I drum my fingers against the steering wheel in time to the rhythmic lull of the interstate. We have the backpack that I packed from the cabin and some of Brianna’s clothes that I grabbed on my dash out of her apartment. Other than that, we’ve got nothing.
Brianna shifts in her seat, angling her legs. The shorts she wore to bed last night ride up her thighs, and her tits are still visible through her thin T-shirt.
At least the view’s nice.
She’s been sitting quietly, but I can tell that something’s changed in her. She’s still tense and jumps every time another car passes us—and I know she keeps thinking it’s a cop—but despite that anxiety, she hasn’t said anything about being on the run again.
The beast stirs inside me. He wants out. He’s not content with being locked away, especially since our mate is sitting with us. He’s curious to get more acquainted with her, but obviously that can’t happen in a moving vehicle.
I chuckle when I picture him pinning her to her seat and licking her face while we barrel down the interstate at seventy miles per hour.
“What are you laughing about?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Was I really laughing?”
She nods, and her dark hair falls over her shoulder. I wonder what it feels like. The long strands look soft as silk. They’re thick too. I could knot my fist into it and arch her neck back before sucking on her neck and nipping her earlobe.
I shift in my seat when blood rushes to my cock. It’s been getting worse, this draw to her, and now that she’s grown a bit softer, less likely to cut my head off, my desire to claim her is growing.
I blink rapidly, hoping my eyes aren’t glowing.
“So are you going to tell me?” she persists. From her innocent curiosity, she obviously has no idea how dirty my thoughts are getting.
Seriously, Ward, you’ve got the SF after you, you have no resources, and all you can think about is Brianna spreading her legs?
I clear my throat and drop an arm on my thigh to hide my erection. “Nothing, really. It’s just something about my wolf.”
“What?” She angles herself more my way.
“He’s happy. That’s all.” She raises an eyebrow so I add, “I haven’t felt him happy in a very long time.”
“So if he’s not happy normally, then what is he?”
I cock my head and try to think of the perfect word to describe him but then realize he’s too complex for that. “He’s angry, crazy, vengeful, and a whole slew of other adjectives, but he’s nothing good. That’s what happens when a wolf goes rogue.”
Her brow furrows as the desert landscape zips by her window. “What exactly does going rogue mean? I’m just a normal person, remember? None of this makes any sense to me.”
A pit forms in my stomach, but then I remind myself that she already knows the beast is a murderer, and she’s still here. She chose to come with me. Still, I can’t help but wonder if that would change if she learns just how horrifically brutal my wolf has been.
I vow to keep the worst aspects of my dark past to myself. She knows he killed people—hell, she watched him massacre that prick who attacked her—but that’s the extent of what she needs to know. Because if the beast and I want to keep her, the killing needs to stop, which means she doesn’t need to ever see that side of us again.
You hear that? I say inside to the beast.
He whines, and I know that he understands.
In other words, today has become the first day of a new future. I won’t let the beast kill anymore, and as long as he knows that murdering people means losing Brianna, I think he may try to stop his impulses.
But he’s still crazy. His deranged mind hasn’t changed. I can tell that from the random bloodlust images I get from him. When a car passed us not even ten miles back, a vision had filled my mind of wolfing down the driver’s intestines. I’d pushed it aside, like I usually do.
Another vision comes to me. It’s of Declan on top of Brianna, pinning her to the ground back in northern Arizona. Red coats my gaze, and I understand what he’s showing me.
Well, as long as no one’s threatening her, you can’t kill, but if someone’s hurting her…