wanted—and Cooper figured it probably was. Roger seemed to make his intermittent visits out of a grim sense of duty. Distance would put a stake through the heart of that particular obligation.
And then... then Cooper would be down to having no visitors at all.
All the more reason not to be there in the first place. All the more reason to get out while the getting was good.
Keith took some time out from stabbing the GPS with his finger. “Maybe they did a survey and fewer people in Bergen wanted you dead.”
It surprised Cooper into a short laugh. He wouldn’t have guessed the kid was capable of making even the smallest joke. “I’d love to have seen the questions on that form.”
“Do you want to kill Cooper Dawes?” Gretchen said. “Please check yes or no.”
“Or undecided,” Keith said, in a tone that vaguely implied that that was still where he fell in the whole equation.
“With a fourth option. ‘Who the hell is Cooper Dawes?’”
“On a scale of zero to ten,” Cooper said, “how many shivs have you sharpened in the last week?”
“I hope you’re healing okay,” Gretchen said. Cooper caught sight of her frown: it put an adorable little indentation between her eyebrows. “They didn’t give you too much time to glue yourself back to—”
Cooper was thrown forward against the security barrier, and Gretchen’s words were swallowed up by the grind of metal on metal and the thud of his head against the barrier.
His vision briefly went white from pain. The seatbelt was digging into his neck, choking him, and with his hands cuffed, he couldn’t get it unbuckled...
All the claustrophobia and hatred of confinement he’d spent the last six months repressing suddenly reared up and attacked full-force. He was trapped.
The only sense of his griffin he had was a blind, panicked flailing inside him, like its talons and lion claws were scratching to be let out. As hard as he tried to pull that feeling to the surface, nothing happened.
He couldn’t breathe.
“Cooper. Cooper, it’s okay. We just got rear-ended, that’s all.”
Gretchen.
She was turned around in her seat now, her hand pressed to her side of the barrier. Her gaze kept going back and forth between him and the blotch of blood his head had left on the plastic, and her luminous eyes were full of worry and genuine concern.
No one had ever looked at him like that before. Not just “not in the last six months.” Ever.
I can calm down. He forced himself to breathe evenly. I can calm down for her sake. I can do it for her.
If he just leaned back, obviously the seatbelt wouldn’t be digging into his throat. Panic had made him momentarily stupid, that was all. There was a slicing pain in his side from where the seatbelt had gotten pulled hard and tight against one of his wounds, but he couldn’t feel anything worse than that.
He slumped back in his seat and took a few deep, slow breaths.
“Are you hurt?” he said as soon as he could talk again.
“I bumped my head on the steering wheel, that’s all.”
Now that she mentioned it, he could see a pink mark on her forehead. It didn’t look too bad, but head wounds could be tricky. For the moment, though, he was relieved.
“Are you okay?” Gretchen said.
He didn’t want to give her one more thing to worry about by mentioning the nagging pain in his side. He should still heal up pretty quickly, anyway, and it was just pain. There wasn’t anything she could do about it. He nodded.
“Keith?” Cooper said. “What about you?”
Keith seemed to still be wrestling his airbag down. When he finally got free of it and turned around, he was blinking blood out of his eyes. An ugly cut had opened up near his hairline. All the blinking made him look woozily confused, like he didn’t know what had happened to make Cooper ask after him.
“I’m all right,” Keith said eventually. He pointed ahead of him. “Airbag,” he added as an explanation.
Okay, it wasn’t just the blinking making him look woozily confused, then. He’d gotten his cage seriously rattled. At least when Cooper had hit the barrier, the barrier hadn’t hit him back.
“That airbag did a number on you, I’m thinking,” Gretchen said. She patted Keith on the shoulder. “Maybe take five. I’m just going to go trade insurance info.”
Anyone who just heard her voice would think she was completely calm and lighthearted, but Cooper could see how her warm golden-brown eyes now had