73. Lily

73

Lily

They’d put me in the back with the dark-haired one. The older one was driving. We had to go through the center of town to reach the highway and traffic was heavy so we’d slowed almost to a crawl. The driver slapped the wheel in frustration.

I stared out of the window at the town I’d never gotten to know. Just as I was finally starting to fit in. Just as I’d found someone. Was Bull even alive, or had they already killed him?

The guy driving pulled out his phone and dialed. I knew immediately who he was calling. “We got her,” he told my uncle. He listened for a second. “He wants to talk to you.”

He passed the phone back to the dark-haired guy, who passed it to me. I braced myself for a voice I hadn’t heard in two years.

“Tessa,” it said with honeyed venom.

I wasn’t sure whether he was going to have me killed, when I got back to New York, or keep me imprisoned in the house and force me to testify in his defense. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

“Fuck you,” I said instinctively. Tears were flooding my eyes. I threw the phone back at the dark-haired guy and stared out of the window. I didn’t want them to see me crying. I stared at the street, at passing cars, at the driver-side mirror—

And saw something unbelievable.

Coming down the street behind us, riding between the lines of cars, was Bull on a white horse.

“You guys are in so much trouble,” I told them.

They followed my gaze and then twisted around to look out of the rear window. The dark-haired guy pulled out his gun, glanced around at the hundreds of witnesses and nervously holstered it again. The driver honked his horn, but there was nowhere for the traffic in front of us to go.

“He’s just one guy,” the driver said. “He doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Yeah,” I told them. “But he doesn’t know that.”

That was what was so great about Bull. Sure, he was arrogant and pushy, with an ego the size of Mars. But that meant he never let anything get in his way. He simply couldn’t conceive of an obstacle big enough to stop him...and so nothing could.

And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.

The horse grew closer. Close enough that we could see the snarl on Bull’s face.

The dark-haired guy bailed, grabbing my wrist and pulling me with him. Out of the car and across the street, into the first store we came to.