Page 24 of Ruthless Daddy
She boarded.
I was in the car before Marco finished the sentence. The lot was crusted with ice, but I took the turn at speed and felt the tires catch. I ran the red at Clark and hit the highway at seventy.
The 6:05 stopped in Kalamazoo at nine for a twenty-minute transfer break. If I floored it, I could make the stop before the bus pulled out.
Two and a half hours. Two hundred miles of I-94. The speedometer never dropped below ninety.
The world outside was a blur. Snow at the edge of the roads, more like dirty slush now, the sky still black at first and then going grey, then pale, then full blinding white as the sun came up over the flats to the right and the farmland started to take shape on the left.
I thought about her on the bus, her face pressed to the window, eyes fixed on nothing. I thought about the ticket, folded and unfolded until it fit her hand like a lifeline. I thought about the taste of her mouth and the way it lingered, the salt and the heat and the shudder at the end, and how it would be gone by now, rubbed out by coffee or time or whatever armor she built in place of skin.
I did not call anyone. I did not play music. I drove with both hands on the wheel and the engine screaming like an animal in my chest.
At 8:55 I hit the city limits. At 9:03 I pulled into the bus depot, the brakes screeching.
The bus was already there, blue and white, hissing and idle at the curb.
I scanned the windows, looking for her face.
She was not there.
I killed the engine and went inside. The waiting room was half empty, but I knew her right away, even with the hood up and the coat zipped to her chin and the face turned away from the door.
She was at the vending machines. Bag at her feet. Bottle of water in her hand, not yet opened.
She saw me before I reached her. Her whole body went still. Like a deer at the sound of a branch.
I stopped six feet away, not a single step closer, both hands open and out where she could see them. Like a cop at the end of a hostage standoff. She didn’t run, didn’t even flinch. She just went stock-still, like some part of her had already known I would come for her, here, before the sky was even fully lit.
She stared at me with that shark stare—a look I’d seen on men who’d come back from war, and once or twice in the mirror on bad mornings—but there was something else there now, too. Not fear. Not quite. Fury, mostly, carved into her jaw and the backs of her hands as she clenched the water bottle so hard the label twisted off. But underneath, something like relief. Like she’d been waiting for someone to catch her falling.
“What are you doing here? What is your problem?” Her voice was low, but it carried. The clerk behind the ticket counter pretended not to hear.
I watched the angry flush rise in her cheeks, the way it clashed against the rest of her, which stayed cold. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to step closer or just put my head through the vending machine and end it right there.
“You’re my problem,” I said. The words landed wrong. I winced. “I mean—”
“Well in that case, just leave me alone. Let me get back on the bus.” She didn’t look away from me, but her left shoulder dipped back, telegraphing her escape.
I didn’t move. “You don’t understand. My problem is that I care what happens to you.”
She made a laugh out of it, but it was the kind that hurt to hear. “You don’t. You don’t fucking know me. You don’t even know my name, do you?”
“Then tell me.” I said it careful, slow.
She shook her head like I was an idiot. “So you can use it against me? Use it to track me down?”
“No,” I said. “So I can talk to you. So that when you try to leave, I can say, honestly, that I’d rather you stay. That I want to keep you safe.”
Her lip curled, but her eyes flicked, quick as a pickpocket, to the corners of the room. Assessing exits. Calculating the odds. “You mafia men are all the same—”
“You have experience with the mafia?” I asked, and I let the word taste like blood.
She hesitated, just a flicker. “Yes. No. Just . . . leave me alone.”
Behind her, the clock over the waiting area said 9:13. The driver was outside the glass, pulling on a cigarette, his eyes on me. I tried to read her next move, but I couldn’t.
I said, “The men. The ones who tried to take you before.”
