Jude pulls a face. “You need to get over yourself. You like her just as much as I do, you’re just too buried in your own grief to see it.” He turns back to River. “And we don’t need to fight over her. We’ve talked about this before, we all have.”
Oh boy.I close my eyes and shake my head. I knew this was where Jude was going but I should have talked to him, told him to wait a bit longer before bringing it up.
“One girl for all of us, that’s what we decided,” he says. “We knew coming into this job that any serious relationship would be hard. Everyone ends up getting divorced or leaving theirpartners as fucking widows. Freya is ours. We share her. That way she never gets left alone.”
Eli stands up. “For fuck’s sake. No. Not her. Anyone but her. We all have to agree, remember? And I will never agree to this with her.” He storms off. The coffee table shudders as Jude kicks it.
River runs his fingers through his hair. It’s actually starting to look disheveled which means he’s more stressed than he’s letting on. “You’ve got to let this go, Jude. Nothing can happen anyway, not while she’s working for us. Not when we don’t know if we can trust her.”
“I trust her,” Jude says. “She needs us, River. Just like we all needed each other.”
I tilt my head and consider him. Jude’s utter conviction that Freya is the one for us does a lot to sway me to his side.
Every person on this team is like a brother to me, but Jude and I connect on a different level. We’re just in sync, always have been.
The two of us have shared women before so it’s not a huge step to imagine being in a relationship with Freya and the others. Plus, Jude’s a literal genius, if he trusts Freya, I’m inclined to listen to him.
My phone pings at me even though it’s on silent which is never a good sign. I take it out of my pocket and an alert pops up on the screen.Crap balls.
“Riv?” I grimace at him and hand over the phone.
He swears at the screen. “Fucking, infuriating woman.” He glares at Jude. “If Freya’s so trustworthy, why the hell is she trying to run?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Jude
I FIDDLE WITH the window button, opening and closing it again and again. I can’t believe I read her so wrong. She’s already tried to run from us once before, but like an idiot, I trusted her. We moved too fast. Ialwaysdo things too fast. But I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about Freya, and I thought she felt it too.
She let me close, let me hold her. She came on my goddamn tongue.
I still can’t get the taste of her out of my head. Her heady musk, like strawberries and cream.
I’m not like Eli, I don’t do casual. I wanted Freya the moment I saw her in that tent but God, I might have just screwed up big time.
Eli takes a sharp turn. “Will you stop that?” he snaps at me. I snatch my hand away from the button and grip onto the door handle instead.
“Sorry.” The need to fiddle switches to my leg and my knee bounces up and down.
“Update,” River demands from the passenger seat. Next to me, Oz’s eyes are glued to his phone.
“I don’t like this,” he says. “She hasn’t moved for the last ten minutes, she’s barely outside the boundary.”
Hope flutters through my heart. “Maybe it was a mistake.”
Eli grunts. “Or she’s found a way to take the fucking tracker off.”
I swallow.My mind spirals, imagining a hundred different outcomes and analyzing the probability of each one. I don’t like the results.
Streetlights flash past as we speed through the suburbs, only slowing down when Oz announces we’re a mile from her location.
I see her bike first. Or rather, pieces of it.
Ice trickles under my skin as I take in the carnage. Shards of carbon fiber. A snapped exhaust pipe. Red specks of a shattered break light. I follow the tire marks to where the bike itself lies on its side at the edge of a road. Like a metal corpse.
“Shit,” Oz swears.
Panic claws at me. Oz never swears.
