Page 34 of Blood Hymn

I laugh. It comes out cracked and wild. "Everybody in Louisiana just watched me throw a man off a balcony."

"You're all right."

"I'm not." I turn in the seat. "I'm not all right. Silas, they're going to kill us. They know my face. They know your face. Every cop in three parishes is looking for this truck. We've got three days and eleven girls and no house and no guns but what's in that shed, and Judah's sitting in his house with twelve men and dogs, and Saturday night he's going to walk me down to the water himself⁠—"

He kisses me.

It isn't gentle. It isn't a question. His hand goes into my slicked-back hair, closes and pulls my head back, and his mouth comes down hard on mine. I make a sound I've never made in my life, grab the front of the cook's jacket with both fists, and drag him across the bench seat on top of me.

It's frantic. There's no other word. My back hits the passenger door, and the handle digs into my spine. I don't care. I'm tearing at the snaps on the jacket, and he's got my vest open and my shirt ripped wide, the buttons pinging off the dash, and the locket swings against my throat as he yanks my bra down and puts his mouth on my breast and sucks, hard. I cry out and arch into him, and my head bangs the window. There's his blood on his knuckles and Malcolm's blood on my cuffs and gel and powder smeared across both of us, and we smell like gunpowder and hotel kitchen and fear.

I get his belt open. I get my hand inside his jeans and wrap it around his cock and he's already hard, thick and hot in my palm, and he groans against my breastbone like it's been punched out of him.

"Now," I tell him. "Right now. I need it now."

He hauls my slacks down. They catch on my shoes, and he drags the shoes off and throws them in the floorboard and gets the slacks off one leg and leaves them tangled around the other. My underwear goes with a rip. There's no room. My head's jammed against the door, and one knee is up against the dash, and he's crouched over me with his shoulders against the roof and his stitched arm braced on the seat back. It doesn't matter.

He pushes into me in one hard stroke, and I scream.

Not pain. Something bigger than pain, and the scream fills the cab. I'm soaked and he slides in to the hilt and holds there, buried, and I can feel him throbbing inside me. I sink my teeth into his shoulder through the thin cotton undershirt to keep from screaming again.

He fucks me hard. Fast and deep and rough, the truck rocking on its springs, my head knocking against the door with every stroke until he gets his hand between my skull and the glass and takes the blows on his knuckles. The windows fog. My heel slams against the horn and it blares once into the cane, and neither of us stops. I claw at his back and grab his ass and pull him deeper, harder, and he gives it to me, grunting, his face in my neck and his teeth on my throat right above the gold chain.

"We're going to die," I gasp.

He lifts his head and looks at me. His eyes are black in the dark. There's powder on his lip from my skin.

"Not yet."

He shifts his weight and gets his thumb on my clit and rubs it in hard, tight circles without breaking rhythm, and it takes me apart almost at once. I come with my back bowed up off the seat and my nails dug into his shoulders, clenching around him so hard he swears, and I hear myself sobbing his name over and over into the fogged-up cab.

He drives into me three more times, deep and ragged, and on the last one he goes rigid and shudders and comes inside me with a groan that sounds like something breaking loose, his forehead pressed to mine and his whole body shaking.

Afterward, we don't move. We can't; there isn't room. He stays on top of me with his weight on his elbow and his cheek against my wet hair, and I lie crushed against the passenger door with one leg on the dash and my slacks around my ankle and my ripped shirt hanging open, breathing.

Through the fogged windshield the cane moves in the wind, whispering. Far off to the north, a siren rises and falls and fades.

I reach up and find the locket at my throat and close my hand around it, kink and all.

"Not yet," I whisper back.

CHAPTER 12

SILAS

Malcolm Harlowe's face is on the screen of Charlotte's phone by six in the morning, and it stays there all day.

The campaign photo with the good teeth. A shaky video somebody shot from the lobby floor of the Bentley, the banner tearing loose off the mezzanine and following him down. A state police spokesman at a podium in Alexandria describing a person of interest: female, early twenties, dark hair, possible facial injury. By noon they've found the Ram in the cane where we left it before dawn. By two they've released Evie's driver's license photo.

She sits cross-legged on the cot in the gauge house and scrolls through it without a flicker, her swollen eye gone purple and green at the edges.

"They didn't use my name," she observes.

"They will."

"Nobody's said yours."

"Nobody puts a dead man on the news."