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"Only one way to find out." I grinned and waved my hand toward the driver's seat.
Cooper frowned but climbed in and closed the door behind him. He turned the key over. The engine purred to life.
I nodded, satisfied. "Follow me back to Crimson. Then we need to get to work."
1
Ivory
I don't knowwhich hurt more, my leg or my face. It might be a tie.
I dropped my head and watched blood drip out of the teeth marks on my calf and pool on the floor of the car. Whatever, it wasn't my fucking car. Sure, it was my blood, but chances were, I wouldn't need it much longer.
I glanced over to Ben. He had a similar injury to one of his legs, and claw marks on his chest and back. He was clearly in as much pain as I was. Like me, he was a stubborn prick and was trying not to show it. Neither of us wanted to give Dagen the satisfaction of hearing us scream.
"Where do you think we're going?" he asked, his voice low.
I shook my head and winced at the searing agony that small movement caused.
"I don't know," I managed to say. I didn’t know why we were still alive, much less where the asshole was taking us.
Dagen's words, 'You'll learn, bitch,' suggested he intended to keep me alive for a while longer. How much longer was anyone's guess. Given I had no desire to learn anything from Alistair Dagen, he'd probably kill me out of frustration.
My best hope right now was that Jake was doing what I asked him to do. He knew the organisation as well as I did. Better. He'd keep it running. Nothing was stopping Ivory Claw from wiping out the Onyx Ridge Pack now they had moved against me directly, personally. Jake and Cooper would have a field day doing just that. Jake waited nearly two decades for this. My only regret was that I'd miss all the fun.
Ben would, too, come to that. He enjoyed a good killing as much as the next wolf.
"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I should have—"
I would have frowned at him, but my face hurt too badly from where Asshole hit me. Twice. For that alone, I should rip his head off. I would, if I got the chance.
"For what?"
"Letting them touch you." He grimaced toward Dagen, who sat in the front passenger seat.
I waved a couple of fingers in dismissal. "There were sixteen of them and only two of us. If anything, it's my fault for not traveling with an ostentatious-as-shit entourage." I said that last bit loud enough for Asshole to hear me.
He didn't respond.
I lowered my voice again. "The only thing you could have done was kill me. If you did that, you'd have to make sure they killed you right after. Otherwise Jake would hunt down your ass and make your final days a living misery."
Ben managed a pained half-smile. "Yeah, he would, but I would never kill you. Unless you ordered me to. And..." he gestured toward the collar around his neck. Identical to mine, it was to stop us from shifting into wolf form, "this makes it harder."
That was the point, of course. I was sitting in the back of a black SUV, completely naked, but the inability to shift made me feel barer than the lack of clothes. My inner wolf was my better half. Stronger, faster, deadlier.
Without her, I was nothing more than Ivory, head of the biggest criminal organisation in New South Wales. Okay, that was a lot, but I still needed my wolf to be whole.
"For the record, I wouldn't order you to kill me," I told him. No matter how bad things got, I always managed to find a way out. I would do it this time too.
"That's good." His gaze flicked toward Dagen. He looked like he had something else to say, but shook his head slightly. He looked back at me with meaning in his eyes.
Maybe I should have been taken by surprise, but I wasn't. He was one of my most trusted bodyguards. We'd worked closely together for years. That spilled over into the bedroom a time or two. I may never trust anyone the way I trusted Jake, but Ben was in my top three. Cooper rounded that out, although we'd only known each other a short time. In my line of work, trust was everything.
I reached over and laced my fingers through his. Hopefully Dagen would only assume we were two prisoners consoling each other. A sniff of anything more and he'd use that to his advantage.
"There's a private airfield up this way," Ben said a few minutes later.
I peered through the window. He was right. A road sign read 'private property' but a hangar and a short airstrip appeared as we drove out from behind a series of industrial buildings.
