“Six hours or so.”
Yep, they’ll be pissed.
“Don’t worry, I already sent someone to find your friends.”
“How do you know about them?”
Bowen let out a hearty laugh. “You know, you keep winning me over when you get all protective like that. You were trying to talk in your sleep and that was enough for me to pick up your thoughts. I sent someone to the shop you were staying at to bring them here. I expect them to show up in the next hour or so. We’re a bit out of town, here.”
I frowned as I considered something else.“Soshi is tiny. How could she even move me?”
“We never send her out alone. I was just around the corner in one of the shops.” He paused, his eyes clouding over, the first real spark of anger I saw there. “I should have kept a closer eye on her, but she wanted to check out the park, and I sometimes spoil her because I want her to have a normal life.”
I understood that feeling, the desire to have or give what wasn’t possible, and the anger when it didn’t work.
He turned an empty smile on me, the sort that said he was used to smiling even when he didn’t feel like it. “So when I found her, and she told me what you’d done, well, I went ahead and brought you back here. Call it a moment of stupidity, due to my gratitude. If you hadn’t been there, Soshi would have been hurt—maybe even killed—and it would have been all my fault. So I figured I owed you this much.”
“Thank you.”While I didn’t trust him, not by a long shot, I sure as hell was willing to admit that he’d saved me.
“Just don’t make me regret it, okay? My place in life is to protect those around me, those who reside with me. I’ll do whatever it takes to do that. So if you endanger us, I’ll make a formidable enemy.”
And I couldn’t help a shudder that ran through me at his not-at-all subtle threat. When hearing the name brownie, or the idea of a house spirit, I’d expected someone who cooked and cleaned and cared for the residents of the house.
I sure hadn’t expected the violence of his threat, but I couldn’t deny that was exactly what it was. In fact, he even made me believe he could follow through on it.
So I nodded in agreement. I wanted to get out of there, wanted to take my men and get to freedom, to live a happy, quiet life together. I wanted to put Lakewood and all that pain behind us all.
I wouldn’t tangle with an angry house spirit and risk messing that up.
* * * *
Kit
Deacon hadn’t spoken a word since we’d left Larkwood. He drove—I’d never learned how, since I’d gone to Larkwood before cars were around.
He didn’t need to speak for me to know exactly what he thought. It reminded me of our last exchange, when I’d told him to think, to stop and use his brain to figure out what Hera had been doing.
Of course, now we were here, heading off to go find her. It was strange how my entire life had somehow wrapped around that girl.
“Direction?” Deacon asked as he pulled up to a stop sign.
I closed my eyes, feeling the ends of that bond, the one that led to Hera. I pointed to the left. “North Eastern.”
“How far?”
“No idea. The bond doesn’t tell me that.”
Deacon’s knuckles went white as he gripped the steering wheel, a sure sign he didn’t much care for me, or the bond, or probably a million other things. Deacon wasn’t the sort of man who needed much of a specific reason for his anger.
He was a lot like Brax in that way. It confused me, made me wonder what it would feel like to experience life in that way. Perhaps that was what Hera needed, why she ended up with men so full of passion. From Brax and Deacon, both run by anger, to Knox who let self-hatred and lust control him, to Wade who used humor to rule his life. If that was what she wanted, what she desired in mates, why would she spend time with me?
I had brief moments of emotion, like when I’d seen her through the bond after the escape, when the need to touch her and have her had overridden all the calm I usually lived with, but that was it. Otherwise, the world always seemed distant, like something I observed but didn’t belong to.
“Would you like to simply come out and say whatever it is you want to say, or would you prefer to wait until after you break the steering wheel?”
Deacon pressed his lips into a tight line, then yanked the wheel to the side and slammed the breaks, skidding the car off the road and onto the shoulder. Dust kicked up around us as the car shuddered to a hard stop.
Deacon turned toward me, and I wondered if I’d get another punch from him. He might have been the only person I’d allow to hit metwice.