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“Another bruise.” He brushes his knuckles tenderly across my jaw, below where my face is throbbing. “Moya malen’kaya printsessa. Can you stand?”
He doesn’t wait for my answer. His arm comes under mine and he takes my full weight, and I let him because I’m too shaken to argue. His hands on me feel like the safest thing in the entire world.
“We have to go,” he says, a sharp urgency in his voice as he helps me toward the car. “Right now.”
11
Zevran
Idrive us away from that blood-spattered road, taking every turn that presents itself, putting distance and confusion between us and the unconscious cop. My hands are steady on the wheel, but that’s the only thing about me right now that is.
Viktoriya was supposed to run.
She was supposed to fling herself into the cop’s arms and point a trembling finger at me, telling him I’d kidnapped her, I was cruel to her, and that I locked her up night and day.
Instead, she came out of that car like something flung from a trebuchet, all five feet nothing of her in my oversized clothes, one hand in a cast and the other balled into a fist, screaming at a state trooper twice her size to keep his hands off me.
I can’t make it make sense. I’ve been trying for the last eleven miles, and I’m no closer than I was when I watched her hit the ground. The pained little sound she made when she hit the gravel is going to live inside me for a long time.
I take another turn. Then another.
I drive until the sky has turned jet-black, and I’m reasonably certain no one is following us. Then I pull off onto a narrow dirt track between two fields and kill the engine.
I get out and open the trunk.
The spare plates have lived under the false floor since I bought this car, because I am a man who plans for situations exactly like this one, and I swap them out in under two minutes.
When I’m done, I conceal the old plates and reach into my duffle bag on the back seat for the first aid kit that I took from the last motel.
“Out,” I say, opening her door, and add, “c’mon,” softly so she knows I’m asking, not commanding.
She unbuckles her seat belt, and I lift her onto the hood of the car, my hands firm at her waist. The metal ticks quietly as it cools in the night air. There are no other cars on this road. Just the dark, the fields, and the quarter-moon overhead, giving me just enough light to see.
I take her right hand and turn it palm up in both of mine. The gravel has taken the skin off in long, shallow tracks across her palm and the heel of her hand. The blood looks black in the darkness. She hisses when I start to clean the grit out with a cotton pad and antiseptic, so I go slower.
“Sorry,” I say, and I mean it with everything in me.
This girl’s been hurt enough. Goddamn enough. It makes my blood boil to see one more scratch on her, let alone her bleeding hand and the new bruise darkening her cheek. Every time I look at it, my jaw tightens to the point of pain.
When her hand is clean, I put small dressings across the worst of it and press them down gently.
Then I make myself look at her face.
Up this close, I can smell something sweet and warm that’s just her. I catch myself breathing her in before I even notice I’m doing it.
I cup her jaw in my hand and turn her toward what little light there is. The mark left by the trooper’s hand is turning purple, and a broad flush spreads from her cheekbone toward her jaw.
This is the last mark anyone’s going to put on her.
I swear it on my fucking life.
I close the kit, but I stay where I am, standing between her knees in the dark.
“What was that about?” I ask, my voice a low rumble. “Back there. You could have given me up. I was waiting for it.”
She takes a long time answering, looking up at me through her lashes and carefully considering her words. I wish I knew what was going on in that mind of hers. I think I’ve guessed the worst of it, and I’m already anticipating the anger that will roll through me like a storm when she confesses every hateful, hurtful thing that’s been done to her.
I’ll make them all pay. Every single one of them.
