Page 15 of Soft Flannel Hank

Tell me something I don’t know.

Nothing looks like self-destruction quite like running out of your job with all the money from the cash register in your backpack and then hiding from your boss in remote pockets of the country for almost a year.

Esther didn’t want to think about the past. Not about Callum or his goons or what they would do to her if they found her. How they would make her pay.

She flipped the second card. Present. Death. Always Death in the present lately. But she smiled. New beginnings. Isn’t that what she’d said to Hank in the diner? Isn’t that what he’d whispered when he was as deep inside her body as it was possible for him to be? Their breath mingling in the taut energy between them?

Esther ran her fingertips over the skeleton’s form, feeling hope radiating in her chest.

She moved her fingers to the third card. Future. She almost wanted to just stuff the cards back in the deck and go to bed. She was tempted to, but the card pulsed with energy, and she knew she couldn’t.

Nine of Swords.

She shook her head. That couldn’t be right. Not with everything else aligning so perfectly.

Esther touched the card, and as happened when she had a vision, the world around her telescoped to a pinprick of light in a black space. She found herself hurtling towards it, falling into the scene with her mind’s eye.

She saw Callum’s tall frame, his broad body. The sandy blond hair that swept over one brow with an arrogant tilt. He sat at what looked like a small dining table in a hotel room. He wore a suit, like always. It was easy to wear a suit for every occasion when you never had to get your own hands dirty.

Although that always had been Callum’s deception, hadn’t it? Or maybe not. Because under the expensive custom tailoring, he had the body of an ancient warrior, the kind who could kill a man with his thumbs and nothing more. That’s exactly what he had been, in fact, and Esther knew without a doubt that his torso would bear the scars of blades and axes and clubs that were hundreds of years old.

He wasn’t a warrior anymore, though. He waved the lazy hand of a tyrant.

Esther was awareof other people in the room. She saw Jones. Trevor. Javier. Mick. And someone she didn’t recognize. They all stared at something on the table. A map.

“Here,” the stranger said, pointing a long, tattooed finger. “She’s here.”

She saw Callum tilt his head, pull the map closer.

“Then that’s where we go,” he replied in his deep, Scottish brogue.

His icy gray eyes lit up with malicious glee as he pressed his finger to a spot on the map. She knew what he was pointing to before she saw it. World’s End.

Esther felt her mind yanked back to her body. She gasped for breath, feeling as if she’d been underwater for too long. Just then, her phone rang. She shrieked before smacking her palm over her mouth and looking at the screen. Shannon.

She slid her finger over the screen to answer the call.

“They know where you are, Esther,” her cousin practically sobbed.

“I know,” Esther said in a voice that sounded far calmer than she felt. She sounded controlled and steady, like a woman who had a plan and every confidence in her ability to execute it. Which was funny, really, since the truth was that Esther had just lost every single precious sense of hope that she’d been reveling in all night.

It was over.

“You said I would be safe here,” she said, the words catching in her throat, which grew thick with tears.

“I know,” Shannon whispered. “I’ve never been wrong before.”

“Small comfort that is to me now,” Esther bit out. She started to shove her legs into her jeans but stopped when she realized that nobody would be in the motel office in the middle of the night. She was paying cash.

Stealing from the kind, elderly woman who owned the motel was something entirely different from stealing from a man like Callum MacLeod.

“How long do I have?”

Shannon took a deep breath. “A few days. Maybe a week. But not more.”

She nodded.

“Get some sleep, Esther. He’s not there yet and I still feel like you’re safe there.”