Page 54 of Lucky or Knot
“Okay,” I said, instead of any of that. “I’ll put you over my shoulder and bust out of the room and run. Feel free to struggle as much as you want to make it look realistic. I’ll be able to keep you where I want you regardless. You won’t slow me down.”
“Oh,” he breathed. “I wish we had the chance to explore that concept further, under other circumstances.”
It took a second for that to compute. Yes. A hundred fucking times yes, and if Raven wanted that too, then nothing was going to stop me from getting us the hell out of here and through all this bullshit to somewhere with a bed.
“We will. You ready?”
He swallowed hard, bit his lip, and nodded.
My half shift wasn’t something I showed people all that often, if for no other reason than it had, in retrospect, probably been the original inspiration for my sister calling me Smilodon. When I allowed the magic to well up and transform me, fangs lengthening past my lower lip and claws extending to their full, razor-sharp length, my jaw heavier, fur sprouting on my shoulders and chest, Raven stared at me with glittering eyes, flushed and speechless. Hopefully not with horror, but I wasn’t about to waste time asking.
“Showtime,” I said, and scooped him up to sling him over my shoulder. With my left arm wrapped around his ass, I wrenched the door open with my other hand.
As the door cracked off its hinges and went flying behind me, Raven and I were, for a split second, the eye of the storm: everyone around us—which included Axel, two of Cunningham’s security team, and a passing hotel staff member carrying a towering stack of linens—froze, their mouths open in shock and disbelief.
And then Raven shrieked, loud and shrill enough to leave my ears ringing, and all hell broke loose.
Axel dived for the door behind me, eyes practically popping out of his head, and I didn’t know if he wanted to hide or get his stuff or he’d just panicked or what, but I practically tripped over him as I turned to run down the hall.
One of the bodyguards did trip over him, cursing and lunging for me, and the other shoved the staffer out of the way to get to me. That guy screamed as napkins flew up in the air and everywhere, and I bowled Bodyguard Two over, kicking his legs out from under him and racing away at alpha weretiger speed, leaving them all to wrestle and yell and untangle themselves.
As we passed the service elevator, I hesitated for aprecious half-second—but no. I could already hear the security guys shouting into their radios, and we’d have the fucking National Guard waiting for us the second the doors opened at the bottom.
I bolted past, Raven still screaming and waving his arms around, and in the distance there was an uproar: the party dissolving into chaos, I suspected. Good, maybe that’d buy us some time. Maybe Axel and his team would slip out unnoticed in the confusion. I hoped so, but I didn’t have time to worry about them. My feet slapped the polished concrete floor, the hallway narrowed down into a yellow-lit gray-walled nightmare tunnel, the stairwell had to be—there, the red emergency exit sign glowing above it. I skidded to half a stop, yanking the door open and using the momentum of it to fling myself through, remembering just in time to strafe to the right so Raven’s head didn’t whack into anything.
Behind us, the service elevator dinged, and then a new hubbub of shouts and frantic commands arose. Good thing I hadn’t waited for it, because it seemed to have disgorged a whole security team.
I’d already made it down five flights, flinging myself around the corners, praying that Raven’s fae magic could protect him from whiplash, when the team burst into the stairwell.
By the cacophony of new scents assaulting me as they clattered after us, they were mostly shifters themselves, a mix of coyotes and wolves, but they wouldn’t be able to catch up.
But a bullet could, and the overlapping, overwhelming chorus of echoing shouts and running footsteps suddenly shattered in a horrendous, earsplitting bang. The shot ricocheted from the wall two feet in front of me, concrete chips flying and ripping gouges into my thighs and stomach.
Raven cried out, for real this time, and I managed to catch a glimpse of a tear in his trouser leg, blood welling through fromcrimson-painted white skin.
He’d heal, fuck, it was only a scratch, but I ran faster and faster, swooping around and around the square stairs and their central well. Another gunshot rang and boomed.
“Stop, you’ll hit the boss’s boy!” someone shouted, and thank the gods for that authoritative someone’s common sense, but sweat poured down my back and my feet were slippery with it, and with the blood running from my wounds and Raven’s, and I ran just as fast but slammed into walls as I took the corners now, without enough traction to prevent it. My shoulder would be ground beef, and the pain nagged at me, but my grip on Raven with my other arm hadn’t slackened in the slightest.
The stairwell whirled past me, sickening and dizzying, and Raven moaned. The number 42 flashed by, big white blocky numerals next to a door. About eighteen floors down, nearly a third of the way.
If Sean had the car waiting, if I could even find it, if I didn’t pause for anything, if they didn’t start shooting again…my heart hammered to the beat of my frantic thoughts, and my frantic feet, and then I caught a glimpse of 33, we were leaving pursuit behind, we might actually fucking make it, 24, then 19, and then…
Down below, a door slammed, and another wall of sound echoed up to meet the noise from above.
Two heads appeared, craning up, and there were more moving shapes, more voices.
I skidded to a stop, bracing myself against the wall, squeezing my eyes shut to try to blink away the stinging sweat. My chest heaved. Even my powerful alpha body needed a second to catch its breath.
We were fucked. Enemies coming up from below, more above, closing in now that I’d stopped. Cornered. Nowhere to run. Out of the stairwell, and I’d be lost in the hotel’s mazeand end up cornered somewhere else. Raven would probably get killed if I tried to fight our way through, too high of a probability to risk.
A triumphant call and response went up as they realized the same things I had.
“Put him down and back away from him,” the same voice yelled from above, the one who’d told his subordinate to stop shooting. “Now! Put him down!”
My arm tightened, and Raven squirmed, twisting around and obviously trying to get a look at the situation.
“Put me down, do what he says,” Raven said, loudly enough that everyone could hear. “Stop moving, he could kill me,” he added, even louder, and the footsteps slowed down, but I could still see the guys down below creeping up one stair at a time. A glint of halogen lighting on bare metal suggested they were trying to get in position for a clear shot. “He’ll put me down. Right? You don’t want to die here, do you?”
