Page 10 of The Wayward Sons & The Vampires of Fortune
Oh, I bet it was.
But I wasn’t about to ask that question. Knowing what kind of bounty Daddy Hartford put on Ryder’s head wouldn’t do a damn thing for my temper.
I took another long drag of my cigarette to stave off my anger as best I could.Time and place. Time and fucking place.This wasn’t it.
Yet.
“Were you the only ones who picked up the bounty?” I asked, though I highly doubted it. The quick shake of his head told me everything I needed to know. “How many?”
“I don’t know,”
“When did the bounty go up?”
“A few months ago,” he whispered.
After the Seattle incident.Fuck.
While I had wanted to believe the quiet run we were having was a good sign, it hadn’t sat right with me. The incident at the strip club in Seattle with Ryder’s power was always at the back of my mind, nagging at me with the question of how long we had before his past caught up with us.
I made a small sound and leaned back against the dresser, pulling in another deep inhale of smoke as I considered his words. It was fucking messy. That’s what this was. It left us with a list of issues that were growing by the minute.
At the top of that list: we had to get the fuck out of Cincinnati.
And I had to get rid of Two.
“I got one last question for you,” I said quietly, my gaze flicking in the direction of the bounty hunter. “Who else knows he’s here?”
“No one.” He shook his head.Poor idiot probably thought that fact would save his life.If anything, it sealed his fate. “Wejust had instructions to bring him back and where to bring him—some rich guy’s house in Seattle. That’s all. No one knows we found you or where we found you. I ain’t told no one anything.”
“Well, that,” I began as I stood, “is just what I like to hear.”
And then I ripped the air right out of his lungs.
CHAPTER 06
Half an hour. For half an hour I stood in the parking lot and clamped down hard on my power to not feel a damn thing. It didn’t work. Not really.What Gray was doing…
I exhaled slowly and tried to stop the runaway train that was my thoughts.This was my fault—always was.That same nagging thought popped up in the back of my brain, trying hard to convince me that Gray would be better off without me. Without my past. Without my mess.
The motel door opening drew me out of my anxious thoughts. Gray came out with our bags in hand and a cigarette stuck between his lips. The hard expression on his face was a punch to the gut. He said nothing as he popped the trunk and tossed our stuff in. One quick survey told me it was everything we had. He’d cleaned out our room.And very likely, he did whatever the hell he could to erase any trace of us.
His emotions were intense but not quite mad. They clashed together in a myriad of feelings that I couldn’t put a name to.Just overwhelmingly, nauseatingly intense.
“We need to drag two bodies out to the woods,” Gray told me quietly. He lit the cigarette as he stopped next to me. His gaze remained fixated on the motel room door. “And then we need to get the hell out of here.”
The pit of my stomach dropped out. Deep down, I’d known what he planned to do to them, but hearing him say it was different. I was the trained killer. He was the hunter. That was how this whole thing was supposed to go. I signed up with the military. I signed up to kill people when ordered to. Not Gray. I didn’t want that for him.
“You killed them?” I asked, needing to hear for sure.
“You or them, baby,” he snapped. “I don’t give a fuck who I kill to protect you, got it? We bury the bodies, and then we get out of here. I want to lay low in the hustle somewhere for a few days. Find a cheap place and pretend like we don’t exist. Harder to make a whole fuckin’ scene when we’re surrounded by people.”
“Or easier to get others killed,” I pointed out.
“Ask me how much I care about the others,” he retorted.I knew the answer to that.Gray warned,“Don’t give me that look, baby.”
“What look?”I knew exactly what look he was talking about.
“There wasn’t a fuckin’ choice.”
