Page 39 of Escape From Me

I glanced back. The judge’s body was still slumped over. That wasn’t good. Probably.

“I can’t go home.”

There was a bit of a growl from the man beside me. The one who had me wondering if he was the bad guy. But if he was? He was my bad guy.

“You were never going home anyway.”

I turned toward my dark knight and just stared at him.

“Dove, I know I'm easy on the eyes, but you don’t need to stare.”

That got me blinking and trying to process everything that had happened.

“You came back? And what do you mean I was never going home? I doubt I would get lucky enough to be rid of my family.” I was practically mumbling that last part. What the hell was wrong with my family?

Zeid hadn’t turned toward me, and he kept one hand on the wheel, but the other reached for mine.

Warmth and safety and something else blossomed in me, and for the first time in my life, I found myself not really caring that my future might be ruined. Hell, I didn’t even care if the judge was dead. He’d come back for me. No one had ever come back for me. My father never spared me a second look. My mother usually had a drink in hand as she wobbled about leaving me to eat dinner alone. I knew the staff better than my own parents.

“Should I feel numb or something?”

Zeid effortlessly swerved in and out of traffic, and I couldn’t get enough of him. Just watching him. Mapping scars that I had yet to trace. I liked the way his Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. I wanted to know what that stubble felt like between my legs, and well, shit. I was wet and that seemed rather inappropriate considering my fiancé might be dead in the back.

Numb would imply shock.

But him? Whatever this strange feeling blooming inside me was, it felt like a dream. He’d come back.

“I never left. I know what a caged animal does when backed into a corner, and you, my Daisy, were backed into a corner.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I hadn’t recognized it for what it was. I didn’t actually know what to do. Too busy taking orders forever.

When he pulled my hand to his lips, my entire body woke up in a flood of relief and heat and want.

“But regardless whether you were or weren't, your eyes don't lie even when your words do. And I wouldn't leave what's mine anyway. You, my little dove, are mine.”

That should have scared me just as it scared me to be in the same car as the shit in the back. It should have scaredme that he was in charge of a gang. My whole life, I’d been told they were the enemy. They were the devil. But I felt safer in his arms than I did in the backseat with someone who was supposed to uphold the law.

“Well, thank you for not abandoning me. Yours or not,” I said, glancing back into the passenger space of the car.

When Zeiden squeezed my hand to this side of pain, I turned back to him.

“There is no or not, Daisy. You are mine, and I will prove it to you. Your body, your mind, your soul.”

I shivered at the look he threw my way as he pulled into a garage.

Where were we going?

I glanced back.

“Do you think he’s dead now?”

I asked the question, but there was no waver in my voice. No fear that I would end up in jail. No sadness. Not even my stomach seemed to understand that it might all be wrong and things might come crashing down.

“Dove, what if he was?”

I glanced at Zeid and then back to my ex-fiancé.

“Help me get rid of the body?”

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