Natasha tried to keep her hands from shaking as she rifled through the clothing that happened to also be on a dead man’s body. The act of killing him had not bothered her nearly as much as she had originally thought that it would: she was already relatively okay with that situation. There was something that bothered her about the act of touching the dead man’s clothes, however, and maybe it was just the sheer disgust of touching dead flesh that got to her. She wasn’t sure. She had never touched a dead body before this moment, and honestly had never considered the handling of it up until this point.

 

She knew that the actual act of killing should feel wrong, that she should feel tainted and ruined and no longer able to live in polite society, but instead she just felt vindicated. It served him right, she decided. She probably had even decided that particular mindset the moment she pulled the trigger. If he didn’t want to die, he shouldn’t have tried to kill her. The thought would have shocked her on any other day. If she had been just sitting in class, working on her finals, she knew that it would have never come to her mind.

 

Of course it wouldn’t, she thought and almost laughed. Why would it have? Back at the University of Texas it wasn’t as though she was public enemy number one. She had been a normal person.

 

Or maybe I was just pretending to be a normal person.

 

For some reason, that thought bothered her a lot more than the act of killing had, which was its own special kind of insane. Natasha thought of her other self, the person she had been so sure she would become someday. That part of her life seemed very far away at that moment. Yet, in spite of that fact, she didn’t mourn it nearly as much as she expected to. That was something that completely surprised her. In fact, the thought that she was okay with murder almost made her want to run back to Austin and forget that she had ever seen the town of Brazos.

 

She couldn’t do that though, not while Griffin was still out there—probably putting himself in some horrible danger. The thought made her queasy, but another made her even queasier: What if he had been in on it?

 

The idea was ridiculous, but now, every member of the Lost Disciples was suspect to Natasha. Every Disciple except for Griffin that was. There was no way he would have saved her life so many times only to have some stranger from his club murder her. That didn’t add up. Of course there was that sad, girlish thought that she kept close to her: the simple thought that Griffin clearly couldn’t have wanted her dead because they were sleeping together. She was sleeping with a member of a dangerous biker club and she was worried about that kind of loyalty? How pathetic. Yet, there was something about the way he looked at her, the way he held her once they were finished having sex as though she were a port in the storm. It was the simple things that made her trust him, even though that might be the most foolish thing she could have done.

 

Something had to have gone wrong with the mission, or else Griffin would have been back by now. At least he would have called her. The thought was worse than the slow understanding that she was now a killer. She decided that no matter what happened, she could live with this newfound knowledge about herself so long as it meant that Griffin was still alive.

 

She would call him. That was the best thing that she could do at that moment, but first, she definitely had to get out of the motel room.

 

For the first time, she looked around the place and gauged the damage. For some reason, she had vaguely deluded herself into thinking that nothing would seem out of the ordinary if it weren’t for the dead body, but she was sorely mistaken. The struggle had knocked over a lamp or two. Broken shards of lightbulb glass littered the ground, the milky shards just waiting to sink into a foot. There was a smear of blood in the bathroom from where Natasha’s head had hit the tile, and she reached up to touch the back of her head to see how bad it was. It isn’t so bad, she thought. Although Natasha’s nerves were so on fire that she wasn’t fully sure how true that was. The bathroom door was a wreck of broken wood, and of course there was the corpse.

 

The dead man had yet to stiffen, but his dead weight was hard to move around. After a bit of struggle, she managed to get the man’s leather vest off him. Part of it was still stiff with blood, and it felt gummy and strange in her hand. She was not the biggest fan of the texture at that moment. Natasha could hear a distant jingle coming from one of the pockets of the vest, and she prayed that it wasn’t just loose change.

 

Absentmindedly, she slipped the vest on, digging through the pockets as quick as she could. At first, she thought that wearing the vest wasn’t the best idea. Wasn’t it a little macabre to put on a dead man’s clothes? But there was something about how she felt when wearing it that made her feel proud, as though she had won the vest in some sort of contest of wills—when all she had really done was shoot someone. Triumph coursed through her veins, as her fingers touched familiar metal shapes and she pulled out some keys.

 

While one of them obviously belonged to the motorcycle parked outside, there were other keys as well. Most likely they belonged to a house or an apartment. She wondered if he lived with a family or lived alone.

 

Thoughts like that were not particularly helpful, and she knew it, so she shook her head to banish the terrible thoughts from her mind. What was the point in lingering on that man’s life? He had made his choice, hadn’t he? Would he be thinking the same thoughts about her if he had managed to successfully kill her after all? For some reason Natasha wasn’t convinced.

 

“Just keep it together, Morrison,” she whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”

 

It didn’t help as much as she wished that it would, but saying something out loud solidified her reality for a little bit. Gripping the keys in her hand, she struggled to her feet with shaking knees and made her way to the door.

 

No! She realized suddenly. She was missing something; she could feel it. Natasha wracked her own brain in an attempt to remember what she had forgotten when it hit her.

 

My cellphone.

 

She bolted back towards the bed, nearly tripping over the body on the floor. Her cellphone lay on the bed where she had left it, and she quickly glanced at the screen in the hopes that Griffin had contacted her in the last few minutes. She had received nothing, and while it wasn’t a particular surprise to her, the lack of contact only served to make her worry grow. Natasha gripped her phone tightly, as though afraid of losing it again, and pondered whether or not to take anything with her when she left.

 

None of it mattered, but she grabbed her duffle bag full of clothes on the way out. If anything, it might keep them from finding her, and it always helped to have an extra change of clothes.

 

It was easy to find the bike, parked directly outside as though ready for a quick getaway. Natasha smiled in sick relief. It was still going to be used for that purpose; it just had a different rider this time.

 

As she mounted the bike, even more relief washed over her, so intense it nearly took her breath away. She could see a light at the end of the tunnel now; more guys weren’t going to burst through the door and murder her, or if they were, at least they wouldn’t be able to find her. Plus, if they did find her, she would be ready for them. That thought gave her enough strength to turn the ignition. The motorcycle roared to life beneath her, and she sped off without a single look back.

 

The wind in her hair felt delicious, and she allowed herself a moment or two of joyriding before remembering the task at hand. Once she felt as though she had put enough space between herself and whoever might be after her, she pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store, dismounted the bike, and walked in.

 

She could feel the eyes settle on her immediately, and at first, she was annoyed at the handful of shoppers checking her out. Hadn’t any of them seen a woman before? It wasn’t until she made her way to the back of the store where the drinks were located and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass door of the drink case that she realized why so many had stared.

 

Natasha looked like a mess, but she shouldn’t have been surprised by that. Her hair was still messy from the struggle with her would-be assassin. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her neck, the product of the assailant slamming her head into the bathroom floor most likely. She was still wearing the bloody vest, and she looked so tired. There was something else though, a danger that touched her eyes in a way that it hadn’t before. She thought it would scare her, this physical affirmation of her new self, but instead she decided that it suited her. She looked alive, and it was electrifying.

 

Grabbing a bottle of water, she walked to the front of the store, making sure to make eye contact with as many of the people who were staring at her as possible. Most of them had the grace to look embarrassed, but a few stared back with a mixture of curiosity and arousal. Good, let them look. With those people, she gave a little smile, maybe the ghost of a wink before she paid for the water and left. Never in her life had she felt so sexy.

 

Walking back to her stolen motorcycle, she couldn’t help but feel incredibly powerful as she slung one long leg over the bike and slid onto the seat. She cracked open the water and took a gulp. The cool liquid immediately soothed her throat, and once she felt properly hydrated, she took her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen like she had done hundreds of times since Griffin left the motel room. Still nothing.

 

Should she actually call him? What if he was still in the middle of the raid? Clearly, if he were in the midst of battle, he wouldn’t just pick up. Would that just make her feel worse? Her fingers played over the keys of her cell phone. At least if she called him, he would know that she needed to get in touch with him, and it wasn’t as though she was being annoying. A man had tried to kill her. She was pretty justified in calling him at this moment. If she called him, then he would know to at least call her back. With a deep sigh, she pressed on his name and brought the phone up to her ear as the number dialed.

 

She didn’t realize how scared she had been until she heard the phone’s tinny ringing on the other end. Her heart started to pound in a furious rhythm, the edges of her vision seemed to sharpen with the panic.

 

The phone continued to ring. She could feel the curious eyes of the people in the store still watching her as she stood there, straddling her bike, praying for an answer.

 

“Please pick up,” she whispered into the phone. “Come on, Griffin.”

 

The ringing continued, and Natasha’s heart began to sink.