The car out front—one of Wes’s goons, surely—really squelched my plans. Certain, then, that I needed to tell Luna everything—that her father had now given Wes Kraemer’s stolen money right back to him—I resolved to do just that.

But, now, we were zipping across the back end of the motel yard, crunching over gravel and fallen leaves, wide-eyed and panicked. Me, for reasons I understood. Her? Probably just because I’d suddenly asked her to jump out of a second-story window.

I was pretty surprised that she’d done it, to be frank. The girl had guts.

“My car’s at the diner,” Luna said between huffs as she kept up with me. “I have my keys with me.”

“God, you’re a lifesaver,” I breathed. After sneaking a glance behind us, I darted across the road, toward the 24-hour sign glinting in the distance. Luna followed close behind, gasping for air.

The parking lot showed it was the lunch rush hour, with several station wagons, mom vans, and dilapidated vehicles all in rows as their drivers sat inside the diner eating greasy burgers. I slowed down briefly, allowing Luna to run in front of me and press her key into a little red Chevrolet. She gestured for me to get into the passenger seat, her eyes shooting back toward the diner.

“I’m supposed to be there right now,” she whispered. “Hurry.”

She didn’t understand that we were in a whole lot more trouble than her missing a shift at a crummy diner.

Speeding out from the parking lot, Luna drove us out onto the highway and headed south, her hands gripping the steering wheel like her life depended on it.

She was anxious. And her anxiety only made mine worse.

“Holy shit,” I said, bringing my hands over my eyes. My heart wouldn’t calm. I found it thudding in my throat, ramming against my tongue. “Jesus Christ.”

“Stop praying over there and turn on the radio or something,” Luna said. “I’m driving as fast as this little car can go.”

I watched as the little dial grew over first 70 mph, then 80, with Luna whipping her head back and emitting a wild, beautiful “Yahoo!”

She looked alive to me, then. It seemed that she’d found her element in the minutes since our escape. Her skin became clear and bright in the sun, her breasts rising with each of her strenuous breaths. In that moment, I could see our entire lives stretched out before us: Mexico, then South America, then—hell—Europe, just to explore the world together.

It felt like it belonged to us.

We drove for maybe half an hour, listening to the ’80s radio station and nodding our heads in time. As we raced along the highway, I could almost see Luna’s brain in motion, cranking gears beneath that bright red hair. She was putting everything together. Her teeth crested from her lips, biting the bottom one in an adorable way—one that made her irresistible.

I had half a mind to tell her to yank the car off the highway and find a spot somewhere in the back woods of Iowa so we could make love into the afternoon.

As if she’d read my mind, Luna did pull off the highway, driving along a country road and bumping against the gravel and the potholes, mumbling something about them “never fixing the road out here.” She glanced past me at a dilapidated building out behind a barn, and then she turned down a small, almost unnoticeable dirt road.

“Where are you going?” I asked her. Even though my cock was trying to think for me, I still felt Kraemer’s men, hot on our heels. If we didn’t push ourselves to get past the state line, we’d be caught. “Maybe we can stop in a few hours…”

But she yanked the gear to park, halting us in front of the building. She pointed at it, her eyes direct, and then burst toward it, leaving the car door wide open. Several napkins fluttered out, flitting across the field.

I followed her at a run, already falling into a pattern with this woman: out of breath, my strides long. Things had been relatively calm before, when I’d assumed that I’d either make it to Mexico or I’d die along the way. Now, I sensed an explosion at every turn.

The abandoned building looked like it had once been a radio station. We burst into the empty hallways, eyeing the signs on the wall, which read back top hit singles from the late ’90s. I traced the once-familiar songs with my fingers, still trying to bring my breath back to being steady. Luna’s eyes were on me, direct and fiery, waiting for me to turn toward her—to take it.

“I know what you did,” she said, inhaling and exhaling in quick bursts. Flipping her hair behind her shoulder, she continued. “The money you gave me was Wes Kraemer’s money, wasn’t it. You stole it. And now I’ve given it back to him by way of my father.”

As I heard the truth of it from her gorgeous lips, I turned and brought my hands to my hips, sighing. “Seems you’ve figured it out,” I said. I gave her a slight smirk, hoping to make her fall into giggles once more.

But she gave me only a grim expression, a flat line across her face. “I can’t believe you’ve helped me put my father in danger.”

“How was I supposed to know your dad was involved with Kraemer?” I protested, raising my hands into the air. “It’s not like you had pure intentions when you asked for the money. Your dad was in way over his head. I thought I was doing you a favor. And I thought you were doing me one in return.”

My voice was low, growing gruffer. Our voices bounced against the walls, making me sound bear-like. My heart pounded in my throat, reminding me that I hadn’t been completely honest with Luna, either. I still had so much under wraps, but since I hadn’t yet voiced my story to anyone on the planet, I wasn’t sure how to form the words. I wasn’t sure how to face their reality.

The reality of Aaron’s death, of my impending one. “You’re next,” the note had read. Jesus Christ.

“I have to go back and make sure my father’s all right,” Luna said, her eyes filling with tears. “I can’t just traipse off to Mexico with you while my father gets eaten alive by some asshole loan shark. Jesus, Colt, you really know how to ruin a girl’s life.”

I turned toward the wall and rammed my fist into it, making a big, horrible tear in the large board, right between numbers 16 and 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. I heard Luna’s sharp cry of alarm as she backed up, suddenly fearful of my strength. I didn’t feel the pain of the strike, only sensed a tingling at the edges of my knuckles.

In the silence that followed, Luna crept backward, eyeing me darkly. “I need to go,” she whispered. “Don’t think I won’t leave you here, Colt, because I will if you can’t control your temper.”

My nostrils flared, and I finally caved. It was time to tell her.

“There are bigger things at play here than an Iowa City loan shark, Luna. There are bigger things at play than whatever Wes Kraemer might do to your father. Just trust me on this.”

“What do you mean?” Her voice was small.

“I mean what I’m running from in the first place,” I said, my hands beginning to shake. When was the last time I’d had any food? Anxiety seemed to fill every cell of my body. I needed a fresh breath of air; I needed relief. But I continued, sensing Luna’s eyes on me—bright, like moons. “Back in Detroit, I didn’t have much. My granny died when I was young, and I hopped in and out of the foster system for a long while. Lived on the streets for a lot of it. My only friend was a kid named Aaron Lee.”

That was it, the first time I’d said his name out loud since his murder. I hadn’t had the strength to look up whether or not they’d had a proper funeral for him. I hadn’t had the heart to contact his mother, to tell her that Aaron had still been a good person despite the people he’d dealt with. “We aren’t like the rest of them,” we’d always told one another while counting the bills on our bedspreads, plotting our next job. There was always another corner, another neighborhood to hit, another stack of bills to count.

Luna crossed her arms over her chest, waiting.

“Aaron and I were basically inseparable, and when he suggested we start selling weed, I thought it was a fine idea. I mean, we were both broke as shit, could hardly pay the bills. I was working as a fry cook and he was driving cabs. It wasn’t a good life, Luna. And I know you struggle, with your waitress job and your dad who can’t keep his hands off the gambling table. I know. But we had nobody else but each other, so when he went off the deep end, I followed him. I became his partner. And that’s around when we started getting involved with a gang called the Detroit Seven.”

“The Detroit Seven,” she echoed back, her eyes glittering. “It sounds like a sports team.”

“It was a bit more fucked up than that. Quite a few more guns,” I said. “And I’m sorry if this knowledge makes me ugly in your eyes, Luna. I’m so sorry for all of it.”

Luna made no move to speak. She seemed filled with urgency, wanting me to continue.

“Aaron started to take a bit too much from the gang for the jobs we did for them. He didn’t think they’d notice, you know? He thought he could cream off a little bit here and there and pay off his debts. He started seeing a girl and taking her on all these fancy dates. Sharon, her name was. I teased her, told her she had an old lady’s name.

“It went on like that for a while, with things slowly getting more and more out of hand. The gang didn’t threaten him. They didn’t warn him. I simply came back to the place where we were crashing at the time, and found him dead.”

Luna’s lips parted in shock.

Needing to make sure she believed me, I reached into my back pocket and drew the note out of my wallet. I’d looked at it countless times, tracing the words and wishing I’d known who’d written it.

I passed the note to Luna, watching as she unfolded it and stared down at it, incredulous. Giving tentative shakes of her head, she seemed dumbfounded, finally realizing that I was a fuckup. Nobody she should be involved with.

“So, if you want to leave me here, you can,” I said. “But I’m going to keep moving, keep fighting. I keep that note with me to remind myself to run. Because the Sevens, they don’t stop for anything. They think I wronged them, and that action is returned with death. That’s it.”

Luna leaned heavily against the wall, her legs quivering beneath her. She held the paper against her chest, processing the information. I waited, my hands pressed tightly across my chest, as she formed one word after another without emitting any sound. She looked like a puppet whose ventriloquist had gone off duty.

“So yes, what you said is true,” I said, my panic rising. “I stole the money from Kraemer. I put your father in danger. But had I known what you were planning to do with the money, I would have warned you. And as far as that bald goon tracking us down back there at the motel, I’m not sure how he could have found me so quickly, unless maybe there was a camera at Kraemer’s office. I’m guessing once he realized the money was gone, he found the footage and sent one of his goons out looking for a blue Mustang. My guess is he’s looking for me, and me alone.”

Luna hesitated. Licking her lips, she eyed me with suspicion. “So you really don’t think my dad’s in danger, even if he’s already turned in the money? I mean, Wes Kraemer’s no idiot. He’s probably put a few of those pieces together.”

“I’m saying that it’s probable that Wes doesn’t care, that he knows your father had nothing to do with it,” I said. Even as I spoke, I sensed that what I was saying was unfounded, that it would do nothing to quell Luna’s fears. She was a sharp woman, sharp-tongued as well, and wouldn’t allow me to talk her down.

Luna’s breaths staggered, her eyes nearly bugging out from her face. “If what you’re saying is right, then nobody will spot us in my car. We can drive back to my dad’s place and check to make sure he’s okay—warn him. Because if Wes can’t find you, then I’m sure he’ll go after my dad next. And, Colt, I don’t care about what’s happened between us. If anything happens to him…”

I swiped my hand between us, halting her words. “Don’t say anything you’ll regret,” I said, but we both knew I was powerless to change her mind. “Fine. I’ll go with you to warn your father. That’s no more than thirty or forty minutes of our time. Then, after that, I’m going to fuckin’ floor it down the highway, straight to Mexico. And you’re coming with me, Luna. Like it or not, we had a deal.” I pushed toward her, pressing her against the wall, my lips mere inches from hers. Our aggravation at one another made the air tense, thick with lust. “I’m not prepared to let you go quite yet.”

Lifting her hands to my chest, Luna gripped my shirt, bringing me toward her. She kissed me deeply, angrily, biting slightly at my lower lip. My cock pressed up against my jeans, my whole body filled with yearning. Beside us, the bulletin board creaked on the wall, falling slightly after my volatile punch.

Breaking the kiss, Luna looked up at me. “I swear, just as soon as we’ve checked up on him, we’ll get out of this country, off the continent if we have to. The Detroit Seven can have you over my dead body.”

Exhaling raggedly, I brought my hand to her hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” I murmured.

Suddenly, we were racing back to the car. Luna passed me the keys, telling me she felt too volatile to drive back. I ducked into the car and yanked the door closed, watching as Luna buckled herself in beside me. Her dress had yanked far down her chest, revealing pale, cresting cleavage. Her face held a hardness I hadn’t seen before.

Pointing toward the back road, she said, “Okay, drive fast, but not ten over. We don’t want to get pulled over at a time like this. Loan sharks. Gangs. Gambling. Jesus, what happened to simpler times?”

“Everything dies, baby,” I said, blasting down the country road and finding traction, glancing across the green fields and ramming my foot on the pedal with more ferocity. With a quick motion, I reached for the cigarettes in my pocket and lit one between my lips, needing the spike of nicotine in my blood. “But not us. Not today.”