Page 56 of Lucky or Knot
“Tony, Tony, please,” Raven’s voice finally coalesced into words through the screeching pain in my skull. “You fuckingidiot. Tony!”
Gods, he sounded so terrified. For me, and that was both the best and the worst thing ever.
My throat had cleared enough for speech, maybe. I worked the muscles, coughed again, forced my eyes open. Raven caught me by the chin and turned my head, peering down at me. So beautiful. Worth all of it. And in a second, I’d get up off my broken ass and get him out of here.
But when I did manage to speak, all that came out was, “Ow.”
“Ow,” Raven repeated, in a tone of disbelief. And then his chin lifted and he drew himself up. “Fuck you. Up! Now! Move!”
He scrambled to his feet, and the lack of his usual fluid grace worried me, but then I couldn’t think about that anymore, because he’d shoved an arm under my shoulders and heaved, and every nerve in my body fired at once, and I twisted into knots again, letting out a very not-stoic groan.
Raven whispered a few odd, sibilant words, and his magic twined around me, tugging on all my limbs.
Oh, that was strange, because I was moving—up, as he pulled on me, as if I’d suddenly lost about a hundred pounds of weight.
Raven dragged me to my feet, wrapped his arms around me, and began lurching and stumbling us through a propped-open door, out of the stairwell and into a parking garage. The garage, the car…
“There’s a car,” I mumbled. “A c-car. I had a…” Fuck, I couldn’t get my throbbing brain to function. Concussion. That’d be healing too, but not fast enough, and I could hear the sounds of pursuit, the shouts and rapid footsteps from the stairwell.
“Move faster,” Raven gasped. “You’re alive, you can walk. Fuck. A car, yes, thank you for that brilliant idea,” and there was a car in front of us, a sleek black luxury vehicle in a line of othersleek black luxury vehicles. Cunningham’s. Shit. Not Sean’s car, not that I’d have been able to find it in this state.
Raven propped me against the side, panting for breath, got the back door open, and toppled me through it with no ceremony at all.
I faceplanted into a leather seat, nearly lost consciousness again, and couldn’t help at all as he stuffed my legs in and then slammed the door.
A moment later, he flung himself into the driver’s seat, said something else in his own language, and the engine revved to life. Fairy magic. Now there was a way to hotwire a car that had never occurred to me.
As he screeched into reverse, I flopped down into the footwell, my face mashed into the edge of the seat, blood smearing fucking everywhere. And then he gunned it, tires squealing, shouts of alarm and three gunshots ringing out as we peeled out of the garage. Or at least I assumed we had, by the rending crash of what had to be one of those barrier gates breaking over the hood, and the violent scrape of the suspension as we swung crazily to the right.
A chorus of honks broke out around us, and Raven punched it.
“Tony! Are you still alive?”
Trying to pull myself up onto the seat again was taking all my attention and effort, but I mumbled something that could’ve been a yes, and Christ, this was impossible, digging my claws into the seat for leverage, managing to get sort of onto my knees as the car swerved and weaved, more honks breaking out, and a few screams. I was kind of glad I couldn’t see anything from my angle.
“Good, because I need you to tell me where to go—oh no, hold on—” A wild, spinning turn to the left flung me back down into the footwell, and I lay there, gasping, everything feelinglike it’d broken all over again, and gave up on moving for now. “Where are we going? Now, please?”
“You should’ve left me,” I managed.
“Not helpful,” he gritted out. “And not possible. There’s no going back now.”
No, there really wasn’t. Louie. We needed to get to…he had an office, but at this time of night, he was always in a shitty strip club way out past the end of the glamorous part of Vegas. I managed to mumble the name of the place and the intersection, and then I breathed deep, focusing every bit of energy I had on healing.
Raven slowed down slightly, but he still drove like a maniac, changing lanes and gears with reckless abandon. Beautiful. Magical. Brave and resilient. Quick-witted and loyal. And he handled the car like a professional getaway driver, to boot.
Fuck me. That spreading warmth in my chest, the smile I couldn’t suppress even though smiling hurt…it couldn’t be anything else. I’d already known, but I’d been trying not to give it a name. Now I simply couldn’t deny it.
“Gods, I love you,” I said into the torn-up leather of the back seat.
The car gave a lurch, quickly corrected. “What the fuck did you just say to me?” he demanded. “You can’t possibly have said what I heard!”
Something in my abdomen felt like it flipped over and strangled something else, a crescendo of agony that had me clenching my teeth and arching my back in a rictus. Everything faded for a second, blurred, came back after a moment, with more blood pooling in my mouth. I’d bitten my tongue, fucking damn it. On the other hand, I probably had one more organ functioning again. Healing like this was a bitch, zero out of ten, would not recommend.
What had he…I blinked into the semi-darkness of the footwell. Right. He needed clarification.
“Then I’ll say it again,” I said. “I love you. I love the way you drive. I love everything about you.”
Raven didn’t reply. Well, that was kind of discouraging.
