The question hung there. Yes, there was something off. The way my body had responded to them from the first time I locked gazes with Blue and Gray…there was definitely something going on.
It wasn’t just my body, though. The stop at the diner had been because they needed to deliver me healthy; it seemed they couldn’t stand what my pack had done to me, couldn’t stand for me to be weak and miserable.
Guilt twisted through my stomach. The energy from that food was what would power my escape, because I’d been too weak to even try just a few hours ago.
“Yeah,” Blue said finally. “I think maybe she’s on the verge of her first heat.”
“We’ve got to get her there ASAP,” Gray said. “It wouldn’t be right… she shouldn’t feel that for the first time like this. Not with us.”
“Yeah—“ Blue twisted in his seat suddenly, as if he’d sensed the change as my heart started to pound. “You’re awake there, huh? Eavesdropping?”
“Heat?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but there was a hitch in my voice.
Blue and Gray traded a look full of fear themselves, as if they’d just walked into a conversation they weren’t prepared for.
“I don’t know, lass,” Gray said. “I’m no expert.”
“I wish we could skip this guy…” Blue ran his hand through his hair.
“Yeah, if only there were a fairy godmother for shifters,” Gray said. “Seems like we’re out of luck on wishes.”
“What guy?” I asked, sitting forward.
“He’s just the other prisoner we’re picking up to transport. You don’t need to worry about him.” Blue had his usual quick, dismissive tone. Then he added, “You don’t need to talk to him.”
“Pretty close quarters to ignore someone in,” I said. Even though they managed to ignore me.
We skirted a city—cities were neutral territory for wolves—and then, once pines rose around the highway, we pulled off, down increasingly rural roads. I leaned my head against the window, watching them. We were heading north as we left my Florida pack behind. Closer to the Freed?
When the car stopped, I looked out curiously, but I didn’t see much around me but trees that seemed to press in.
“Stay put,” Gray warned me, looking back.
Blue opened my car door a second later. He dangled the cuffs from one finger, looking almost reluctant. “Come on. You know the drill.”
I shifted toward him at the same time as he swung into the bench seat, which brought my shoulder bumping his. I flinched away, and something sparked in his face.
He smelled so good. The same heat between my thighs that I’d felt earlier throbbed, on the verge of being an unbearable ache.
“Show me your back,” he said. His voice was gentle, but commanding, and a shiver ran up my spine. I didn’t want to show him. Maybe he would feel sympathy for me, maybe he’d let his guard down. And yet…I didn’t want him to pity me, to see me as nothing but a girl he had to rescue. They’d been right before we walked out of my family’s house; at least I could cling to my pride. That would be enough of a fight in prison.
“Now, please,” he said, a faint note of steel under that gentle tone. “If you’re hurt, we need to know.”
“It’s nothing,” I mumbled, but when he raised a finger and mimed me turning around, my resistance felt futile anyway.
I shifted, turning my back to him. In the front seat, I heard Gray sigh, and I wondered why.
Blue’s fingers skated under the hem of my shirt, raising it up to my shoulders. I wasn’t sure what he saw; I’d looked at my back in the mirror once, then avoided looking again.
Usually, only male shifters were whipped for disobeying the alpha, but when my father caught me in the driveway and pushed me to the ground, the alpha had only been a few steps behind. They’d tied my hands over a low-slung branch of a tree in a front yard, the tree I used to climb when I was a kid.
When I’d dared to look in the mirror, my back had been livid with welts and wounds, still oozing blood. But it wasn’t bleeding anymore.
Blue went still behind me, but we were so close that I could feel his heartbeat quicken, that I could feel him tighten with rage.
“I thought you must have been beaten, from the way you flinched…” he began, his voice flat and cold. Despite the way he spoke, his thumb stroked gently across the skin between welts. His touch felt so good, slightly painful but in a way that was pleasant, almost healing, that it made me tremble, my thighs beginning to shake.
He went on, “But I didn’t expect they did this to you.”
“It’s fine,” I said, easing away from him. “It’s already healing.”
He tugged the hem of my shirt down. “Where you’re going, no one will ever hurt you like that again.”
A laugh tinged with other emotions—bitterness, nerves? I couldn’t even tell—slipped out of my mouth. “In prison? I didn’t know that was a kinder, gentler place.”
“You’ll be on a block with other thrown-away girls,” he said. “It’s different there. Hands.”
For a second, his anger had felt so protective, and now he was back to being cool and indifferent. I twisted to give him my wrists, but a strange sense of betrayal had settled into my skin. It didn’t make sense. I barely knew this man; I didn’t even know his real name.
“Jesus,” Gray said. “Other thrown-away girls. You’ve got a real flair with words.”
But that wasn’t even what bothered me. It was the truth.
There had been something about Blue’s stern, caring voice that had sent a thrill through my body, though, that had stroked the throbbing heat there to an almost unbearable level, and then he’d taken that away from me.
Even now, he’d locked the cuffs on, then shifted away from me out the door, and it felt as if he was taking himself away from me, the
