“I’m telling you…” he said, his tone patient and wry. “…that you will let me take it off of you as soon as we get there. I must apologize myself to your breasts for the attempted murder.”
Jasmine threw her head back, and her laughter filled up the car. More of that Hawaii sunshine shipped directly to his East Coast.
Had I really thought about leaving her behind? Han was extremely glad he’d changed his mind.
But then she sobered and asked, “So Victor…is he the reason you hate women so much?”
Han moved his hand back to the stick shift. “I don’t hate women.”
“I mean, if that’s how the break-up left him,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard his denial. “I can only imagine what the relationship was like.”
“He was obsessed with her,” Han admitted, his voice becoming quiet. “Even after her father ruined his life and brought about the end of the Red Diamond.”
“The Red Diamond—that was the original triad you all belonged to, right? The one that made you get tattoos at every level,” she said, pulling in details from the earlier conversation about why he’d stopped getting tattoos so abruptly. “So I guess you’re walking around with the reminder of what the wrong relationship can do.”
She nodded, coming to a conclusion, even though he’d neither confirmed nor denied any of her suppositions.
“I can see why all the Rhode Island STs are acting like it’s a miracle that I showed up here with you.”
The conversation had been so pleasant before, but ire rose inside Han now. He didn’t like that she’d managed to unearth some of his deepest fears and truths with just one question.
Close. She was getting too close.
“You know how you do not like to talk about your father having a disease that will waste his muscles away and eventually kill him?” he asked, his tone low and tight. “That is how I feel about this subject.”
He wasn’t looking at Jasmine. He kept his eyes glued to the road in front of them. But he could imagine her face during the long, terrible silence from her side of the car and could almost see it resetting to closed off when she said, “Copy that.”
Guilt sank like a stone in his gut.
“Jasmine…” he began to say.
Another vehicle slammed into them from behind, sending the Cougar into a spin. Han fought to regain control of the car, assuming someone must have hit them on accident. But before he could bring it to a stop, a black F-50 truck bore down on them again, slamming into the Cougar’s back.
The car flipped, and all the windows shattered after the Cougar landed like a green sea turtle onto its hardtop.
“Jasmine!” She was his first thought—his only thought.
She was hanging upside down, with her head lolled to the side. Fear stabbed through him. Was she unconscious or dead?
“Jasmine!” he yelled, reaching over to shake her. “Jasmine, wake up!”
Han didn’t realize he was hurt, too, until the world started to fade out on his words. Still, he called her name, over and over again, until everything turned black.
26
JAZZ
“Jasmine!” Han called to me from somewhere far away. “Jasmine, wake up!”
I opened my eyes with a jerk. Everything ached like I’d been hit by a truck—which, after a few blinking moments, I remembered I had.
A truck had hit Han’s stunning Mercury Cougar. Then we flipped over, and…Han? Where was Han?
I sat up—very, very gingerly. I must have thrown my hands up in front of my face when the car flipped. The tops of my arms were covered in cuts, and whoever had tossed me onto this couch hadn’t bothered to take out the tiny shards of glass still embedded in my skin.
So it hurt quite a bit to sit up and discover that I was in an office—one that had that timeless quality of workspaces run by blue-collar Boomers. I spotted heavy green metal filing cabinets, a desktop that had to be older than me, and an overlarge panel and metal desk that had probably been hauled in here sometime during the prior century.
No Han, though. Where was he? Had they taken him somewhere else to question him, hurt him, or worse? A rising panic made my heart race. I didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t get orientated.
But then, I heard a familiar sound in the background. Water—but not the aggressive swish of the ocean. Was it…? I sniffed like the werewolves in the shifter novels I moved onto in my twenties when I got sick of all the Fae YA.
And…yes, the air here smelled like fish and diesel fuel. So that meant that lapping water sound in the office’s background probably came courtesy of a river.
Warehouse, I figured. Right on the port, judging by the sound and smell.
Piecing together those two guesses staved off the panic and gave me enough orientation to look around for more clues.
