The men who'd come to Dillon's house had worn masks, so she hadn't seen the lower half of their faces, but the grungy white shirts and the leather vests proclaiming them Leviathans were impossible to mistake. Dillon looked at the malice and aggression on their weathered, pockmarked faces, recognizing the shape of the man she'd killed.
“Still okay?” Nasa asked softly, his palm spread wide on her belly, his thumb stroking back and forth just above her navel.
Dillon watched the man she'd shot in the chest slam his hand and a picture against the thick safety-glass, clearly threatening Patti. First with words, then with a gun.
The whole time he was being a complete asshole, his buddy did his best to break into the shelter through the secondary door.
Thankfully, the only way to get inside the building was to be buzzed in from the other side.
There were no keypads, no card reader slides, no deadbolts or keyholes. Just one smooth, three-inch solid steel door, magnetized to the frame with ten thousand pounds of resistance.
“I'm fine. It was their choice to come after me.”
“Yes, it was,” Nasa agreed gravely, his arm settling to envelop both she and Harper in a protective embrace.
It made Dillon give a mean little smirk to see Patti calmly smack her hand against the red button that activated the lock down protocol.
A steel plate slid down over the check-in window and the main door locked in place, trapping both bikers inside.
They bounced around inside the narrow entryway like rubber balls, kicking and hammering at the doors, throwing their shoulders against the glass, striking at it with the butts of their guns, probably blistering the air with curses if their enraged expressions were anything to go by. Two minutes later the cops were on scene to arrest both men.
“If they were arrested, how did they get out so fast?”
“I'll have that answer for you in a minute. Let's get a better look at the photo, eh?” Nasa leaned forward with his arms outstretched to work at his keyboard, flipping from camera to camera until they were looking out on the lobby from Patti's point of view.
Nasa paused the video to enlarge and enhance the picture slammed up against the glass.
“There isn't any sound to your security system, but Patti reported both men were looking for this woman.”
Dillon's mouth suddenly felt drier than the desert. It took her a few tries to form words, and her voice came out raw and raspy when she finally got there.
“I think I know what Ghost meant about me having strayed into the Leviathan's territory.”
“Tell me,” Nasa urged calmly.
“Three weeks ago, Patti called and asked if I could drive a girl to Oklahoma City. She was brought into the shelter by one of the nurses in the network, and according to Patti, it was a high-risk situation where the girl had to get out of town immediately, completely off the radar.
“One of the reasons I chose that particular building is because it has a basement and shares a wall with the warehouse next door. That, and the main entrance is a block and a half away from the shelter's front door.
“I knocked the basement wall out during the renovation, put in a secret door, and if we need to move people in a hurry, we can exit out the opposite building with no one being the wiser.”
Nasa made a proper sound of appreciation, his arms still bracketed around her as he brought up an aerial photo of the building.
“Very nice. Anyone looking at the shelter entrance has no line of sight on your secondary exit. You didn't use the Bronco, right?”
“Of course not,” Dillon scoffed. “I have a little RV with a secret compartment I keep at a storage facility on the other side of the city. I drive the Bronco into a storage unit, drive out in the RV, and into the warehouse garage.
“My passenger can ride in the back or lay down, depending on how badly they're hurt, and tuck into the secret compartment if we get pulled over.
"It's happened a few times when I'm on the road at night, but as soon as the cops see Elka, they don't look much further.”
“I can't imagine why.” Nasa chuckled and gave Elka an appreciative look.
Elka's tongue lolled out happily, looking back and forth between them because she knew she was being talked about.
“So, the girl. You get a name? Any details from her?”
Dillon shook her head, thinking back to that night and how scared the girl was. Hurt, jumping at shadows, shaking so hard Dillon swore she could hear the rail thin teen's bones rattle.
“I never ask them their name. It's safer that way for both of us, but she definitely looked younger than nineteen, badly beaten, strung out.
"Patti said the nurse gave her a list of all the girl's injuries, and considering the amount of damage she sustained, I'm surprised she was even mobile.
"I do remember she had green eyes. Pale, hard to see because both her eyes were nearly swollen shut. Her nose was broken, her face all swollen up, lips cut.
“The only thing she said to me was thank you and let me tuck her into the bed in the back of the RV. She slept the whole way to Oklahoma and didn't wake up until I stopped at an RV park just outside of the city. It's owned by an elderly couple in the network.
“They knew I had a passenger because I don't stay there otherwise, but they never saw her. We spent the night in a slip with tree cover, and in the morning, another transporter parked their RV beside us to make the hand-off.
"I helped the girl get from my RV to theirs, sanitized my rig, then Elka and I spent the weekend at the lake nearby.”
Nasa listened attentively, his hand once again settling on her belly, the warmth of his breath moving distractingly across her ear.
“So as far as you know, the only
