Someone.
Her head lolled in Buckeye’s best effort to look up and see. It hadn’t been this dark outside The Rose. One of her knees buckled and fabric yanked up into her pits. A fist hoisted her again, and she tried to make words. They came out a sludge of malformed syllables.
“… think it’s wearing off.”
Spiderwebs laid over her hearing, the voice just on some sticky opposite side of clarity. She blinked and flexed her fingers as though she’d just regrown them. Wrong? Yes. This was wrong.
“Then I guess you need to get the fucking door open already.”
Here, this second voice vibrated in a familiar way. It belonged to the person with a grip on the back of her shirt. Deep and male. Handsome.
Buckeye’s heart thudded and more of the fog burned out of her skull.
August.
The dance. The porch.
The sonofa—
She dragged her head up on an uncooperative neck to see wheels. A heavy rear bumper. A rolling cargo door clattering up its track.
Buckeye swayed but got her knees to lock for support. From the maw of the armored hauler, at least a dozen pairs of eyes stared back, glassy from darkened sockets. Every one of them told her the same thing.
Run.
Adrenaline redlined. The purge was violent, systolic.
She dropped. Twisted. Ran.
Clear night air seared her nostrils. Dry earth pounded under her boots. There were lights in the distance and she surged in that direction, the glow from each starring uniformly from the grit watering her eyes.
Male voices swore behind her and the thud of rapid pursuit matched the sound of blood in her ears.
Enforcers? After all this time?
Buckeye lurched forward, remnants of whatever drug keeping her stride sloppy. The footfalls closing the distance behind her were sober and driven. Greed would catch up with her. It always did.
Her breath sawed in and out of her throat. She dodged around small, thorny shrubs in the moonlight. Tore through the barrens, no idea how far she was from The Rose. The lights she ran toward could be anything.
A second set of lungs worked in the night. Her pursuer was close enough for her to hear his breathing.
Fuck!
She pushed harder, muscles on fire to keep up speed. Something batted at her right elbow as it swung back. A hand. Buckeye ripped away with a shout, but it was enough. She wasn’t watching her feet.
Rocks and earth rushed at her face. Drunken reflexes did no more to help than force an awkward yell out of her throat when palms and knees skidded over the ground. She scrabbled to stand, to keep going.
And then a boot kicked the inside of her knee. The sole of another planted squarely on her ass and shoved her forward, off-balance. Her hands weren’t fast enough to break this
fall, and Buckeye collapsed face-first onto hard dirt.
“Enough!”
August shifted his boot to the small of her back, pinning her like a bug. She screamed pure rage, abraded palms still trying to pull her body from under his weight.
“Goddamn it, I said enough.”
The boot became a knee and he grappled her arms. Buckeye flailed, but the man wrenched her wrists around to her back. The high of adrenaline bled out from the stalled chase, and her prior state flooded in to fill its place. Her world spun, and she groaned into the dirt, grit sticking to the spittle on one side of her mouth.