Page 384 of Hell Hath No Fury
“Will Aaron be okay?” I asked her as she searched the street.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “If Zeus and The Fallen MC are here though, he’s in good hands. But I can’t think about that right now. We need a vehicle.”
I spotted a luxurious Audi across the street and whipped out my phone. I’d created a quick and dirty app to hack into car systems earlier that year and sold it on the dark web for money to support a local animal shelter that was being shut. I used it to disable the car’s immobilizer that was supposed to prevent break-ins and then opened the locks.
I jogged over to it with Swan on my heels. When she went to take control of the vehicle, I placed my hand over hers on the door handle.
She raised her dark brows. “I’m a good driver.”
I shrugged. “I’m better.”
A tiny smile quirked her mouth, but she let go without a word and darted around to the passenger side. I was just starting the car remotely when a man burst through the restaurant door’s behind us shouting in Mandarin. I revved the engine and peeled out into the street as he shot at us, a bullet piercing the back window on my side of the car. A shard of glass sliced across theside of my neck, opening a wound that felt shallow but began to bleed profusely.
“Dammit,” Swan muttered, getting to her knees on the seat to reach around for the wound with cold fingers. “We need to staunch this.”
I gritted my teeth against her probing fingers. “It’s all good. Where to?”
“My ride out of here is in an hour,” she murmured, checking an old, masculine analog watch on her wrist. “At the Port Authority.”
Without answering, I swerved onto East Hastings and headed toward Vancouver’s busiest commercial port. I didn’t ask what she needed there. I knew. She was going to disappear.
I swallowed the bitter taste of disappointment on my tongue.
“How did they trap you?” I asked as she ripped a section of her tight black tee to tie it around my throat. “You’re the 0b1d14n Sw4n, I’m surprised they were able to catch you.”
The smell of her made my head swim, something calming like lavender and chamomile that suited her as much as it didn’t. She was an enigma code I had no hope of cracking, but I couldn’t stop myself from being compelled to try.
“It’s complicated.”
I snorted. “Would it kill you to give me a straight fucking answer? I put my life on the line tonight and you’re still icing me out.”
Without any outward sign, Swan seemed to recoil, growing even smaller in the seat beside me.
My hand found her denim clad thigh and squeezed lightly before pulling away so she didn’t feel crowded. “I told you, I would’ve done anything I could to get you out if you’d asked.”
“Yeah, well…” she shrugged, hugging herself as she stared out the window at the streaks of lights flying by in the dark. “I couldn’t know that.”
“Fuck that,” I countered, anger seeping into my blood as the adrenaline faded. “We’ve been talking for a year, Swan. I might not know where to send you flowers or what your goddamn name is, but I know you well enough, and you know me for damn sure.”
She remained silent, facing away.
“I know you read magna and love anime. You told me once you wanted a cat one day named Tsugumi after your favorite anime hacker. I know you speak six languages including Mandarin and Spanish. Now, I know you have a brother named Aaron who would fall on a bullet for you, and that you’re one of the most infamous hackers in the world.”
I sucked in a deep breath to control the madness reeling through me. It was desperation, pure and simple. A desperate need for her tolookat me, for her to let me really look at her. To feel seen by the only person in my life who’d ever seemed interested in the geeky, gawky ginger that was Finnegan Ramsey.
“I know you’re the best friend, the only friend, I have in this world or the virtual one,” I admitted softly, sneaking a glance at her.
Her profile was lovely, a word I’d never used before that seemed to suit her just fine. She was delicately carved, but those big black eyes, dark brows and shocking white hair gave her a certain boldness that was beautiful. The way she held her chin, high and jutted out as if she was ready to take a hit told me what I already knew.
This woman had been beaten down all her life.
My kindness was a foreign sequence her hard drive couldn’t process.
When she didn’t respond, I sighed. “At least tell me why you went out of your way to tell me about my mum. It must have been dangerous.”
She turned to face me then, curled up in the seat with her cheek pressed to the leather. I could feel her eyes on me like fingers stroking and then realized with a start, theywere. One cold finger followed my hairline over the curve of my ear down to my jaw.
“You told me you were ugly,” she said so quietly, I could barely hear her. “But you’re more beautiful than I know what to do with.”
