Page 35 of Wretched Thorns

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Smaller. Slower. The kind of mouth-movement that made her want to slap him and climb him, which she absolutely was not going to think about with her grandmother in the backseat.

Stamina.

The word ping-ponged through her skull the way it had on Grandmère’s porch the first night she’d laid eyes on him. She shoved it back into the corner where it lived and slammed the door.

“Mère,” she said.

Grandmère didn’t open her eyes. “Eyes on the road, baby. The road is where the work is now.”

Tara faced the windshield.

Beside her, Dex flicked the rearview a quarter-inch left.

***

They stopped for gas on the shoulder of a state highway running through pine country Tara hadn’t seen in years. A typical backroads station that sold pickled eggs out of a jar and ran the same beer cooler it had owned since the eighties. Two pumps. A canopy that had given up trying to hold its paint.

Dex pulled in and killed the engine. He sat with his hands on the wheel for the length of three breaths.

“Three men,” he said. “Black SUV. Far end of the lot.”

Tara didn’t turn her head. She let her eyes drift past him toward the side mirror, the way Grandmère had taught her to look at something when she didn’t want to seem nosy. SUV at the far end. Parked nose-out. Engine running. Three silhouettes behind the glass.

The driver was looking at her.

She kept her face on the dashboard. “They aren’t gassing up.”

“No.”

“How long have they been there?”

“I suspect only a couple of minutes longer than us. There was a different vehicle behind us this morning, obviously shadowing. They peeled off about an hour later and these picked us up. They passed us about two minutes ago.”

She turned her head and gave him her full face. “Dex. You’ve known we were being tailed all this time?”

“Wasn’t the right time to share.”

“Oh, every single minute back there was the right time to share. You don’t get to decide what I’m allowed to know, you arrogant…”

“Chère.”

“Don’t chère me.”

He looked at her then. Full on. His eyes were more gold than they’d been at Grandmère’s kitchen table the night before.

“Stay in the truck,” he said.

“I don’t care if you’re a big bad fucking wolf. I don’t take orders from anyone.”

His eyes flashed in a way that was entirely inhuman.

“Whatever you say, chère.”

She wanted to set him on fire.

He got out and walked around the front. Opened her door before she could open it herself. His hand found the small of her back from her door to the door of the station, deliberate, warm through the cotton of her shirt. She didn’t push him off. She should have, but she didn’t.

Inside, the AC was working overtime. Dex laid a twenty on the counter and asked the woman behind the register for a fill on pump two, cash, no receipt. The woman didn’t blink. People in this part of the country had been making cash transactions without questions since before any of them were born.