by Dean Murray
James stepped around me as though fully ready to go head to head with another hybrid on nothing more than my say-so. Mohawk tried to step forward to meet him, but Tiffany was there.
"Don't do this. He doesn't have to take you on by himself. For all intents and purposes we are in their territory right now. You can't win a fight against three or four of her people and the last thing we want is to bring half a dozen burly guys down here where Lori will have an easier time of influencing them. Don't throw away everything we've spent the last few weeks trying to accomplish."
Mohawk shook her head. "The slut won't do anything—Tasha still has Everett locked up."
I put my hand on James' elbow to stop him from continuing to close, but my eyes never left Mohawk's face. "I agree with Tiffany. There is no need to further inflame things. Get back into your vehicle and we'll pretend this never happened."
She wanted a piece of me, of anyone really, but me most of all. For a heartbeat I thought she was going to resist the order, but then she finally realized that I was planning on getting into that same SUV with her and driving away from James and the rest of my supporters.
Her smile as she got back into the SUV was a cruel thing, but I was still several steps ahead of her as I turned back to Tiffany. "You have anyone else you'd like to give a break? Preferably someone with more sense and less of a chip on her shoulder."
Tiffany waved one of the women from the backseat out. "Go get some sleep in the RV. While you're in there toe the line and do whatever the butler says."
They both nodded, but I held up my hand, stopping them before they could go to the RV. "I want a promise from each of you that you will obey Donovan for as long as you're enjoying my hospitality."
Once I had their promises I waved them in and nodded for James to follow them. Mallory appeared at my elbow. "I don't think this is a good idea, Adri."
Tiffany shook her head. "She'll be safe. Really, we've just exchanged hostages—nothing's going to happen to her as long as she's got two of my people in that RV."
I gave Mallory an inquiring look, but I wasn't surprised when she finally gave me a reluctant nod to indicate that Tiffany was telling the truth. The Del Rio hybrid wasn't the type to bow and scrape, but she also seemed to play things pretty straight.
"Tiffany, if you can drive I'd like to get started—we're running even further behind schedule now."
I opened up the door closest to me and sat down in the middle bench seat next to Lori. I would have rather sat down in the back seat next to Tiffany's fourth hybrid, but that wasn't the right way to start out what was probably going to end up being the most important negotiation of my life.
Lori was in obvious need of a shower and a hairbrush, but that somehow just managed to highlight how incredibly beautiful she was. It seemed like every second girl I ran into made me feel like an ugly duckling, but most of them had to do their hair and makeup to look that mind-blowing. Lori, on the other hand, just looked like she was slumming.
Her wrists were handcuffed together and her ankles were manacled to the chair frame beneath us. If Tiffany's group had been pulled over on their way east they would have ended up having to decide between killing a cop or spending the rest of their lives in jail, but Lori's condition wasn't entirely surprising.
They'd apparently stopped drugging her and she looked like she was at least getting something to eat, but that was as far as they'd been willing to go. It actually should make my job easier, but that didn't mean that I liked anyone being treated in such a manner—even the girl who had tried to seduce Alec.
I couldn't really blame Lori for ignoring me when I scooted onto the seat next to her as best I could with only one working arm. She was probably expecting me to take the opportunity to beat her with a baseball bat.
"Where are the keys to her restraints?"
"You're not freeing her!"
The protest burst out of the woman behind me with a force that said she was having a hard time believing that anyone would consider freeing Lori to be a good idea.
"Adri, meet Polly; Polly, this is Adriana Paige, our…patron. Go ahead and give her the keys."
"I don't care if she's the patron saint of leprechauns; I'm not giving her the keys."
"You'll do it or you'll be walking home. As much as I don't like it, it appears that she's the one in charge here. Graves backed us into a corner and we don't have much of a choice but to go along with whatever he's got planned."
Polly turned her head like she was going to spit, but then looked at the upholstery and changed her mind. "I'm a free woman, I've got all of the choices in the world."
"Yeah, you have the choice to let your daughter starve—or worse. You know as well as I do that we're screwed if Graves doesn't continue to give us cash. We left home with little more than the clothes on our backs and as long as this war is going on it's not like we're going to be able to settle down and work steady jobs."
"So we torture the whore and get at the money she and her daddy have stashed away."
"Yeah, good luck with that. Everett is no Alec Graves. He doesn't come from old money and the tithe from the pack was never enough to really get excited about. Besides, I'm not going to torture Lori, so you'll be on your own."
Mohawk shrugged without looking back at Polly, Lori or I. "Not on her own—I'd help."
"Yeah, which just means that you'd kill her after three hours instead of six. Neither of you know enough to do it properly without killing her before she breaks. Hell, you don't even know how to properly restrain her."
"Oh, I don't know, the cuffs seem to have worked just fine."
I cut into the conversation before it could go any further. "Yeah, cuffs and leg irons are just fine if you want to cut her hands off. You're lucky it wasn't a full moon or she might have lost control and bled out."
Mohawk gave me a dark smile. "You're coming at this from the wrong angle, Polly. If we want money we should be torturing the gimp princess rather than the whore. I'll bet that Graves would pay tens of millions to get her back in one piece."
Tiffany looked back at me by way of the rear-view mirror, but she didn't speak up. Apparently she wanted to see how I was going to handle myself. I shook my head at Mohawk. "Alec won't pay a single penny to get me back because he doesn't negotiate from a position of weakness. What he will do is take time away from the war with the Coun'hij to hunt down anyone who hurts me."
"That's no big deal, Polly and I have both been on the run before."
"Not from Alec Graves you haven't."
This time I'd slid my gun into the sling holding up my left arm rather than into my pants. My hand was already gripping the handle. Mohawk was on the far side of the car from me, I figured I had a decent chance of taking her out before she could reach back and hurt me, even assuming she was one of the relatively rare hybrids who could manifest a partial shift. The real problem was Polly, but she was sitting directly behind Lori, so I would probably have time for at least one shot. Polly was going to kill me, but not before I got Mohawk. It wasn't how I would have chosen to die, but not many humans could say that they took out a hybrid in the process of dying.
"Stop. You're not going to kill her or I'll make sure this car is ripped apart."
It took me longer than it should have to realize that it had been Lori who had finally spoken, but that was at least partially because Tiffany slammed on the brakes with so much force that my butt actually left the seat for a second.
Sometime over the last minute or two we'd entered the city limits and moved off onto a smaller road with stoplights and crosswalks, but that wasn't why we had to stop so abruptly. We'd stopped because more than half of the cars around us had come to a stop and even now people were getting out of their vehicles and approaching ours.
Polly had a knife at Lori's throat. "Release them!"
The slender length of steel had already drawn a thin line of crimson across Lori's tanned skin, but she seemed remarkably unconcerned about the possibility of dying.
"Right now you're all thinking that you didn't know I was capable of influencing people who hadn't gotten a good look at me. You're wondering what else I can do that you didn't know about, but what you should be worried about is the fact that those people out there are now close enough that they can see inside our vehicle. They can see that you're holding a knife to my throat, and they don't like it. You've now missed your opportunity to kill me. If you hurt me now you'll have a riot on your hands."
I looked around at the people pressed up against the van windows and realized that Lori was right. There were a few men who had their phones out as though calling 911, but most of them looked like they wanted to take matters into their own hands.
"Get your knife away from her throat!" I hissed the order at Polly, but she didn't move until Tiffany nodded at her. Even then she didn't obey very quickly, obviously unhappy that Lori had been able to turn the tables so completely on them.
"You're now going to hand Adri the keys to my handcuffs so that she can free me, and then I'm going to step out of the van and walk away without any of you trying to follow me."
Again another nod from Tiffany, and slow, angry compliance from Polly. I took the keys and unlocked Lori's wrists. It would have been too hard to get to her legs with only one hand, so I just handed her the keys to the leg irons and let her unlock herself. While she did that I pulled out my latest burner phone and handed it to her. She looked at me with derision.
"Do you really think I'm dumb enough to accept something that will let you track me?"
"It's got the number to my RV programmed in it. You've got no money and no way of communicating with the rest of the world. You're going to want a way to confirm that your father is released."
Lori looked at the phone for several seconds before nodding and accepting it. "You've got four hours to free him. After that, I'll start hunting your people down and making them pay for keeping him locked up."
"I'm not the one you need to be threatening, Lori. I'm the one who made sure that the two of you were treated humanely. I'll call and order his release within the hour."
She nodded, not exactly satisfied, but apparently willing to give me enough rope to hang myself if that was what I wanted to do. She started to reach for the door, but then stopped and looked over at Tiffany.
"You three empty out your pockets and give me all of the cash you're carrying."
Mohawk looked like she was going to argue, but I stopped her with a look. "Just do it. I'll make sure you're reimbursed."
Lori didn't like that. "I don't want your money, just theirs. If you reimburse them then it defeats the purpose."
"Does it? The purpose I see is making sure that you have enough money that you won't have to steal from someone out there. I'm willing to fund that purpose as long as you're willing to let bygones be bygones with Tiffany and her people. I don't want you hunting them down at some point in the future to extract revenge."
"Why should I care what you want? They imprisoned me and drugged me senseless. They should have to pay for that."
"Be careful, Lori. Once you start down the path of justice above all else you're putting yourself in a very difficult position. What you did in coming to Sanctuary was just as bad. Tiffany's people took away your freedom, but you came intending on taking away Alec's free will."
"So I should show a little mercy to them in hopes that Alec will show me mercy in return?"
"I couldn't have said it better myself."
Her hand was suddenly at my throat, not gripping hard enough to stop me from breathing, but with enough strength that I knew it would take very little effort for her to kill me.
"You're forgetting that your threat is predicated on my believing that Alec Graves is still alive and able to come after me. He's obviously not or he never would have allowed you to come here without him."
I knew I should be scared, but part of me was just too tired to feel the level of fear the situation called for.
"My threat is predicated on Alec being alive because he is alive, Lori, but even if he wasn't, if you kill me or come after Tiffany's pack you'd still end up dead. There are more than enough female wolves and hybrids under our command to see the job done."
Her grip loosened slightly as she tried to reconcile my surety with her reading of the situation. "You're an interesting individual, Adriana Paige. You're either a psychopath, or you really believe what you just said. I'm actually inclined to believe you simply because I don't believe that a man like Alec Graves would let himself be taken in by a psychopath."
"Good. I'm not lying, so it makes things a lot easier for both of us if you believe me when I tell you the truth. Do we have a deal?"
"What, two hundred dollars in return for letting Tiffany's people go unpunished?"
"No, your freedom in return for theirs and a promise that you're not going to do the kinds of things that will make Alec come hunt you down at some point in the future. If it's all about the money, I can make sure that you've got enough to really start over. How much would it take to make you do the right thing, Lori? Five million dollars? Ten?"
"It's not about the money! Don't follow me!"
Lori threw down the cash and threw open her door, stepping out into the crowd of people—mostly men—who looked at her with desire in their eyes, but who made no effort to mob her like I half expected them to. It was the moment of truth and I did the only thing I could; I jumped out of the SUV and followed after her.
The further Lori walked the more of her admirers she released—by the time we turned a corner and were no longer within sight of Tiffany and the others, she only had two guys still trailing along behind her.
"I told you not to follow me."
"I prefer to think of it as accompanying you—besides, I figured you were talking to the Del Rio ladies. Given that I'm the reason you aren't still passing your days in a chemically-induced coma, it seemed only reasonable that you wouldn't just lump me in with them."
"I could make you stay here."
"Hurting someone who helped you? That's pretty dark."
"I wouldn't have to hurt you. These two gentlemen would gladly hold you here for the next hour if that was what I wanted them to do. Besides, you don't know anything about me."
The two guys following half a step behind Lori were nodding like their heads were going to fall right off of their necks, and one of them slowed slightly as though considering acting on her implied desire, but I shot him a dark look that sent him hurrying to catch back up with Lori and the other guy.
"I know a lot more than you think, Lori. I've been listening and putting the pieces together. Back there they said that you and your dad didn't have very much money saved up."
"What of it? Are you feeling the need to lord over me just how much money your sweetie has squirreled away?"
"Miss Lori, is this chick bothering you? Do you want us to do something about her?"
This was the other guy, the shorter one, and the way that his voice dripped with the desire to please her turned my stomach.
"Yes, she's bothering me, but don't do anything about her unless she physically attacks me."
Both men nodded as though it was perfectly normal for them to be following around a strange woman they'd only just met. Momentarily reassured that I wasn't going to have to fight off several hundred pounds of angry male, I picked my pace back up in an effort to close the distance between us.
"I'm not trying to lord anything over you, Lori. I was actually trying to give you a compliment. You could have made out like a bandit at any point, but you chose not to. You could have easily crashed some high-profile society party and convinced half the billionaires in any given state to hand over half of their net worth, but you didn't. I think that says something good about you."
"Not as much as you think. I considered doing something like that, but it would never have worked. Guys like that love their money more than just about anything else. As soon as they left my presence they would have started questioning
their decision to give me money. I would have been looking at a massive set of lawsuits from each and every billionaire I conned. Not only that, it would have blown my cover wide open."
"Interesting, and did you consider conning people for smaller amounts? I'm sure you could have figured out a way to fleece a few billionaires for a million here or there? That wouldn't have left them as likely to second-guess their decision to give you money…"
"Yeah, I thought about it, but my dad didn't like that idea. He said it was still too risky."
My gun was shifting around more than I wanted it to. It was too late to shove it down my pants now, and I couldn't keep up with Lori's current pace with both of my hands in the sling currently supporting my left arm, so I jammed the gun underneath my left arm and just did my best not to let my left arm sway too much as I walked.
"What about the trip out here?"
"What about it?"
"You could have gotten away from Tiffany and the others at any point—why didn't you?"
Lori turned right, seemingly at random, and headed past a pair of banks and a bakery. "I don't know. Maybe I was waiting to see what you would be like in person before breaking out."
"Maybe, or maybe you knew that getting away from your captors would have involved a lot of innocent guys getting hurt or killed. You didn't act to get away until it looked like Mohawk and Polly were going to kill me, and even then, your first concern seemed to be making them back off. You didn't decide to make a run for it until you realized just how completely you had control of the situation."
Lori stopped and rounded on me, sticking her finger into my sternum with enough force I was going to have a bruise later. "Why are you so determined to paint me as a decent person when every other person in the world is convinced that I'm too far gone to save?"
"Because I need you to be a decent person. I think you've been on the fence for a while. I think you enjoy manipulating guys and making them do what you want, but something—either your father or some inherent goodness—stopped you from becoming completely narcissistic. More importantly though, I think what happened in Nephi scared you to death and you're afraid of what you might become."