Dangerous Desires

by Siren, Tia

  “Because they don’t exactly pay a ton here,” the guard snapped back, showing the spark that he could always see in her eyes but had never been able to experience in the closed, regulated routine of their usual day. “It runs and drives, and that’s really ticks off everything on my car priority list.”

  “Are you sure it runs?”

  Just as he said that, the engine finally roared to life and Crewe stomped down on the gas pedal. The car lurched and shot across the parking lot. He clutched the wheel so tightly he felt his knuckles ache with the pressure, and turned it sharply to whip the car around the vehicles that had invaded the lot and tried to block the exit. A scraping, crunching sound filled his ears as the car ground against the side of one of the black cars and then burst free on the other side. He tried to force his foot down harder though the pedal was already on the floor. Blaire had made no move to get off of his lap and now he felt her hand clutch at his thigh as if to hold herself in place as they screeched out of the lot and onto the open road.

  “Will they have put up blockades?” he shouted.

  “Yes,” she replied. “No one leaves the area.”

  “We do,” he said, looking out of the window beside him briefly before yanking the wheel to the side again.

  The car jumped as it left the road and bumped into the wooded area that ran alongside it. Branches scratched at the sides and windows, and the tires bounced treacherously over rocks and roots, but he kept pushing them forward. As they went, Blaire maneuvered herself off of his lap and into the passenger seat. She grasped at the seatbelt and latched it before grabbing at the handle above her head. He looked at her briefly and then back to the woods ahead of them.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She looked at him strangely as if she couldn’t fathom why he would be asking something like that at this moment. He knew that it was strange, but he needed to know her first name. He didn’t want to think of her as a guard any longer. He didn’t want to refer to her only by the last name that represented the distinction between them. The prison was behind him now. He wasn’t an inmate anymore.

  “Whisper,” she said.

  Crewe couldn’t help the short laugh that burst from his lips.

  “Are you serious?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It doesn’t suit you,” he said. “You are definitely not a whisper.”

  Color crept across her cheeks and he felt an unexpected flutter in his chest. He hadn’t expected to say anything like that. It had just come out. The car hit something and his attention was brought back to the windshield as the front of the car lifted up off of the ground. Whisper gasped and gripped the handle more tightly, curling her legs up toward her body as if in an effort to protect herself.

  “Crewe!” she cried out almost in admonishment.

  He turned the wheel hard and slammed on the brake, slowing the vehicle before he smashed into the tree ahead of them. The front of the car crumpled, but the airbag caught him, preventing Crewe from slamming into the dashboard ahead of him.

  “Dante,” he said when the car had settled.

  “What?” Whisper said through labored breath.

  He fought away the airbag and kicked open the door.

  “Dante,” he said, climbing out. “My name is Dante.”

  He watched Whisper clamber across the seats and out of the driver’s side door before walking around to the front of the car.

  “Damn it,” she said, kicking at the ground. “The tires are busted.”

  “I think that the front of the car being wrapped around a tree is the more pressing issue right now,” he said. “We’re going to have to keep going on foot.”

  Whisper ran around to the back of the car and pounded a fist in the center of the trunk. The lid popped open and she reached inside. When she appeared again, she was clutching a purple duffel bag with a prestige brand name splashed across it in silver glitter.

  “You won’t get your car fixed so that other people can actually get inside, but you’ll cough up a couple hundred dollars for gym gear?” he asked somewhat derisively.

  Whisper slammed the trunk closed and slapped the bag down on top of it, unzipping it sharply before shooting him a scathing glare and ducking her head to dig through the bag.

  “I shop at the thrift stores close to rich neighborhoods. You’d be amazed at what people will just toss away. As for the car,” she came up with a handful of clothes and glared at him, “I haven’t really had anyone who felt the urge to open my passenger door, so I didn’t feel any urgency to have it repaired. Is that enough of an explanation for you?”

  She seemed exasperated and Dante regretted talking to her that way. He started to apologize, but she tossed the clothes at him. He unfolded them in his hands and found a pair of grey sweatpants and a plain black t-shirt that he assumed she kept in her car for emergencies. This definitely constituted an emergency. He kicked off his boots as fast as he could and stripped off his prison-issue uniform, throwing it to the side with the compulsion to spit on it. He wished that he had a match with him so that he could light it on fire, but that would likely bring even more attention to them and that was truly the last thing that they needed.

  Dante could feel Whisper’s eyes on him as he stood in front of her in nothing but his boxers and then stepped into the pants and dropped the shirt over his head. It felt fantastic to be in fresh clothing that wasn’t khaki and he savored the feeling as much as he could as he perched on the edge of the bumper to put his boots back on. When he was dressed, they started through the woods on foot, not communicating where they were going to go, but moving through the trees in an effort just to get as far from the main road as they could.

  They had been running through the woods, weaving around to keep their path from being too easy to trace, for long enough that the sun had melted away and they were cloaked in near-darkness when he turned to her.

  “Alright,” he said. “I’ll leave you here. Just give me a few minutes and then call for help.”

  “What?” she said, sounding stunned.

  “I really appreciate all that you did for me, but I think that I can take it from here. You head back and let them rescue you. Just try to keep them off of my path for as long as possible.”

  “I’m not just going back,” she said. “I came with you this far, I’m going to make sure that you get where you need to go.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  Before she was able to respond, the sound of a chopper in the sky above made both of them pause and hunker closer to the ground.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered.

  “They’re looking for me,” she said. “They’re going to have spotlights out any second. We’ve got to keep moving. If we split up now, the second that they see me, they’re going to know that you are here somewhere.”

  “So, what do we do?” Dante asked, starting to feel frantic.

  This was his only chance. The one chance that he had to make things right, and he couldn’t let them stop him. He would die before they dragged him back to prison. He once swore that he would give his life for those he considered his family, and he wouldn’t hesitate to live up to that promise if he needed to.

  “Go back,” she said.

  “What?” he nearly screamed at her.

  “Go back,” she said. “We need to go back toward the prison. By now they’ve already scanned the woods close to there and have moved on. Soon enough they’ll see my car and they’ll know that we were that far in, so they’ll keep looking deeper into the woods. If we go back, we’ll have more of a chance.”

  Dante thought through what she had said for a second and then nodded.

  “Do you have a phone?” he asked.

  Whisper rummaged around in the bag that she had gotten from the locker before they left the prison and came up with a tiny pink flip phone. He looked at it quizzically.

  Who the fuck was this woman? Prison Guard Barbie?
/>   “Technology isn’t exactly my favorite thing,” she said as she handed it over.

  “I can see that,” he said.

  The number was permanently etched in his mind and he easily tapped it into the keypad as they made their way back in the way that they had come, repeating the weaving that kept their path difficult to follow, particularly in the darkness that had settled over them. The voice that came over the line was a welcome glimpse of the past and Dante was tempted to keep the man on the phone just so that he could hear the familiarity of it. Knowing that he didn’t have the luxury of either time or privacy, however, he rushed through the conversation and then handed the phone back to Whisper.

  “We need to get to the rest stop on the highway,” he said.

  “The rest stop?” Whisper asked. “That’s at least three miles from here.”

  “Then I guess we need to get moving. Unless you’ve changed your mind. You can stop anytime and call for help.”

  Whisper shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “As long as you have me, you have leverage. Just keep going.”

  Dante didn’t know why she was staying with him. He had gotten out of the prison. Staying with him was only putting her in more and more danger. There was determination in her voice and her eyes, though, that told him that he wasn’t going to be able to change her mind.

  The sound of the chopper overhead was getting quieter as they made their way in the direction of the highway, giving him some reassurance. He could hear cars zooming down the street several yards away and knew that some, if not all, of them were police cars looking for them. They couldn’t hesitate. They needed to get to the rest stop and the car that would be waiting for them there, left by his contacts on the outside. From there, they would go to the safe house. He would have to decide what to do after that when the time came. One step at a time.

  4

  The temperature had dropped rapidly during the time that they were running from the prison and by the time that they made it into the parking lot of the rest area Whisper was shivering. The fast pace that Dante had maintained as they made their way through the woods and along the side of the highway had caused her to sweat, making the chill that settled into her bones now even worse. It wasn’t until they were walking into the shadowy back corner of the lot that the chill started to turn into a sense of fear. The reality of the decision that she had made to go with this man became suddenly apparent and she questioned herself. She was starting to hesitate, her steps slowing as she resisted going toward the car that she saw hunkering in the darkness, when he turned toward her.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  The sound of his voice was smooth and velvety, soothing the chaos of her mind. It reminded her of all that he had done to protect her. Though they had only had the occasional interaction during the time that he had been in the prison where she worked, he had put his own safety and even his life on the line to try to shield her from the danger of the riot. It didn’t make sense to her and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to explain her thoughts to anyone else, but in that moment, she knew that she trusted Dante.

  Whisper nodded and quickened her steps to catch up with him. They approached the car and she noticed that it was already humming, the engine running. Whoever had left it for them hadn’t been gone for long.

  “Who left this for you?” she asked as she slid into the passenger seat.

  “A friend,” he answered shortly, the tone of his voice telling her that he wasn’t going to offer any more details than that.

  “Why didn’t they wait?”

  “Being seen with a fugitive wouldn’t be good for him.”

  Apparently convinced to pay more attention to safety rules by their crash in the woods, Dante latched his seatbelt into place and backed out of the parking space. They drove deeper into the darkness toward the back entrance to the rest stop and cut through rows of trucks before leaving the lot. The feeling in the car changed the moment that they left the rest stop behind. Though Whisper watched as several marked and unmarked police cars wailed past, somehow, she felt shielded within the car, as though the mysterious friend who had left the vehicle for Dante had imbued it with some form of protection that cloaked them so that they could move safely beyond the immediate radius of the prison and toward wherever they were going.

  She was still shuddering in the seat as they went down the road and Dante reached forward to turn up the heat. The warm air blasted out of the vent toward her and Whisper felt her tense muscles start to relax and the chill on her skin ease. She didn’t know how long they had been driving when she turned to him.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “A safehouse,” Dante replied, not taking his eyes off of the road. “We established it before I went to prison, just in case any of us ever got a chance to escape.”

  “How far away is it?” she asked.

  “A while.”

  They fell silent and Whisper listened to the rushing of the tires on the road and the wind whipping past as they sped down the open stretch of highway. It was late into the night now and she didn’t see any other cars in either direction. The news of the riot and the announcement that a guard had been taken hostage by an escaped inmate would have gone out by now and she knew that many people would avoid getting on this road thinking that it was a direct path of the authorities. Her knowledge of escape procedures at the prison, however, told her that they wouldn’t bother to get on this smaller offshoot of the main turnpike. They would first examine the woods and the larger highway where the rest stop had been, only branching out when those most expected routes had been exhausted. It was one of the signs of inefficiency that she had often taken issue with during her earliest days working at the prison, but it served them now as they were able to drive along undetected.

  “What did Redding mean when he said that you owed this to his brother?” she finally asked, both wanting to fill the quiet and to know more about this man who she had aligned herself with in a decision that had filled an instant and would impact the rest of her life.

  She could see Dante tense, but he still didn’t look away from the road ahead of him.

  “His brother was murdered by the same person who killed the man I was convicted of killing.”

  “But what does that mean?” Whisper asked. “Why do you owe risking your life because someone wronged you?”

  “I can’t get into all of the details right now,” Dante said, the pain evident in his voice. “But if I had done what I needed to do, he wouldn’t have died and his name wouldn’t have been dragged through the mud. I owe it to him to fix that. His family doesn’t deserve to have people believe the things about him that they do.”

  Whisper felt an ache in her heart that she never would have expected to feel. The sincerity in Dante’s voice when he insisted that he wasn’t guilty of the crime that brought him to the prison had touched her, convincing her that she needed to do what she could to help him out of the horrific situation that had exploded around them. Now, however, she was feeling so much more. Ever since he had been processed into the prison, she had felt an attraction toward this man that was everything that it shouldn’t be. She knew that it was beyond unethical the way that her heart pounded and her belly fluttered when she looked at him, and fought to never allow her growing desire for him show when she interacted with him. She thought that the draw was purely physical, the reaction of an affection-starved woman to a gorgeous, sexy man who was, in every way, forbidden. Now that as she listened to him talk and heard the emotion in his voice as he spoke of the turmoil that had forced him behind bars, the attraction took on a depth that was breathtaking. She wanted to know about him. She wanted to learn about the person who was behind the number that the prison had assigned him, the person who seemed to have been revealed to her as soon as he got out of the uniform.

  She had the compulsion to reach over and take his hand, to offer him the comfort and reassurance that she felt he so desperately needed and had
been denied for the years that had been wasted in the steel and stone boxes. Something held her back from following through with it, however. Instead, she turned and rested her head back against the seat as she stared out through the window at the night beyond.

  She was still in that position, her head tucked back and her hands rested in her lap, when she was jostled awake by the car bouncing off of the road again. Whisper’s eyes snapped open and she sat up, looking around the car nervously. There were trees around them again, but it seemed that they weren’t staggering through the trees blindly, but following a rustic road that guided them through the woods. They continued on this way for a few minutes before the headlights washed across the silhouette of a small building in front of them. Dante pulled the car to a stop in front of the cabin and turned off the engine. The stillness closed around them and Whisper instinctively strained for the sound of sirens or a helicopter. There was only silence and she let out a breath. This must be the safe house.

  5

  Dante left Whisper in the car so that he could check the cabin to make sure that it was safe. He found the key where he knew it would be hidden and stepped inside. Stepping over the threshold into the cabin felt like he was stepping back in time. The interior of the cabin held the energy and emotions of the moment that the door was closed, securing this building with the hope that it would one day be shelter to Dante or Evan Redding, protecting them while they sought the vengeance and justice both of them, and the people they considered family, had had stolen from them. He roamed through the cabin slowly even after he had checked each of the rooms to ensure that there was no one inside. He could almost hear the voices of the family echoing from the walls. Some of those voices he would never hear again, others were locked away, silenced until he could free them.

  “Are you OK?”

  The sound of Whisper’s voice behind him startled Dante and he whirled around, stalking toward her.

  “I told you to stay in the car,” he shouted.