“There’s nothing wrong with you for wanting to believe the best about people. No one walks into their office and wonders if everyone there is in on some criminal conspiracy, Coop. That wasn’t a problem you should have ever had to worry about.”
“I should have seen the signs.”
“You did see the signs. You knew you didn’t fit in. You knew Phil could be a dick and the other two could be strange. You saw everything that was there for you to see—these are sharp guys, and they know how criminals get caught. They were careful, and you still picked up on something being wrong.”
He opened his mouth to tear into himself again, but then his griffin pushed forward into his consciousness and said, She’s right.
Was she?
She was Gretchen, his mate, so that was definitely a point in favor of him trusting her argument.
Besides, he’d spent so long waiting to get his griffin back that he hated to think of ignoring it now.
When she first picked you up, you knew how good she was. And you thought that if you escaped, it wouldn’t be fair for anyone to blame her for it or think she was careless. You were a Marshal too, and you knew all the tricks, so you had one-up on all the other prisoners she had to escort. If it wouldn’t have been fair to blame Gretchen for letting you escape, even though she was on her guard, how is it fair to blame yourself for missing the truth about your team when you didn’t even have any reason to suspect them?
It was like his guilt had been a hand on his throat, choking him, and with this thought, it had finally eased off.
For the first time in months, he not only knew he was innocent, he felt like he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything to bring this down on himself.
He had deserved better than what he’d gotten.
Ever since the arrest, he’d been trying like hell to not seem angry, because anger only made him look scary to other people. Scary and probably guilty. But now, knowing that Gretchen knew him even better than he knew himself, he could let those feelings have free rein. He could finally feel the enormity of how Phil and Roger and Monroe had screwed him over, and he could be pissed about it.
“Coop?”
“You’re right,” he said. He still couldn’t get over what it felt like to finally be able to breathe freely.
She’d given that back to him. She hadn’t just given him the sky; she’d given him the air.
“You’re right,” Cooper said again. “There wasn’t a lot I could have done differently. They lied to me, they used me, and they framed me.” He took a huge breath, relishing the feeling it gave him. “And now we’re going to find them and drag them into the light of day, and they’re going to have to tell everyone what happened. And you know what matters to me most about all that?”
He was half-expecting her to make some joke about how it was probably the part where he’d get out of prison, but instead she just said softly, “What?”
“The fact that I started all that just saying ‘I’ and I get to end it saying ‘we.’”
A wide smile spread across Gretchen’s face. “My favorite part is getting you free so that we can be us all the time.”
“We make a good us,” Cooper agreed. “And then we can start figuring out what you—”
—might be able to turn into. That was what he’d been ready to say.
He was interrupted by an inferno.
Flames streaked down from the sky, tracing a circle that surrounded their car. Cooper’s heightened senses let him hear the paint blistering on the hood, boiling and popping: that was how close the fire was. It was lapping up against them like the tide against the beach.
Gretchen slammed on the brakes, throwing them to a halt so quickly that they snapped forward against their seatbelts. Her face had gone dead-white. “We have to get out.”
He knew what she was thinking. If the gas tank blew, they were dead. But if they got out, they’d roast anyway.
They couldn’t stay in a burning car. And they couldn’t get out in the middle of a fire.
They couldn’t go forward, they couldn’t go backwards, and they couldn’t stay where they were.
Cooper could only think of one thing to do.
He unbuckled his seatbelt.
“Hold onto me,” he said. “We’re going up.”
18
First, they had to get out of the car, and they had to do it in the middle of a vortex of flames. Unfortunately, Gretchen couldn’t help with that. She just had to sit there while Cooper shifted and tore through the mental frame of the car like it was nothing more than soft cheese.
Even in the midst of all her terror and panic, even with the temperature in the car climbing so high that sweat was starting to break out all over her, some part of Gretchen could still admire the sheer majesty of Cooper’s transformation.
He really was magnificent. The glossy white feathers on his head smoothed out almost imperceptibly into the mahogany brown wings and golden fur. She’d never seen a griffin before him, and she had always more or less imagined that they would look awkward, like two entirely different animals smashed together. She could almost have pictured a visible seam between the lion half and the eagle half.
But the real Cooper was nothing like that. He wasn’t half-lion and half-eagle. He was a griffin, a complete whole in and of himself.
And it was incredible to watch him in action. The same talons that had carefully cradled her and carried her to safety at Ford’s motel now sheared through the car roof, tearing their way to freedom. His enormous wings ruffled slightly, brushing against her, and then he turned his immense head to look at her with his liquid golden eyes.
Somehow, they were still recognizably his eyes. She would
