Page 56 of Hunted Mate
“Exactly.”
“So what now?”
“Now we run.”
“Oh.” I smile.
“What?”
“Well, I guess the hunter, you, is becoming the hunted. How are you going to handle that?”
He looks serious. I was teasing, but I guess I was also accurate.
“He will send Karl. Karl’s the most motivated to bring me down. Maybe some of the older brothers, but most of them have real jobs and families that don’t allow them to take time off to run a sibling down, even if they wanted to.”
“Where are we going to go? What are we going to do? I have money. I bet it’s practically impossible to find a billionaire who doesn’t want to be found. You stalked me, but that’s because I didn’t know about it.”
“For starters, you go and get in the passenger side of this car, and we get out of here.”
I agree to that, and he lets me go long enough for me to do that. It feels a little nice to get into the passenger seat. I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, hardly any of it good. I guess I’ve been acting a little unhinged, but it felt really good at the time, and that’s what matters most.
Gray gets in the driver’s seat and looks at me with an expression of what I can only describe as relief and satisfaction. He starts the car and sends it out of town at a very reasonable speed. The posted limit here is just fifteen mph. Cars here crawl. We pass the intersection where I simply lost interest in driving and abandoned the car I stole. The car is being hooked up to the back of a tow vehicle, by someone who looks bland and righteous at the same time.
“I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you before something unfixable happened,” he says as we get on the open road. “Youhave no idea how scared I was for you. You know you’ve been out of control, don’t you?”
“Staying in control is for when life makes sense in the usual way,” I say. “Doing whatever the hell feels best is for when I end up captive and medically experimented on. You can’t expect people to follow the rules when you get evil.”
“You’re reckless,” he says. “And you’re not thinking about the fact that there’s a very real chance that you are going to have some kind of medical reaction to the procedure they put you through.”
“And there’s an even realer chance that we can spend a lot of money doing some very cool things,” I say. “I don’t feel sick. At all. I’ve never felt so healthy, actually. I’m glowing.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “You do look good, healthy, I mean,” he says, reluctant to admit that the secret underground nonconsensual lab treatment seems to have done wonders for more than just my skin.
“Yeah. I’m doing great. And I’ve got some money being wired to me, and I’m not in any real legal trouble, because people with as much money as I have never are. So stop worrying. It’s going to be fine.”
“I know you feel bulletproof,” he says. “But you’re not. You can be harmed. You can easily be killed. You have to be careful, and you have to lay low with me. We are on the run.”
“You’re on the run,” I say, sassy. “I’m along for the ride.”
“You’ve really got to stop with the attitude,” he growls. “I feel like I need to thrash you until you settle down and learn howto behave yourself in this new form. That medical treatment definitely did something to you.”
“Yeah. It made me fun. I’m sorry you got attached to the boring bookworm who spent all her time looking up old chat logs about shifters, but I’m interesting now.”
“Interesting,” he snorts, indicating to change lanes. “You’ve always been interesting, Calista. You don’t need to act like a criminal on a binge to be interesting.”
“I’m not trying to prove a point,” I tell him. “I am just different now. Because of what your family did to me. So maybe lay off the fucking judgment.”
He gives me a brief, sharp look before his eyes return to the road, and I know I’m going to pay for that later. I really don’t care. This isn’t about behaving properly, even though he’s going to make it all about my manners, or lack thereof. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be nice and good and polite the way most people are. Half of being human is constantly policing yourself.
I wasn’t doing anything for attention. I was just doing what made sense, what my instincts told me to do.
“What if…”
“What?”
“What if we didn’t run? What if we just went back home.”
“They’d try to come for you.”
