and it reminded him of the morning sky above the mountains. It seemed to fit perfectly with her short, sleek, dark hair and her falcon-like golden-brown eyes. It was like she was made to be outside.
He felt a twinge deep inside him. A rustle of feathers. Was his griffin stirring back to life? Had Gretchen’s fresh-air scent done what all his efforts couldn’t?
Then she closed the door and all he could smell was himself. He didn’t think anyone would be bottling the scent of prison infirmaries anytime soon.
And his griffin sure as hell wasn’t going to be drawn out by it. The sensation faded away, leaving only the feeling that he was missing something. No surprise there. He knew exactly what he was missing: he had a dark hollow inside his soul where his griffin was supposed to be.
Gretchen slid into the front seat. Her voice was clipped and matter-of-fact now, much more official now that she was under the hard, colorless gaze of her partner.
“This is Deputy Marshal Keith Ridley,” she said without looking back at Cooper. “Keith, this is Dawes.”
He wished he could ask her to call him Cooper. Well, he could ask, but there was no reason for her to say yes. Especially now, because she was embarrassed, and Cooper couldn’t even blame her for it. Shaking hands with him had broken every Marshal protocol in the books, and it had technically put her life at risk. It had made her vulnerable, and there were a lot of people willing to take advantage of that kind of split-second weakness.
He didn’t even like to think about what could have happened if someone like that had been in his shoes.
But he had the funny feeling that if that had been the case, Gretchen wouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place.
She was either careless or someone who had a good intuitive sense of the people she was dealing with, and people who were careless didn’t stay Marshals for long.
So Cooper decided to push his luck. If he got his hand slapped for it, he could live with that.
“Just Cooper’s fine,” he said, trying to keep the hope out of his voice. “Or Coop, if you want. I always liked the sound of that.”
People had stopped calling him by his first name around the time they’d stopped shaking his hand. He missed it. It would be nice to hear someone sounding friendly for a change, even if they actually weren’t.
“We’ll call you what we choose to call you,” Keith Ridley said. The words had a razor-sharp edge.
“It’s a long trip,” Gretchen said in an undertone. “Let’s make this as painless as we can.”
She shifted into drive and began taking them off the penitentiary grounds. Cooper lost his interest in the tension between his escorts and instead turned his rapt attention to his window. He watched as their car passed smoothly through the different checkpoints, the gates and fences falling away under the force of Gretchen’s authority. They were moving out of the sweep of the searchlights and the sight of the barbed wire, out and out—
Then, just like that, they were on the open road, and he was looking at things he hadn’t seen in over six months.
Traffic. Speed limit signs. Exit ramps.
Graffiti penises.
He could safely say that he’d never been so grateful in all his life to see a spray-painted picture of a dick. It was like a marker welcoming him back to society.
Although, actually, prison got more than its fair share of cartoon penises. It was really the spray paint that was welcoming him back.
And, more than anything else, it was the endless expanse of sky above him. It was a glowering, wintery gray, but Cooper was as happy to see it as he had ever been to see any bright shade of blue.
He wasn’t going back to prison. He couldn’t lose this freedom again. He couldn’t go on watching his griffin slip away from him.
He just had to watch for the right opportunity. He needed to be sharp and quick—he couldn’t miss his chance, and he couldn’t hesitate, especially since he was working with a severe limitation: he refused to hurt the people he was escaping.
Especially Gretchen.
Luckily, he had no reason to think that moral stance would mean giving up his chance to escape. He might have had more scruples than most prisoners, but he also had more insider information: he knew the transport process from the other side. He knew the exact location of all