anger and frustration flared between them. He had to be careful with rage, particularly the type that flashed and grew out of nowhere; it was what the beast inside of him craved most and he would lose control.
Maybe she was just at the end of her rope, sick of being sweaty, hungry, and stressed, pushed beyond the boundaries of anything she had ever had to tolerate before. He understood, but he also wanted to strangle her.
And maybe he wanted to fuck with her a little on the way, if just to soothe the itch under his skin that always came before his monster woke from sleep.
“And what kind of man forces his daughter to follow behind him on the campaign trail like she’s a puppy being taught how to heel?” He kept his voice light, even as darker emotions seethed inside of him. “What kind of man packs someone he loves off to a school that he knows she’ll hate because what he wants for her is more important than what she wants for herself?”
“You don’t know the first thing about my life.” Her teeth practically ground together. “My father loves me.”
“He loves that you’re obedient,” he scoffed. “What would happen if you woke up one day and refused to be his perfect conservative Christian princess? If you refused to attend any more campaign events or go back to that ridiculous school? If you decided to act like an adult and actually do what you want for a change? Would he be such a perfect daddy then? You can’t even tell him about your little afterschool job.”
And that was when it finally clicked for her. “You’ve been following me. You came into the coffee shop.”
“It’s called gathering intel.”
Somehow that invasion felt like even more of a violation than any of the others. “How long did you watch me?”
“Long enough.”
“I can’t believe this.” Was any part of her life off-limits? Could she have anything for herself? “You’re disgusting.”
“I’m disgusting?” His voice was mocking. “I saw the way you looked at me, like I was a juicy piece of meat you wanted to tear into. You probably would have gone off with me willingly if I’d asked nicely.”
“Fuck you.” Her tongue snapped around the word, tasting it. He got the feeling that she didn’t curse very often. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I’d say ditto, sweetheart, but you’re dead wrong. I do know something about you.” Maybe it was just him directing all of his anger and frustration at the only target that was available, but he had this irresistible urge to hit her where it hurt. At least it would take his mind off the seething darkness inside of him. “There’s something wild in you just waiting to get out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? What kind of sweet, innocent girl gives head like a goddamn pro?” He grabbed her chin when she tried to turn away. His voice was mocking. “How many boys did you manage to practice on under Daddy’s nose?”
Sophia wrenched away and moved over in the seat so she was pressed against the door. The gesture was more symbolic than anything else. Neither of them was getting away from the other in this damn car. They were two wild animals trapped together in a cage. It was only a matter of which one of them would maul the other one to death first.
And his animal had significantly more practice.
“If I said I’d let you fuck me for your freedom, I bet you’d take me up on it. You’d grab my dick like it was a one-way ticket on the Underground Railroad.”
“Fuck off.”
Two curse words in as many minutes, he must really be getting to her. “If you won’t answer my questions, why should I answer yours?”
“You’re just wrong,” she said, her voice cold as Arctic ice. “There weren’t any boys and there never have been…I’m not like that.”
He caught the hesitation in her voice and pounced on it. “That’s not the kind of thing that a girl just figures out on her own. Unless you watch a ton of porn or something.”
A fiery blush spread up her chest as twin circles of red bloomed on her cheeks. She turned away to face the window but not before he caught the guilty look on her face.
That was fucking hilarious.
“Porn, really?” He couldn’t stop the hearty laugh that bubbled up from deep within his belly. After a minute, he was practically crying from laughing so hard. He couldn’t remember the last time that he found something this genuinely amusing. There was a joy in laughter that he’d almost forgotten existed.
“Shut up,” she growled.
“Not such a good little girl after all, are you?”
“Why didn’t you just kill me?” She sounded more resigned than anything else.
Something had changed in the air between them. He wa
sn’t angry anymore and he didn’t think she was either. She faced away, but the blush had turned her shoulders pink. Even in the darkness, he could make out that the tip of her nose had turned the color of a cherry tomato in her reflection on the glass.
Inexplicably, he felt like he owed her something.
“Torture—” He hesitated, voice catching ever so slightly on the word. “Doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
When he looked back at her, Sophia was staring at him. It was a penetrating gaze, but he couldn’t read her expression. The emotion swimming behind her eyes didn’t even look like sympathy. It was something more, almost an understanding.
“I’m sorry.”
Hunt shrugged. “It’s in the past.”
“If that were true, then I wouldn’t be here.”
“Maybe,” he allowed. “But it doesn’t really matter at this point, either way.”
“But my father isn’t the one who hurt you,” she insisted. “He would never torture anyone.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“My father has never stepped foot inside a war zone.” Her tone was resolute. Nothing in the world would convince her that her father wasn’t a perfect saint. “Whatever happened to you, he wasn’t there. At least admit that.”
This girl was like a dog with a bone, refusing to just drop it.
Maybe it would make sense to just tell her, he thought. But no, he didn’t want those memories between them. Let her think of him as a monster with no logical motive. The more that she tried to understand him, the harder it was going to be to accept what had to happen at the end of all this.
“Just because he didn’t get his own hands dirty, doesn’t mean he’s not responsible.”
When he glanced at her, she was back to staring out the window. But she looked more pensive now. She was thinking so hard that he could almost hear it like background chatter in his own mind. He turned his attention back to the road, resolving to ignore her.
An overwhelming sense of fatigue rolled over him and Hunt fought back a yawn. He was going on his fifth day without sleep, but even his enhanced mind needed rest eventually. There was no way he was going to be able to drive all the way through the night. All he wanted to do was find a flat surface and fall out.
Hunted by the Feral Alpha Page 11
