“I don’t know.” I still didn’t know where the strength had come from to resist. Surely they’d all thought I’d give in.
Even I had thought they’d win, in the end.
But here I was, going off to prison. I’d been thrown away because I hadn’t broken. That sure didn’t feel like a victory.
Reed was watching me, and his gaze seemed to tingle across my skin, although I couldn’t quite read his expression.
“What?” I asked.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said. Those words were so unexpected that I felt myself frown slightly, at the same time as an unexpected warmth blossomed in my chest. “And I hope we both find some freedom. Let’s help each other, Saoirse.”
The car tilted as it went up on the jack, and I found myself sliding toward him, inch by inch. “I’m open to any ideas.”
“It’s a bad idea to put a car up on a jack with people inside it,” he told me. “They must be feeling pretty desperate. If I kick the window out—and I can, I’ve done it before—at the same time as you bang yourself into that side, they’ll lose the jack and the car will fall. They won’t be able to get the jack back under it, so they’ll be limited to chasing us on foot.”
I could picture Blue pinned under the car, and I hesitated. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Then you’re going to get hurt,” he warned me. He studied my face, before he sighed. “You got a better idea? Better yet, you got a weapon?”
I had the knife in my pocket. I wasn’t sure I trusted Reed to tell him about it, though. He was willing to hurt someone to get free, and I wanted to protect Blue and Gray even more than I wanted to escape.
“Is it true,” I asked slowly, “that if they don’t bring us to prison, they take our place?”
He shrugged, as best he could, his big shoulders barely moving. “Might just be a story the Shifter Guard spread to make themselves sound more scary. What does it matter, anyway?”
I shook my head. It mattered to me. They’d implied they had enemies already, just driving through pack lands. I wondered what would happen to them in prison.
“Saoirse,” he said, his voice low and intimate. “Talk to me. What’re you scared of? More scared of than prison?”
“Nothing,” I said, studying the moonlit night outside.
“Look at me,” he said.
Despite myself, I found myself meeting his gaze. I found it less unsettling now, but it was still magnetic. He had beautiful green eyes, lush-lashed; they were surprisingly vivid against his tanned skin. There was a roughness to his features, his big jaw and a nose that looked like it had been broken once upon a time, but he was still handsome. Maybe it only made him more handsome.
“Saoirse,” he said again, his voice low, but this time there was an edge of lust in it, and in the way he looked at me. “Did you know that you’re driving us all crazy?”
He meant with my heat. I had thought I was the only one who was losing my mind, but I could see it in his eyes. “I’m not trying to.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s part of what makes you so…”
He shook his head, breaking off the thought. “You could, you know. You could use it against them.”
He didn’t have to indicate Blue and Gray for me to know. “They’d break if you teased them, I’m sure they would.”
I bit my lip at the thought; it was all too easy to imagine myself up against that car, out in the cool night air, with their hands and mouths against me, caressing my skin, satisfying this heat that burned through me…
“And then we’d have our chance to escape,” he murmured.
Something about that felt so wrong that it broke my fantasy. I shook my head.
“For someone who says she doesn’t want to go to prison, you’re awfully picky,” he muttered. “Why?”
Because I don’t want to hurt them. I didn’t dare say it aloud. I barely knew them, and anyway, it was probably just my body talking. I’d been told a hundred times that fated mates weren’t real.
And yet when I imagined myself with them, I couldn’t imagine betraying them at the end.
“Because I have a better idea,” I said, the idea crystallizing even as I said that. I glanced toward the guys outside. I couldn’t tell him about the knife. I didn’t trust Reed not to hurt them.
But I held my palm out. The key seemed to twinkle under the moonlight, and Reed grinned so big that it crinkled the skin around his eyes in a way that was very sexy.
“I could kiss you,” he said, when I’d unlocked his cuffs, and then he’d done the same for me.
And then he leaned toward me and did just that. His lips were soft, warm against mine.
It was the first time anyone had ever kissed me. For a second, I froze.
He started to pull back, and I glimpsed how his eyes had gone tender. They didn’t look crazy at all anymore.
I swayed toward him, kissing him back. His lips caressed mine open.
He held his hands behind his back still, as if he hadn’t been freed of the cuffs.
So there was nothing to warn Blue that he was loose, as Blue suddenly wrenched his car door open. He yanked Reed out of the car bodily. I could feel his possessive fury sizzle through the air before he slammed Reed into the ground.
Reed exploded into motion, and I saw the oh-shit look flash across Blue’s face as he realized Reed wasn’t chained anymore, right before Reed clocked him.
Gray threw open my car door. “Saoirse, are you okay?” he asked.
His face was so earnest that it wrenched my heart.
But that didn’t stop me from bolting.
“A little help!” Blue shouted from his side of the car, and so instead of chasing me, Gray ran around the back of the car,
