Chapter Seventeen Aria

Chapter Seventeen

Aria

“Are you okay?” Pax’s question sliced through the tension, eyes slanting between me and the road and the rearview mirror as we sped away from the facility.

The road blurred beneath us, and I whipped my attention over my shoulder to look behind us, too.

There was no movement beyond the rear window, and I flipped around to face forward, pressing my back into the seat and gasping for the oxygen I couldn’t seem to find. “I ... I think so.”

A cloak of darkness rested over the Earth, and the heavens were heavy and low. A steady drizzle fell, and our headlights blurred through the murky fog.

Pax’s fierce jaw clenched as he glanced in the rearview again before he made a quick right, the tires screeching as he peeled into a neighborhood, though he slowed his speed when he made another quick left before taking a right into a dark, empty alley.

My breaths were short and ragged, and I still clung to the door, sucking for air as I attempted to settle my heart, which rattled in my chest, to slow the furious pounding of blood that slugged through my veins.

My mind was disoriented, but my spirit was sharp.

Pax’s breaths were just as harsh, and his eyes continually flicked up to the rearview mirror to ensure we weren’t being followed. Tension bound the cab, lashes of energy striking through the cramped, enclosed space.

Heavy and ripe with questions I had no idea how to ask.

Unease rippled and blew.

It was as if now that the facility had disappeared behind us, neither of us knew where we stood.

Were able to process the line that had been crossed.

The rule that had been broken.

A fate that should never be.

The truth that we were here.

Alive and real and whole. No longer a figment or a fantasy.

It was surreal, being in someone’s space, someone who knew you best, yet they still could be a complete stranger.

Familiar yet distant.

Unmistakable yet indiscernible.

A shiver rocked through me, my clothes drenched, and an icy chill sank down to saturate me to the bone.

Pax trembled, too, though I thought it might be from the aggression that still radiated from his flesh. The way his muscles flexed and bowed with a restrained power.

I drank him in.

He was so much the same as I knew him in Tearsith. A shock of white hair, cropped up high on the sides and longer on top. His jaw was edged in severity. Cheeks razor sharp, every angle of him so acute that I thought if I reached out and ran my fingertips over his face I might be cut.

The only things soft about him were his full, red lips, which stood out in stark contrast against his pale, pale skin.

He wore jeans and a worn leather jacket, his body long, hewn in a vicious strength that promised a different sort of wickedness than I’d ever known.

His brow was drawn, slanted with ferocity and tugging between his eyes as he made another right, carefully maneuvering us into an orchestrated maze as he wound deeper into the city.

I couldn’t look away.

Here, I could see the brutalities that had marked us in Faydor.

A long scar cut through the right side of his face, starting up near his temple and extending down to his jaw. Another was puckered at the right side of his neck, hidden beneath the swirl of ink that rose out of his collar and climbed his neck.

Another was carved in at the side of his head, the hair no longer able to grow in that spot.

He looked as if he’d gone to battle a thousand times, a Viking warrior who’d run headlong into danger and had somehow made it out on the other side.

I knew firsthand that he had.

My gaze traced, moving to the only other exposed skin, his big hands that crushed the steering wheel in a viselike grip, also covered in tattoos, swirls and innuendos of the horrible atrocities we’d faced.

My stomach tilted. I could only imagine the rest that were hidden underneath.

“Are you hurt?” His gravel-cut voice curled through the silence, making me jerk, and a tiny sound escaped.

I blinked through the disquiet. “No. I don’t think so.”

He stole a glance in my direction. Those palest gray eyes slid over me, what should be black pupils a murky gray. He seemed to be taking stock as his attention raked over my dripping hair and soaked pajamas.

“I don’t know if I can feel anything, if I’m being honest.”

Or maybe I felt too much. Every sense alive but distorted by shock.

Another shiver rolled through my body.

“You’re cold.” He tried to turn up the heater, which still only blew cold air.

“I’ll be fine.”

He rolled his bottom lip between his teeth, his stare long, before he ripped his attention away and took a sudden sharp left.

He cut across the road and veered into a parking lot behind an apartment building, then whipped into a spot and shut off the engine.

He’d turned and had my face in his hands before I could process the movement. My frozen skin felt singed by the heat blazing from his palms. His pale eyes were wild, raving with hate. “Did he hurt you? Did that motherfucker get to you?”

My tongue stroked out over my dried, trembling lips, and I could barely speak around the thickness in my throat. “No ... He tried. But I fought him off. Right before you came.”

“God, I want to go back. End him.”

“You can’t,” I choked out.

He blinked, his hands burning my face, the pad of his thumb brushing under the hollow of my eye. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

Pax warred, his body a reel of uncertainty and indecision, before he jerked away and tossed open his door. “We have to go.”

He was already around to my side of the car by the time I’d gotten unbuckled, and he ripped open the door and extended his hand.

My head spun, trying to keep up with the change in his demeanor. To catch up to this. To the threat that lurked all around.

Without saying anything, he began to guide me through the shadows, keeping low as we slunk between the cars.

“What are we doing?” I whispered, my thoughts jumbled, feeling as if I were being pulled in every direction.

“Changing cars.”

My brow drew tight, and, as if he could feel the silent questions whirring through my mind, he murmured low, “This morning, I bought the car I came to get you in. Paid cash for it at a junk lot. I didn’t want to take mine to the facility. We can’t have them able to track us that way.”

Air heaved from my lungs as reality began to sink in. We were in very real trouble. Pax was going to be seen as the criminal, when he’d been the one to come rescue me.

To save me from a man who’d been compelled to hurt me.

New fears dumped into my brain, tumbling and twisting as Pax hurried us across the lot.

As we approached a white two-door Infiniti, he let go of my hand, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a set of keys. He pushed the fob, and the car lights flashed as the locks disengaged.

He opened the passenger door, his attention raking over the area to make sure we were in the clear. “Get in.”

I fumbled into the car and buckled, my entire being trembling as he climbed in on his side and started the engine. He turned the heat to high and reached over and turned on my seat heater.

A chill swept through me when the heat began to thaw my frozen flesh.

He pulled out of the lot and onto the road, keeping his pace controlled as he took a few turns before he got onto the freeway that would take us out of Albany, never letting his guard down as we traveled through the city where I’d grown up.

The place where my family lived.

The place I was leaving behind because I knew there would never be any way I could return to it.

It wasn’t until the lights of Albany faded behind us that I finally braved the single question that had been plaguing my mind.

“How did you know?” It scraped through the friction that sparked and shimmered in the air.

For a moment, he didn’t say anything before he blew out a rough sigh, a tattooed hand slanting through his hair in frustration. “You think I didn’t know you were in trouble, Aria? That I didn’t feel it?”

My chest squeezed. He’d heard me. Through time and space, he’d heard me. When no one else ever had, not even those surrounding me in the day.

Hesitation radiated from him, a quiet fury that bristled beneath his clothing. It made the leather appear to writhe over his body. His teeth gnashed before he spat, “Timothy saw the Ghorl. He saw its thoughts, Aria. He saw the truth of what that monster was sent to do. And I knew I had to come for you.”

“It’s forbidden for you to intervene.” It was a whisper, my gaze out the windshield as the world sped by in a slurry of the woods’ blackened greens that pressed close to the highway.

All the warnings we’d ever been given writhed in the space between us.

We would only bring ourselves danger.

Be more noticeable to the Ghorl and become targets.

Become vulnerable to their destructive thoughts.

Turn against one another.

A hand suddenly darted out to grab me by the side of the face. A gasp rocked up my throat, and I couldn’t do anything but turn to him, to the force of his hold and the weight of his eyes. “Make no mistake, I would break every fucking rule in this world and in that one to keep you safe.”

For a beat, we were locked on each other, the way we were in Tearsith.

Understanding passed through the connection.

A second later, Pax pried himself away and returned his attention to the road that blurred beneath us, the white lines whipping by as tension wound with his promise that continued to whisper in the cab.

My stomach twisted as I watched him.

The hard, harsh shape of him that was cut all the way down to his middle. To the darkest recesses where I could almost see his own demons play.

Trapped in a mystery of who we were and who we were supposed to be.

I fiddled with my fingers, then asked, “Where are we going?”

In pure agitation, he roughed a hand over his head again. “Away. Where I can keep you safe.”

No question, we both were wondering if that was even possible.

I lifted my gaze to him. “I hate what I’ve gotten you into.”

His head barely shook, and the tattoos on his throat rolled when he swallowed. “Don’t you dare apologize, Aria. I was already there.”

A sticky awareness climbed through my ribs and compressed my heart. “They’re going to call the cops, and they’re going to come for us.”

It wasn’t a question.

Pax’s nod was clipped. “Yeah, they’re going to come for us.”

“Thank you.” It was out, hanging in the turbulence that rippled between us.

He didn’t respond to it; instead, he reached and squeezed my hand, something close to pain in his voice. “You should try to get some rest.”

I wavered, and his hold tightened. “Everyone will already be in Faydor, so you won’t have to explain anything to our family. Go. Rest. I’ll be here when you wake.”

I ran my hand up my arm, trying to chase away the thick dread that had settled into my marrow.

The consequence of what we’d done. While the other part of me rejoiced.

Unable to process that he’d come.

That he was there.

For the first time, I was next to the man whom I’d only imagined I could be with this way.

Real and alive and awake.

But that joy was short-lived. Because somewhere deep inside, I knew what it was going to cost.