Primal (Wrong Side of the Tracks 2)

It would be fine.

It would be fine.

After all, in the worst case scenario, they had the whole junkyard—and the woods around it—to hide in until the bikers arrived.

So it would be fine.

Fine.

“Goddamn it,” Dane whined, rubbing his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. “What if Frank and the others are targeted because of this?”

Jag’s strong arms wrapped around him from behind the seat. “They’ll know how to prepare. And Rob could already be dead in a ditch anyway,” he said as if it didn’t matter that Dane might have killed a person.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with this! He and I were just fucking. How the hell did it devolve into this?” Dane moaned, rubbing his face hard, but was thankful for the soothing touch.

“It happened because Rob is a sleazy, murderous dick. None of this is your fault. Let’s go.” Jag punctuated the last word with a kiss to Dane’s ear.

The spark of warmth it caused released some of the rigidity in Dane’s shoulders. He smiled at Jag in the rear-view mirror before opening the door to step into the warm night. The moss and grass were soft under his feet, but while he didn’t particularly like being out in nature at night, Jag’s presence felt reassuring enough for him to inhale the fragrant air.

“It will be fine,” he reassured himself once more as he switched on the flashlight function in his phone to see where he was going, because the leafy treetops above his head blocked all of the moonlight.

The smile he’d sported a second ago dropped the moment his gaze settled on a small plastic item stuck to the side of the vehicle. His heart beat faster, pumping hot blood into Dane’s brain, but no matter how desperately he tried to calm himself by thinking that things like this only happened in spy movies, the small electrical device attached to the body wasn’t going anywhere.

“Oh... oh no...” he uttered, staring at the faint light flashing on the tracker.

Jag moved to his side with a crowbar in hand, which he’d gotten from fuck-knew-where. “What is it?”

Dane’s throat narrowed uncomfortably as he breathed in, gesturing at the device. “It’s a tracker! Rob must have put it there to find us! Fuck, he could be here any second!”

“What’s a tracker?” Jag asked, pushing Dane to the edge of sanity. They didn’t have time for this. Rob could be on the way here already if he’d only fallen over earlier.

“A… a thing that will lead him here. He will see on his… phone where we are and come here,” Dane said, frantically looking around as his ears opened to all the noise around them. He could hear the hum of the distant highway, and the typical night sounds, but the fact that he couldn’t know whether a creaking piece of wood nearby informed them about the presence of an animal, or Rob, was already cooking his brain.

Jag’s expression tensed in the faint light from Dane’s phone, and he nodded. “We should move the car away then and come back on foot, covering our tracks.”

Dane was already damp with sweat, but Jag’s input lit a flicker of hope in his chest. “I mean… he could already know… where we stopped bu—” His jaw turned to stone when his oversensitive ears picked up a new noise, an insistent buzz, which despite all of Dane’s hopes sounded like a single motorcycle. And if it wasn’t the club, who’d have arrived in force, it ought to be Rob himself.

“Fuck… fuck, he’s here…”

Jag bared his teeth. “Let’s wait for him. I’ll break him in half.”

Dane grabbed Jag’s wrist and pulled. “I’m not risking it. You keep forgetting you’re wounded.” And Dane didn’t actually want Jag to kill anyone when the biker club could do it for them.

Guilt twisted Dane’s insides when he thought of that terrible moment when Jag had landed on a piece of rusty metal because of him. His man now also had cuts from broken glass on his face, and Dane wasn’t about to let him take any more damage.

Jag huffed as the hum of the bike approached. “Fine, let’s go. I know the junkyard, we’ll be safe there.”

Dane exhaled and looked into the dark woods, but Jag was right—in the junkyard they had the advantage of familiarity and could easily reach their friends too—so he grabbed Jag’s hand and pulled him toward the fence. “Let’s go now! He can’t see us!”

And yet it felt as if Rob was already breathing down Dane’s nape. There was a time when Dane had craved his rough touch, but now the memory of their sex made him queasy. Some people would have pointed out that Jag was just as rough, but comparing Jag’s uninhibited cravings with the objectifying way in which Rob had always treated Dane felt inappropriate. In Jag, Dane had found the gentle beast he’d been searching for, and he wasn’t about to risk the one man who could give him what he needed just so Jag could sate his lust for revenge.