Page 36 of Knox

She said nothing. Her silence spoke louder than any argument.

I fought a grin. “I didn’t think so.” I tapped the final button on my phone. “There. Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

Caroline narrowed her eyes. “What did you do, Knox?”

I sat back down, leaning back and going full man-spreading. “Good news first. Your limo service is booked, and it’ll take you wherever your little heart and your scheming mind want to go. The bad news? It won’t come until tomorrow morning.”

CHAPTER 14

CAROLINE

Tomorrow morning?! I needed to leave right now.

I had already wasted enough time being a battered mess with a Devil. Wearing his musty clothes, eating off-brand cereal without milk, sitting in a camping chair waiting for a spider to crawl up my butt crack…

No. Unacceptable.

I leaned forward and stretched out my arm. “Give me your phone. I can find a different service.”

Knox laced his fingers together at the back of his head, perfectly at ease. His phone was balanced on his thigh as if daring me to lunge for it. “We got time to kill.” He glanced up when the rain started to come down harder. Of course it had to. “Good timing, rain.” Then he looked at me and bared those near-perfect teeth in an infuriating devil-may-care grin. “Wanna make out again?”

I was going to murder him. Right here and now with his own knife—the stupidly pretty, stolen Damascus steel knife, whatever that was supposed to be. Kill him, take his keys, take his bike or his ugly old Ford, and drive like hell into the unknown. Goodbye Reno. Goodbye Dad. Goodbye Wolverines.

Fuck you, Knox, you abrasive, annoying, pig-headed bastard.

I made my move, but Knox was quicker. In a blink, his phone was in his back pocket. “Relax, spitfire, I kid. And no, you’re not stealing my phone. Don’t expect me to give up any credit card information, either.”

I pondered the possibility of whether I could climb onto his shoulders, wrap my legs around his neck real tight, and squeeze with my thighs until he suffocated. How hard could that be?

“You’re a good kisser,” he said. I glared, and he held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not saying that as a joke. You are.”

“I was drunk,” I snapped.

“Then imagine how good you’ll be sober.”

My heart started pounding in my chest. He was playing a dangerous fucking game. He was toying with my emotions like a cat with yarn. And he was making it way too easy to look past his good looks, only to see his egotistic charm. “Do you even know how to carry on a conversation without obnoxious banter?”

Knox cocked his head to the side in mock thought. “I can try. What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about,” I began in a forced measured tone, hoping fruitlessly that he’d take me seriously, “how I’m getting out of this fucking hellhole.”

Knox’s grin dropped. Seriousness radiated off him like a heat wave. “Define this.”

It sounded like he was offended that I meant this makeshift campsite. “No, not this,” I said with exasperation. “This… This…” I clenched my teeth in frustration. It was too hard to explain. It would be too convoluted to tell him my sob story about my father’s multifaceted decline. So I just gestured vaguely. “Just this part of my life. That’s why I can’t wait until tomorrow. I have to get out now before my father finds me. Who knows what’s even happened since I got out? You’re right. He could have eyes everywhere. Even I don’t know the full scope of his power. His influence. I would be surprised if you didn’t know he controls the police…”

The more I rambled, the less I felt like myself. The more I started to panic, knowing how deep in shit I was. My father could have pulled strings to have an APB put out on me. He could paint me as a runaway. The thought made me think I was just some unruly teenager who stormed out.

I thought of him introducing Vane. The way he looked at me like I was just some kind of sin tempting his men. The way he left me alone with Vane.

“Vane is going to keep an eye on you while I figure out how we move forward. If we can move forward at all.”

It was a threat, plain as day. But if I hadn’t escaped and I just remained bound to that chair, at the mercy of the killer he’d hired… If he had returned after stewing on my betrayal… What would have happened? What would he have done to me?

There was no sense lingering on what ifs. I refused to be bogged down by past events. It only distracted me from goals that would move me forward.

“He’s going to take revenge now,” I told Knox, pulling myself together harshly. “He’s going to pick a target to punish for me getting away in the first place.”

“That prick he locked you up with?” Knox asked, eyes darkening. “So what if he’s collateral damage?”

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