Tess woke up just enough to realize they were still driving. The road stretched in front of them just as sandy and dusty as it had been for days. She closed her eyes again and tried to go back to sleep. She was tired of the road, but not so much that she was going to complain. Complaining would lead to Milo shipping her home, and she didn’t want that. She’d gotten too used to him, too used to the sex, too used to being important to someone. She didn’t want to lose that, not even for a few days.
He’d tried so hard to keep her from coming along as he zigzagged through the southwest, trying to follow Toro’s track. He’d made every possible argument, from the baby needing to stay safe, to Toro being able to use her as leverage, to simply that the travel would be too hard for her. He’d tried everything, and she’d just stonewalled him, refusing to discuss any of it and packing her clothes right next to his guns in the rental car. She hadn’t actually expected it to work, but when he was on his way out the door, she’d simply followed along, locked the pretty front door behind her, and sat down in the passenger’s seat. She’d half expected him to pick her up and carry her bodily back into the house, leaving her there. At that point, she probably would have let him go; there was a point past which fighting wasn’t going to get her anywhere. If she could have gotten a rage fuck out of it, it might have been worth it, but without that? What was really the point?
But instead, he’d sighed, tossed her duffle back in the back, and gotten into the car. She’d managed to hide her surprise pretty well, but was it really enough? Maybe, maybe not.
Since then, they’d been crisscrossing the southwest, trying to pick up Toro’s track. They’d catch a whiff of him here, a thought of him there, but nothing distinct. Nothing clear. They were staying in motels and, once or twice, sleeping in the car. Those nights she didn’t care for; reaching across the console to jerk him off wasn’t the same as riding him until they were both screaming, but her increasing size was making it hard to make use of the driver’s seat, and he was too tall for the back seat to be practical. The desert nights were cold, but sometimes they still went out, laid down a blanket, and fucked until dawn.
She wasn’t big yet, nothing even close to that, but she could feel the softness of her belly hardening, the soft swell emerging even through the ample curves she’d already had. Milo had noticed it too, and when he wasn’t dark-eyed and glaring at the horizon for not coughing up one stupid drug dealer so that he could move on with the rest of his life, he would caress her belly, talking soft nonsense to a tiny little thing that she could still barely imagine.
Tess knew she should have stayed home. She should have started getting prenatal care. She should have started planning a baby shower, buying stuff for a room, putting together cribs and playpens. She’d honestly thought they’d be home by now, back in the pretty house she’d only just started to decorate. She hadn’t guessed that Toro would either be this smart or this stupid; Milo said that it was actually easier to track the smart guys since they were predictable. The stupid ones, you never knew what crazy thing they were going to come up with. You didn’t know which track to follow.
According to him, Toro had to be the stupidest shit ever to walk the earth.
There was no way Tess was going home. She was almost halfway through her pregnancy now, and she hadn’t been able to let go of the idea that if Toro knew where she was, he wouldn’t hesitate to use her against Milo. Especially if he knew she was pregnant. He was too cold-blooded to give a shit about murdering a baby. She wouldn’t have slept a night in that house alone. At least here, on the road, Milo was protecting her.
But still, the day was stretching out, and she was tired of it. She’d drive later, give Milo a break, but now it was still her turn. She closed her eyes tight and rested her head against the window.
And then Milo’s phone rang. They both jumped a little; the phone had been sitting in the center console for their entire twisted road trip, but the only noise the thing had made was when the GPS told them to turn here or there. Now, actual ringtones? Milo glanced at her, and for a moment, Tess wondered what he was thinking. Then he tapped to answer the call, immediately putting it on speaker phone, and saying “Hello?”
Tess heard a voice she had been afraid of for months. “Hello, my friend,” came the voice, modified through an audible digital scrambler. Tess felt her guts flinch. Milo’s jaw set and his face turned hard as stone. “I wonder if you understand why I’m contacting you. You’re a smart man. I doubt it is too hard to grasp.”
Milo’s jaw worked like he was grinding her teeth. Tess inhaled, and he shook his head sharply. After a moment, he turned the steering wheel, veering the car off into the dusty side of the road. They hadn’t seen another car for miles; they could have stopped in the middle of the road for all the difference it would have made. But still.
He wanted her to be silent. He wanted her to be safe. It was terrifying, but it was still kind.
“Hello, Silk Road,” he said, his voice calm and level. As if he weren’t months late on delivering a contract that had been considered high priority when it was originally signed. “I have a good idea why you might be calling, but I’d like to hear it from you, just for clarity’s sake. I’d hate for us to misunderstand each other.”
There was a silence on the line for several moments, and Tess couldn’t help but hear it as disgusted anger. When Silk Road spoke again, the modulated voice was a level of fierce that made Tess hug her stomach and breathe deeply. “I gave you a month to complete the contract. It was not done. I gave you more time. You said you’d been interfered with. That you would take care of the problem. You have not done so.” Now, a sigh, a sound that was made strange and robotic by the filtering. “I heard through many channels that you are a man of your word, Mr. Sykes. I am displeased to find that this is not true. Of course, I have heard rumors. Someone in my place always hears rumors.”
Milo went entirely still. There was a long moment that passed far too slowly, and then he laughed. The laugh would have been absolutely convincing – if not for his face. If she hadn’t been able to see his face, she wouldn’t have thought he was anything beyond enjoying himself. He was raging – and also, for the first time, he looked fearful. It took her a moment to realize why; he was afraid that Silk Road would do something to her, or to the baby, or to both of them. Maybe his identities weren’t as well-protected as he’d hoped, maybe something else, maybe anything. Maybe he was just afraid because there was something in his life that mattered. She’d understand that.
“Silk Road, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to track a stupid man. You have my word that I’m working as fast as I can, and that I will put this man in the ground. He’s insulted me, he’s insulted you, but most importantly, you paid me to have this done. I will see it done.”
Silk Road made a noncommittal sound. “We’ll see what you can do in the end, Mr. Sykes. For now, I am willing to give you one piece of information, and only because it benefits me. Do you understand what I am doing here?”
Milo’s tan skin went a sallow color as the blood left his face. “Yes, Silk Road. I do.”
“I own you, after this. You will do what I say when I say it. Until I say otherwise.”
Milo swallowed hard, nodded, and then seemed to realize that the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t see him. “I understand.”
“There is a town near the Mexico border. Floydsville. Your target has holed up there, though God alone knows why. You will deal with him, or I will deal with you.” This time, Silk Road didn’t wait for an answer. But they did let out a sharp little laugh. “And make sure to tell Toro’s whore that I said hello.”
The line clicked dead at the same time Tess gasped, and Milo made an incoherent sound of pain and rage.
They sat still for a while. Tess found tears rolling down her cheeks, unaware that she’d been crying. She brushed them away but more just kept coming, and she didn’t know how to make them stop. Milo’s eyes were fixed on the dashboard of the car, his hands were perfectly still and clenched into fists, and his chest was heaving as he fought whatever internal demons were rampaging through him.
Out of nowhere he reached out and snatched up his phone, tapping furiously at the screen. She heard the GPS voice start up again, and then he turned the key in the ignition. Instead of swinging back onto the road and heading on, however, he spun the wheel, reversing direction and heading back the way they’d come.
“Milo. Milo, what are you doing? Is this the way to that town Silk Road mentioned?”
He didn’t say anything, his jaw tight and his gaze fixed on the road ahead of him. His knuckles were pale from clutching the steering wheel.
“Milo, come on. Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“No,” he said, after a moment that stretched until she thought she’d hang in it. “No, this isn’t the way to Floydsville. Floydsville is, apparently, a ridiculously named town in the exact opposite direction from where I am taking you.”
“Then why are we – Milo, stop.”
“I am taking you back to the last town we went through. There was a bus station. From a bus station, I can send you to Atlanta, or somewhere else with a proper airport, and then you can get home from there. You can rest, and wait for the baby, and decorate the house and – and write a novel, or learn to paint or take up extreme frisbee. I don’t care, you can do absolutely anything you want except for walk into certain death on my arm. Do you understand, Tess? I won’t be responsible for you and – your baby getting killed.”
“Our baby,” she said, softly. He ignored her, so she laid a hand on his forearm. He shook her off, hard, but she knew him well enough by now to feel okay trying it again. This time he didn’t shake her off, but he didn’t soften. “Our baby, Milo. You wanted this, you want this.”
“I do,” he said, with far more anger in his voice than Tess had anticipated. “I do want this. And I can’t ruin it – tarnish us – by letting you see this. See the way this thing affects me. I don’t want to be this person anymore, but I have to do this one last thing. If you see this – if you see me like this – you’ll never…”
His voice choked off like this was some kind of bullshit rom-com, and Tess had to choke back a laugh.
“Pull over,” she said. “I need to see you while we talk.”
He did it, which surprised her. Turned off the car again and turned in his seat.
“I think you’ve forgotten how we met,” she said, not even bothering to keep the humor out of her voice. “I think you’ve forgotten how hard we fuck. I think you’ve forgotten that you’ve never yet hit the edge of how rough I want you to be. God, I trust you more, and we just get filthier.” She took a breath and chose her words. “I’m not some lightweight damsel you need to protect, Milo. I’m fierce and mean, and I’ve survived just as much as you have. I handle myself just fine, and frankly, this baby and I are safer with you than we are in a house far away from you. Because I know you. I know you, and I know you won’t let anything happen to me, or to this baby – if you can stop it.”
“This isn’t what it’s supposed to be like for you,” he said, and this time his voice sounded more than a little sad. “I promised you something better than this.”
“This is better than what I had. And when we come through this together, we’ll make it even better. Now it’s time for us to drive, okay? It sounds like Silk Road has a deadline in their mind, even if we don’t know what it is.”
Milo was quiet a while longer, and Tess let him be. It was terrifying in its own way, trusting him to make a decision. Maybe he was realizing, though, that he couldn’t force her to go back to that house alone, not without drugging her and tying her up. And, she laughed to herself, there were much more fun ways of making that happen. But if he tried to put her on a bus, she’d just get off at the next stop, rent a car, and follow him. It wouldn’t help him or her. Better to have her with him. At least, that’s what she was hoping he’d realize. If everything worked the way it was supposed to.
“Fine,” he said after a minute. “Fine. Okay. Let’s go, then.”
It felt good, having him trust her, even if it was only this far. It was a start, and they’d keep going.