Page 6 of Guarded By Them

“And go where?”

I shrugged. “Wherever the hell we want. Europe. Southeast Asia. Australia, even. Just take your pick.”

Rue laughed. “I like the sound of all of those.”

I grinned at her laughter. “As much as I’d like to suggest we just keep moving, every time we do, our passports will come under scrutiny. They’re the best, but they’re still not real. We don’t want to risk getting caught going through passport control. It can take just the slightest thing for them to pull us up and start asking questions, and then we’re screwed.”

“So, we need to pick one place that we’re happy to stay at for the foreseeable future?” she asked.

“Exactly.”

Rue went quiet and huddled back against the seat. She was doing that thing where she seemed to curl into herself, as though she hoped she could somehow make herself vanish. It was understandable that she was upset after what she’d just been through. Sometimes, I didn’t think any of us really appreciated the kind of life she’d had. Being snatched off the streets and seeing men killed in front of her must have been incredibly triggering for her, but somehow, I sensed it was something else she was upset about.

“Rue, what’s wrong?”

She shrugged and shook her head but didn’t respond.

“Please, talk to us. We can’t help if you don’t tell us what’s going on in your head.”

Women were more complicated than us guys. It was one of the things I’d appreciated for the short time it had just been the three of us. If one of us was pissed off about something, we got it out by drinking or fucking, or, in Dillon’s case, fighting. Women were different. Men were relatively simple creatures, whereas they were far more introspective. Maybe I was overgeneralizing, but like I said, I was a simple creature.

“It’s just that I’ve never been on a plane. I’ve never even been to an airport. I’m a liability to you. I’m going to look guilty, and these passport control people are going to pull me over and ask me questions, and I know I’ll say the wrong thing. What if I’ve got to read something and I get it wrong? I’m going to make everyone look bad.”

She was worrying about us again.

“Rue, it’ll be fine,” I assured her.

“Your reading has come on a heap since we started,” Ryan said, taking his eyes off the road and the bumper to bumper traffic for a moment to glance back at her. “But don’t worry about that. We’ll be right there with you.”

She nodded and glanced down at her hands again. “I just hate that you’re having to go through all of this because of me.”

Ah, there it was again. She was feeling guilty.

“You need to stop that, Rue,” I told her. “None of this is your fault. If you want to blame anyone, blame Dillon for working for the Capellos in the first place.”

“Hey,” Dillon pouted.

“Not that we’d change anything about what happened now,” I continued “We’re happy you came into our lives, Rue, despite everything. Imagine if you hadn’t? I can’t even begin to think about what you’d be going through now.”

“I’d probably be dead.”

The truth of her words settled over us. Yes, she was right. She probably would be dead. I couldn’t imagine our world without her in it. Had we been happy, the three of us, before Rue had come along? It had been more a kind of accepted existence. There was passion and tenderness between us—of course there was—but something harder, too. Ryan liked to be fucked rough because it helped with his pain, and I guessed it helped me as well. Dillon had lived through a hard upbringing, and maybe his fighting and fucking was a way for him to deal with that as well.

Like I said, simple creatures.

Rue had given us something to care about in a different way, though. She helped to fuse the slight crack that had always existed between Dillon and me and Ryan. Perhaps, in a way, she’d been best for Dillon out of all of us. But we were all in this together, and nothing was going to break us apart now. I wasn’t going to let it. Especially not Joe Nettie and the Capellos.

The traffic finally got moving. We were quiet inside the car. Each of us was alert for any signs that we were being followed, either by men on foot, ready to shoot at us from the sidewalk, or by similar men in a car, driving past us in the opposite direction, perhaps, ready to open fire as they swung by.

When we reached the outskirts of the city without any problems, the tension inside the car finally eased up.

“Where’s this contact you have?” Ryan asked.

“He’s located in Michigan, near Grand Rapids.”

Ryan frowned. “We’re not going to cover that distance in one day.”

He was probably thinking about his leg. The car had been modified for him, but that didn’t make it any easier for him to sit in one spot for too long. Even sitting in the car, not driving, was going to be harder than it was for any of us.

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