Like he knew she was ready to get buckled in, Luke carefully pushed her shoulders into position so she was properly in the seat.
“I’ll get the belt.” Luke’s voice, so deep, so level, was right in her ear. “Just keep breathing.”
Good advice, she thought to herself.
After he pulled the strap over her torso and clicked it into place, he closed her in and she watched him with blurry eyes as he bolted around the front of the car. When he had to pause and flipped the set of keys around in his hand, she made a move like she was going to reach over and pop the lock for him. But there was no lifting her arm.
At the rate her body was refreezing in its current position, she was going to have to be surgically removed from this car.
Fortunately, Luke did not have her problems with mobility. He all but pile-drove himself in behind the wheel, and the easy way he tossed the pack into the back seat without any effort was not the kind of thing she’d ever thought she’d envy. As soon as the engine turned over, he threw them in reverse and stomped on the gas.
“Don’t hurry,” she mumbled as they jerked back. “No accident.”
“Right.” He K-turned at a more reasonable clip. “Try and sleep. We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Where.” Finishing the sentence was too much like work. “Kidnapping me?”
His head whipped around. “What the hell?”
“Guess I’d be in trunk, then.” She tried to smile at him, but all she could manage was to turn her head in his direction. “Right?”
“That’s not funny.”
“Little funny.”
“No, not at all.”
And then they were off, traveling toward the river at only slightly faster than the thirty-mile-an-hour limit. She watched him instead of the street. He was bearing down on the steering wheel like he might rip it off its column, sitting forward as if he could get them to wherever they were going quicker if his face was closer to the windshield.
As the pain ramped up, and she felt that horrible retching sensation threaten the back of her throat, she moaned. “I think . . . need a doctor . . .”
“I know. I’m going to take care of it.”
She was going to tell him to just take her home, but that wasn’t safe. Mozart was going to find out sooner or later that his hitman hadn’t just failed. He’d been eaten. And with only one bloody body at the scene? Her old “boss” was going to guess she was still out in the world, some-where.
With all kinds of information on him.
“Where dog come from,” she heard herself say.
When Luke didn’t respond, she figured he had no better idea than she did. Or maybe she hadn’t said that out loud? She just couldn’t seem to connect to the world, the agony in her body the kind of thing that so completely overwhelmed her senses, it was hard to break through its haze and connect to anything outside of herself.
The Northway’s Trade Street on-ramp came up way too quickly—and she suspected she had lost consciousness for a minute or two, the angle of the car rousing her as they hit the incline and accelerated. When they flattened out and headed north, she took a shuddering inhale.
“Where . . . going.”
Luke glanced over, his face grim in the glow of the dashboard. “It’s safe, I promise. Try and rest, okay?”
“Three times,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Saved me . . . three times.”
He went back to staring out at the road ahead. “And I’ll do it a hundred times more, if you need me to.”
His words were spoken so softly, she wasn’t sure if she’d heard them right. If she had? Well . . . then he was a criminal with at least some kind of a moral compass, wasn’t he.
About forty minutes after Lucan finally got off the Northway, he pulled the stolen Cutlass onto an overgrown drive and proceeded a hundred and fifty yards off a county road that had had less traffic than a goat path.
As he went along, he kept checking on Rio. She was looking . . . dead. Her skin was gray, her mouth lax, her body motionless except for the kind of rapid, shallow breathing that was not a good thing. Over the course of the trip, which had been longer than it should have been because he’d had to make sure they weren’t being followed, she’d settled against the doorjamb, her torso tilted away from him—though her face had stayed angled so that if she opened her eyes, she could see him.
And now he was worried he wasn’t going to be able to get her out of that seat. Get her the help she desperately needed.