Page 41 of Guarded By Them

“They’ve been careful not to leave a trail,” I said. “Nothing that would link them to anyone if things went wrong, which they clearly did.”

Ryan pursed his lips and exhaled a sigh through his nose. “We’re going to have to do something about this car, though. We don’t know what else it’s been used for. The cops might even be looking for it, and we won’t want to be found inside it if they are.”

Kodee shook his head. “I don’t think either gang is sloppy enough to use a car that might get them in trouble.”

I leaned forward, in the gap between the driver and passenger seats. “But we don’t know where these men came from. They might not be directly linked to either gang. They could just be guns for hire, for all we know.”

Not having a vehicle was going to make things even harder. If we leased a car through normal means, we’d have to show ID, which might then flag up our location. But stealing a car was also going to cause us problems. The last thing we wanted was to get arrested for grand theft auto.

“Where are we even going?” Rue’s voice was small.

Kodee’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “We’ll head north for the moment, and then we’ll figure it out. We need to put some miles between us and the cabin.”

She looked between us all, hope and desperation in her eyes. “Have you got any other contacts? Ones we can trust this time?”

Kodee gritted his jaw. “Honestly, I’m not sure who to trust.”

“Fuck.” I clenched my fists. I hated running. I preferred to stay and fight. But this wasn’t all about me and what I wanted. I had to think of the others; I had to think of Rue. But if we didn’t turn and fight, would we be running forever? Would we go to bed each night, afraid to close our eyes because there was a good chance we’d wake up with a gun pointed at our heads? I didn’t like feeling afraid. Fear was something you couldn’t escape. It made you question every little thing you did in your life, never being certain that the move you made was the right one. It had the power to paralyze you.

Beside me, Rue let out a sigh and placed the side of her head against the window closest to her. We all carried guilt inside us, but for her, it was the worst. She blamed herself for our current position, even though I was the one who’d gotten us involved with the Capellos.

“Hey,” I reached for her, slipping my arm around her shoulders, “we’ll figure this out, okay?”

She lifted her head from the glass and leaned into me instead. She was still shaking, though not quite as violently as she’d been back at the cabin. It was understandable, considering she’d seen men killed right in front of her. It had shaken me up as well, and I was a hard son of a bitch.

I pulled her closer and placed my lips against the top of her head, her soft hair tickling my nose. I didn’t care. It was all worth it to be this close to her.

She let out a long sigh. “I just wish I could turn back the clock.”

I stiffened. “To when? To a time before you’d met us? How would you have done anything differently?”

“Maybe I should never have accepted the Capello brothers’ offer of protecting me from Joe Nettie’s men. Maybe I should have just allowed them to kill me.”

Her words shocked me. “Hey, don’t say that.”

“Well, you’d all be safe right now, wouldn’t you? And you always had each other. You were happy before I came along. I screwed everything up for you all.”

Her shoulders shook, and she buried her face against my chest. I wasn’t good with crying women, but I couldn’t stand to see Rue cry. I looked helplessly to the other guys, wanting them to do something.

“Rue,” Ryan said from the front, “we can’t go back and change things, and even if we could, we wouldn’t. We’d all rather be here, taking care of you and making sure you’re safe than living our lives without you in it.”

She sniffed and lifted her face from my chest. “But Dillon’s been shot. And you’re miles away from your doctors. There was a very good chance one of us could have been killed back there. How could I live with myself if that had happened?”

Kodee spoke, his voice stern. “Stop it, Rue. You’re acting as though we’re innocent men you’ve corrupted. We’re criminals. We get mixed up with dangerous people—we did long before you came along. We know what we signed up for. We’re all grown-ass men capable of making our own decisions, okay? Now, I don’t want to hear another word about how this is your fault.”

“Okay.” Rue shrank down in the seat, unused to having Kodee telling her off.

Sometimes, I caught a glimpse of what Kodee must have been like as a family man. I could picture him with a wife and child, laughing and smiling as they did regular things like go to the park and the grocery store. He was a different person now, but every so often, that old self slipped through the cracks. I couldn’t imagine living that way—my present self so separate from the past. I’d always been the same person, wild and rough, short tempered and fun-loving. A contradiction of a person, perhaps. But I’d done what I needed to survive. I’d been brought to a strange country by my parents, and I’d immediately been identified as an outcast, my accent doing nothing to help that, and then they’d died, and I’d found myself alone. It wasn’t until I’d met Kodee and Ryan that I’d finally felt as though I had a place I belonged again, and then Rue had come along. But I still felt like I belonged. A home wasn’t a place of bricks and mortar; it was the people who made it home.

These people were my home.

We drove in silence. Everyone’s emotions were running high, and I thought we were all worried we’d say the wrong thing and we’d start an argument. We needed each other right now. We couldn’t afford to have any kind of divide between us if we were going to get out of this alive.

“I don’t know about anyone else,” Ryan announced from the front, “but I could murder a coffee, and I could eat a scabby horse.”

I wrinkled my nose at the description, but my stomach gurgled in response.

“We can’t stop anywhere for long,” Kodee said. “We don’t know who might be behind us.”

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