Page 25 of Uncontrolled

His fingers skate up the inside of my arm and goosebumps flare over my body. “I’ll wait until you fall asleep,” he says.

“Swear?” I ask, hating how I sound.

“I swear.”

His touch strokes up and down, the motion soothing. I’m relaxing, my muscles tingling, limbs heavy. All I have to do to save him is stay awake. If I don’t fall asleep, he’ll stay here with me, safe.

One more thing I can’t do right.

My eyelids shut.

Ploy

I sit on the floor, running my pinkie across Allie’s knuckles long after her breathing evens. I’m not naïve enough to expect a nap will fix all her problems.

But it might help me fix one for her.

I rise to my feet and tiptoe from her bedroom, careful and silent. When I hit the threshold, I pause. Her arm hangs over the mattress edge, fingers curled and reaching toward the spot where I sat.

“Damn it,” I whisper as I sneak to tip her hand and tuck it against her side.

A warning tickles at my consciousness, maybe I should stay. It’s the coward inside me, fighting to the surface, making excuses. I’ll only be gone a few hours max. Allie’s not exactly helpless.

And neither, it turns out, am I.

I grab my pack and go before I rethink it. Once I’m in the touristy section of the small downtown, I do my thing, hustling the smiling day drinkers with stories that give them an excuse to donate to my cause.

It’s half an hour before I catch sight of the same guy as yesterday, while I’m midway through giving directions to a “bar the locals drink at” to a giggling trio of college girls. At the end of the explanation, I slide out my hand. “Tips for the tour guide?”

I flash them a grin and a wink, dialing up the cheese factor so I don’t appear sleazy. They take the bait, a chorus of good natured groans as my palm fills with green. I shove the bills in a pocket and shoot a stealthy peek at my stalker.

There’s not a lot of variety to the places I venture, so I’m not surprised he found me. He’s got a ball cap pulled low as if it’ll make him invisible. One thing’s for sure, LowLow was right. This dude sucks at blending. He’s hunkered in the entryway of a shop, looming like a Scooby-Doo villain until someone tries to exit and practically knocks him over when they open the door.

I leave the cover of the trio of girls and collect head shakes and sorries until an older lady in a red sunhat gifts me a dollar and reminds me how much Jesus loves even people like me. I don’t thank her. Instead, I take a side street, away from the foot traffic.

We’ll see how much Jesus loves me when I try to pull this off, I tell myself. Shotgun houses pepper the shops, though the area doesn’t exactly pass as residential. I pause and undo the chest clip of my backpack, then the hip belt. I wasn’t crazy about lugging it with me today, though it helps with the panhandling if everyone assumes I’m traveling and not holed up anywhere nearby. Psychologically, they believe they’re helping me leave.

I squat and drag a battered water bottle from the fraying mesh of the side pocket. Screwing off the lid, I throw back the drink and take a few long chugs, waiting. Finally, a cautious head dips around the corner of the building at the start of the road before slinking out of sight. A second later, he’s there again.

He can’t be one of the hunters that have Allie and Talia living in fear. Not this frightened little bunny. He steps forward, wavers, darts behind the building again. At this rate, I’ll be waiting all damn day.

It occurs to me I haven’t considered my plan.

Jamison must have told the hunters he’d started working with about me or I wouldn’t have a shadow. At the cabin, Corbin acted like I was in on the joke of using Allie. He’d asked me what I was playing at when I didn’t go along with his plot of keeping us there. But Corbin had been dead before he could have told anyone I was in the early stages of crossing Jamison. Even later, on the phone, Jamison took it for granted that Allie shot Corbin.

So what did I tell them? Jamison’s voice whispers. Or did I warn them you couldn’t be trusted? You were going to abandon me over a girl? He grows more insistent, almost sorrowful, and something in my gut curdles. What did you do to me, Ploy? We were friends.

Don’t play like I didn’t make the right choice when I went with her, I snarl back in my mind. Jamison lured me into a freshly dug grave and then put a bullet in my chest to make the grave mine. Without Allie’s blood in my veins, that’s where things would have ended for me.

The ghost of Jamison’s laugh rattles through me. How many people have you killed for her? he asks. How many more bodies are coming?

A glimmer of a thought. As many as it takes to keep us alive.

And then Jamison again, his tone a self-satisfied smirk of a thing I can almost picture. We always were so much alike, you and me.

The hunter peeks around the corner and I whip a neutral look onto my face and lift a hand in greeting. He freezes as if it didn’t occur to him I’d spot him and then ambles forward, crossing the space in uneven steps.

“Help you?” I stand, rising to my full height. I’m not tall, only about five nine, so it throws me off a little when he’s so clearly intimidated. His posture rotates inward, hands splayed as if to show he means no harm. Now that he’s closer, I can see I underestimated his age. He’s got five or six years on me, closer to twenty-three, twenty-four.

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