CHAPTER4
The freedomof being on a motorcycle was a new experience for Cygny. As a child she’d been horribly afraid of them. The noise had shaken the walls of her house and the men that came with them had shaken her.
She could have said something to Leo before getting on behind him but the last thing she wanted to do was give him any reason to hate her even more.
He was being civil and for that she was grateful.
She’d even expected it for the most part.
Yes, he hated her, but this wasn’t about them.
He wanted to work with the Brotherhood as much as she was hoping to.
And even though her heart was being held together with duct tape, she knew her job and how to do it. Pure stubborn determination was going to be her salvation. This training could be her way out of her apartment and back into the land of the living.
As they passed along a high mountain road, she looked along the side of the road for anything out of the ordinary. A strange break in the trees, disturbances in the grass and other vegetation lining the road.
They’d seen a couple of gravel areas off to the sides from time to time, likely added in during the construction for road crews to park off to the side, or for vehicles needing a place to pull over to sleep or fix a flat tire.
Riding along with Leo was strangely easy on her heart. She could hold him. Lean into his warmth. As long as she kept her hands steady, he wouldn’t notice how holding him affected her.
With the vibrations of the bike, she couldn’t even tell if she was shaking from the contact or the churning emotions inside of her.
To keep her inner battle hidden away, looking for signs of Leslie helped to keep her focus away from the man held securely in her embrace.
A set of skid marks on the other side of the road turned her head and before she could tighten her hold on Leo to ask him to stop, he was already slowing and taking a wide radius turn to head in the opposite direction.
Pulling off to the side, just shy of the skid marks, Cygny inched back on the seat, putting some much-needed air between them.
Reaching up, she undid the strap securing her helmet under her chin.
Leo set the kickstand and made quick work of his helmet, bracing it on his thigh as he held out his hand to help her off the motorcycle.
She took it without a second thought but tried to pull back a moment later.
Leo didn’t let her let go.
“It’s okay,” he told her and tilted his head to the side. “Go ahead and swing your leg over. I don’t want your legs to buckle.”
She gave him a sidelong look and then raised a curious brow over his words. “Is it that obvious?”
She leaned her weight onto one leg and swung the other over the back of the motorcycle with some effort. Her thighs were aching from holding on.
Leo’s voice turned her attention back to him. “The look you gave it at first made me worry that we’d have to find some other transportation in the mountains. You looked at it like it was going to bite you.”
This time when she pulled her hand away, she didn’t give him the chance to keep a hold of it. She yanked it back and turned away to take off her own helmet and set it on the back of the bike.
Cygny didn’t even give him enough time to ask about it. “The wheelbase is big. Definitely a truck of some sort.”
Leo came up beside her a moment later, his own gaze focused on the skid marks. “Looks that way. Any indications of a bicycle?”
They split up for a bit, still within eyesight of the other, but they went in both directions from the skid marks, looking into the gravel and dirt for any visual signs that a bicycle had been stopped or forced off the side of the road.
When she turned around to go back to the motorcycle, she looked through the brush from her new vantage point. Cygny had already looked for things in the natural trajectory of the moving vehicle, but that was science.
People were messier.
People were troublesome.
And they didn’t always make sense.
Just a few yards from the disturbance made by the skid marks she saw something through the grasses. She stopped short.
Dropping down to one knee she looked through the thick growth of wildflowers and saw that something had gone through the long, flexible stems.
Some of the stalks had been broken and folded over, but the majority of the growth seemed untouched.
Stepping through the tall flowering grasses, she walked parallel to the damage she’d seen.
Cygny hadn’t gone far when she saw what had caused the damage. A large section of tire had blown through the wildflowers and come to rest up against some hard packed dirt at the base of a ridge in the mountain.
So the skid marks had likely been part of the driver’s attempt to keep control of their vehicle and pull over so that they could trade out the blown tire for a spare.
Cygny moved forward to see if there was anything else back there, but there wasn’t. Just a piece of discarded trash that had been left behind.
Sighing, she straightened up and turned back toward the edge of the road.
Cygny heard footfalls on the gravel.
Lifting her head, she saw Leo slow his steps as he met her gaze.
“Hey,” his chest rose and fell in a quick rhythm, “let me know when you’re stepping out of sight.”
“Out of-”
She looked at the grasses between them and the slight bend in the road behind Leo.
From his vantage point she had been out of sight.
She wasn’t nearly as tall as Leo was, but bent over and peering through the wildflowers, she’d been hidden from his view.
“I’m sorry. I was just going to look behind the flowers here.” She pointed in the direction she’d been walking. “I’m not used to working with a partner. I’ve always been assigned on my own to cases.”
Leo looked like he was fuming.