18

When I opened my eyes I was staring at the seat buckle, my head and body twisted into the side of the car door and my hand resting on the handle, as though in my sleep I’d been trying to hide, or escape.

I glanced up and out of the window. We weren’t moving anymore, we were just sitting on the side of the road as the dawn broke around us. There was no movement, no people, no cars and no noise – it was like the hiatus between breaths. I tried to work out where we were.

It looked like a desert town, flat and arid with dust already layering the windscreen, and even at this hour the road was throwing up a long-distance shimmer. Through the tinted window I could see a couple of buildings, mainly hardware and building supply stores spaced out at intervals. I had no idea what we were doing here other than maybe that Alex had pulled over to sleep.

I shifted slowly in my seat and turned towards him. He was staring out of his window and I felt both relief that he was still in the car and a shot of pain when I remembered that he wasn’t here out of love or friendship but out of some dubious code of honour. That’s what he had meant when he’d said he had no choice. It was so obvious. And so Alex.

I followed his gaze across the street. We were sitting opposite a second-hand car dealership. About forty cars plastered with ‘for sale’ signs were lined up facing us, like the start of a gumball rally.

We sat in the silence of the car, the air conditioning running, for another hour and forty minutes. Neither of us said a word. I brought my legs up onto the seat and sat there holding them, freezing but too scared to touch the buttons in the car or to open my mouth. I tugged at my dress to try to pull it over my legs and realised the seam had split up my thigh. My knees were hatched with blood and dirt. There was a small rent in one of the straps too which looked like it might at any moment lead to a wardrobe mishap. I remembered my flying tackle from the night before and glanced quickly over at Alex, remembering the hatred I’d seen in his face when I’d been standing on the porch. What would he have done if he’d reached me?

Eventually, things picked up a pace, like someone hitting the forward play button. A car pulled up outside the car dealership and a man in a short-sleeved shirt and golf trousers got out and unlocked the double padlock on the chain-link fence. He pulled into the lot and Alex started the engine.

I pushed my feet down off the seat as he drove across the road and into the dealership. I had an idea of what he was about to do and I was guessing Jack was not going to be too happy about it.

The man in the chequered trousers came straight out of his little Portakabin office, a coffee mug in his hand. I saw the look of surprise on his face quickly replaced with a broad, dental-worked smile.

‘Stay here,’ Alex said under his breath, already opening his door.

I watched through the window as Alex started talking. He had his back to me and I couldn’t hear a word. At one point I saw him gesture towards me and the man leant a little forward and glanced into the car, waving. I fidgeted with my dress, aware that I was looking exactly like someone who’d stayed out all night and then been dragged through a hedge backwards; hair all over the place, dark smudges under my eyes where my mascara must have run, and looking altogether the worse for wear. God only knew what story Alex was spinning the man. I glanced up again and caught him pointing to a car on the far side of the lot and I sat forward to get a better view. It was a little white Toyota, fairly old-looking. Not exactly Alex’s style. I didn’t care what it looked like, though, so long as it went fast.

The man started to circle Jack’s car. He opened the driver’s door and got in next to me, giving me a grin.

‘Hi there,’ he said.

I looked at him blankly then forced a smile, trying to surreptitiously smooth my hair and hold my dress together at the same time.

He wobbled the gear stick, turned on the engine, checked the speedometer. His hand hovered over the buttons by the radio and I felt sickness well up in the pit of my stomach.

Alex leant in the door. ‘That’s just the radio tuning.’

The man put his hands back on the wheel. He turned his head and noticed the bag on the back seat. ‘So, you two lovebirds are heading to Vegas, I hear. Congratulations.’

I stared at him, wondering if I’d misheard. Alex’s face appeared again behind the man’s shoulder, nudging me with his eyes. I realised straightaway what the message was and looked back at the man in shock.

‘Oh, er, thanks.’ I looked up at Alex again, who gave me the tiniest shrug. ‘It’s kind of sudden.’

‘Well, good luck to you both,’ he said, shaking my hand.

He got out of the car and I sat there in shock. I’d dreamt quite a lot when I was younger about marrying Alex. When I was nine I’d scrawled Lila Wakeman all over my diary about six hundred times. I’d even designed my wedding dress and practised saying ‘I do’ to a photo of Alex propped up on my dresser. Our wedding would have taken place in my parents’ garden or a little white church. There was probably a pony in there somewhere, too. But never in all those imaginings had I imagined Vegas and a getaway car. I had to laugh at the irony of Alex now being the one pretending we were getting married.

When I glanced up I saw the man indicating his Portakabin. Alex shook his head and the man shrugged and walked inside by himself.

The next thing I knew, Alex had opened my door and pulled me out. Then he walked to the trunk and grabbed a black holdall that I assumed was Jack’s.

Alex put his arm around me, his grip tight. It was pleasurable pain, my body reacting as it normally did to his touch. I was so tired I longed to put my arm around him too but I knew he was only holding me this way to keep up appearances for the car dealer. We had to look like we were in love, not like we were on the run from a secretive government unit and a pack of homicidal maniacs with mind control powers.

The man came out of his Portakabin, holding some keys and several stacks of paper in his hand that I realised were hundred-dollar bills. Alex held out his hand and the man counted out five stacks into it. I shifted uncomfortably, my bare feet starting to burn on the tarmac.

‘Fifty, and I throw in the Toyota.’

Fifty thousand? Jack had said it was worth one twenty. But that was with extras that Alex couldn’t demonstrate, unless he thought the man might up his price if he saw me flop to the pavement clutching my head. So fifty was probably a good amount. Jack would still go mad.

Alex took the keys from the man and handed him the Audi’s in exchange.

‘The paperwork’s all in the glove box.’

‘OK, sir, if I can just get you to sign this here piece of paper and check your licence we’re all done.’

I couldn’t see Alex’s face because he was holding me so tight, I could only look up at his chin. He had to let me go though to reach for his licence in his pocket. I felt him edge ever so slightly towards me so his body was still touching mine. He was clearly nervous about me doing a runner. I instinctively leant into him to close the distance. I was definitely through with running away from Alex.

‘OK, Mr . . .’ the man peered more closely at the document in Alex’s hand, ‘Hunt. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’ I looked up in surprise. He turned to me. ‘And the soon-to-be-Mrs-Hunt, a pleasure.’

He held out his hand and I looked at it until I felt Alex gently nudging my back. I took the hand and shook it, murmuring my thanks.

‘Mr Hunt?’ I asked. We were walking fast towards the Toyota. Alex had picked up the holdall and slung it over his shoulder, his other arm around me. I was walking awkwardly over the ground and he hadn’t seemed to notice that I wasn’t wearing any shoes. ‘How do you have fake ID?’

Alex was unlocking the car and popping the trunk. He let go of me.

‘How do you think I have fake ID? It’s just a shame I don’t have one for you, too. It would be a big help right now.’

He opened the passenger door for me and I got in. The white leather seats stuck to the back of my bare legs and the inside smelt of stale beer with overtones of upholstery cleaner.

‘Nice choice,’ I said, when Alex got in his side.

He looked over at me briefly and I thought I detected the start of a smile at the corner of his mouth. My stomach muscles contracted with it. It was the first sign of warmth he’d shown me. The arm around me didn’t count, that had been acting. I let my eyes travel all over his face. He was busy reversing out of the space, looking over his shoulder. Maybe it was because it was daylight and the shadows were gone but the anger from last night seemed to have dissipated. He was still tense, I could tell from the furrows in his brow and the way his mouth was set in a line, but he didn’t seem angry anymore, just very focused.

‘Why did you sell Jack’s car?’

‘We’re going to need the money. Plus they’ll have an APB out on us. Every cop in the country’s going to be on the lookout for us. The Audi’s fairly conspicuous.’

We drove a few miles out of the town. Alex was quiet the whole way and the air was saturated with unspoken questions. I had so many to ask I didn’t know where to begin but I knew that he most certainly had questions for me too. I wondered when he would start the inquisition.

Just as I was about to test the water by asking again where we were going, Alex swung into the car park of a giant mall. He pulled into a space away from the entrance, between two big SUVs. Before I could ask what we were doing there, Alex started unbuttoning his shirt. My jaw went slack as I watched. When he was done with the buttons he pulled it off. He was wearing a white vest underneath and I couldn’t help but stare at his bare arms and shoulders, wondering what on earth he was doing.

‘Here, put this on.’ He chucked the shirt at me.

I looked at him with a question in my eyes.

‘You can’t walk into a mall like that,’ he said indicating my ripped dress.

He had a point. I didn’t reply, just put the shirt on over my dress, my fingers mangling the buttons they were shaking so much.

I peeked up at him when I was done. The sleeves were much too long, hanging over my hands. Alex took my arm and started rolling one sleeve up.

His eyes, I noticed, were back to their normal cool blue but they were shuttered and I couldn’t read his mood. When he was done he got out of the car and I took a second to look at myself in the little mirror on the inside of the visor. Eyes like a raccoon, hair like it had been dreaded. There was little I could do besides wipe some of the black soot from under my eyes. I got out of the car.

‘Can you make it in bare feet?’ He was nodding towards the entrance.

I nodded back. We crossed quickly to the front of the mall and walked into the air-conditioned cool. Alex didn’t put his arm around me this time, though he stayed close. I was super-conscious of how we looked, the shirt not being much of an improvement. I’d gone from looking like a dirty stop-out to looking like a dirty stop-out wearing the shirt of the man I’d stopped out with. Still, I wasn’t going to take it off. Actually, the Vegas line had been kind of genius. That was exactly what we looked like. Two hungover, partied out people on their way to or from Vegas.

We went into the first store we came to, a Gap. Alex strode through it, clearly in a hurry, and I jogged after him. He was in the women’s section picking out T-shirts. He crossed to the jeans and held up a pair, threw them down and picked up another pair, examined them for a second then threw them over his arm. He seemed to remember I was there and looked around.

‘Shoes,’ he said, as though he thought I’d have already figured out that’s what I should have been looking for.

I turned around and saw a rack of flip-flops by the till. I grabbed the first pair in my size and turned back to him. He was standing by the underwear section now.

I hurried over, feeling my cheeks burn. I hoped to God he wasn’t going to estimate my size in this department too, but when I came up to his side he said, ‘You’d better get some things. I’ll be just over there.’

He walked off to the men’s section. I panicked at the few feet he was putting between us and reached out and snatched hold of the first things I could see then scurried over to where he was.

‘Did you get a sweater? You’re going to need something warm.’

Where were we going? Alaska? I turned around again and ran over to the table with the sweaters on. It was the desert, they didn’t sell many sweaters in this store, at least not ones that would keep me warm if I was Arctic-bound. I pulled one from the pile and rushed back to Alex. The woman behind the counter handed Alex some scissors so he could snip the tag attaching my flip-flops. She looked like she would have liked to hand him a whole lot more, like her naked body across the counter. I slipped the shoes on while glaring at her.

Alex took me by the arm and marched me out the store. ‘You hungry?’

It wasn’t so much a question. We were already walking towards a fast food restaurant. I hadn’t thought about it until that point. My stomach had been in so many knots but now he’d said the word it growled like a wolf to the moon. I clutched it and looked up at Alex nodding.

We ordered enough to feed about ten men and a large, black coffee, which Alex piled sugar into. I felt bad at how little sleep he’d had. And on his birthday, which I realised I had totally ruined.

We sat at a table out of the way, near to the fire exit. Alex kept his back to the wall, eating like he didn’t know what he was putting in his mouth, not looking at it once, his eyes too busy moving over the restaurant. I ate until I was full and then leant back in the chair, suddenly feeling the smack of exhaustion hit me full on. I could have put my head on the table right there and fallen into a coma without caring an ounce whether Demos found me. Or the Unit for that matter.

I rested my chin on my hand and watched Alex scanning the room. Circles were starting to shadow his eyes.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.

‘What?’ Alex moved his eyes back to me. The frown line, the same one I usually caused, was back.

‘I still don’t understand why you’re helping me.’

He looked away again, over to the entrance, at a couple of noisy teenagers who had just come in. ‘I told you, I didn’t have a choice.’ His voice was neutral, no anger in it, just stating a simple fact.

I carried on. ‘But I know what you think about people like me.’

He shook his head and a half-smile, slightly sad, pulled at the side of his mouth. ‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

That was true, but last night I hadn’t needed to be telepathic to know how much he despised me. ‘You hate me.’

I waited to see what he would say. He was looking over at the entrance again, as though fully expecting to see Demos breeze through at any moment. After a couple of seconds he turned his head slowly to look at me again. ‘Lila, I don’t hate you.’

I picked up on the slight emphasis he put on the word ‘hate’ as though he was denying the one word while replacing it with another in his mind, like ‘loathe’ or ‘despise’. It was just semantics, though.

I looked at the table and picked up a napkin, twisting it into a rope. ‘Why did you lie?’

He frowned at me. ‘Lie? About what?’

‘About Demos. I know he killed my mother. I know that he’s the one after me. But you told me it wasn’t the same people. That I didn’t need to worry. And you said that Suki had no connection to the people who did it and I know she does.’ An associate sure as hell was a connection.

For a moment, Alex’s brows drew together and he narrowed his eyes at me. I felt myself flushing under his examination. His expression calmed after a moment, his forehead uncreased. ‘I’m guessing you know all this through Key?’

‘Something like that.’ Best leave out the hacking.

He nodded. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you.’

I was thrown a bit by his apology, it was so unexpected. I shook my head as though it didn’t matter. An apology was nice but I wanted to know why he had done it.

He looked at the table for an instant, then back towards the door, then finally back at me.

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I was doing it to keep you safe?’

I raised my eyebrows to indicate no, I wouldn’t believe him.

He sighed. ‘I thought that if you knew the same people who killed your mum were after you, you might try to do something stupid. Like act as bait. Or that you’d run away, thinking we couldn’t protect you. You looked so scared.’

‘You thought I’d run away?’ Before last night, I’d never have run away from Alex. I’d run to him all the way from London in the first place.

‘It has been known, Lila, it’s not that absurd a conclusion to draw.’ He took a sip of coffee.

He had a point, so I pressed my lips together and let him carry on.

‘I thought you deserved to know about Jack and your father – the reason Jack was appearing so unreasonable.’ He placed his hands on the table. ‘But I didn’t think you deserved to know that the same people were after you as killed your mother. Why would you deserve the fear that would cause? When the threat wasn’t even established—’ He ran a hand through his cropped hair then put it back on the table, around his coffee. He looked up at me through his dark gold lashes and he was suddenly my Alex again. The boy who was holding my hand at the funeral, keeping strangers at bay. ‘Lila, I hate seeing you scared or hurt and I wanted to protect you. It’s as simple as that.’

I nodded. He hadn’t used the past tense. He had said I hate seeing you scared. It was enough to spark a flame of hope that he didn’t despise me after all.

‘Why did you leave the bar and run off like that?’

‘Key was there. He told me – he told me what you and Jack do for a living.’

I didn’t need to tell him that the deciding factor was not that but seeing him with Rachel.

Alex was glaring at me. ‘What did Key tell you?’

I started tearing the napkin into little pieces and scattering them over the table. ‘That the Unit’s mission was to hunt down people like me and that they – that they disappeared and didn’t come back once you caught them.’

‘How does he know that?’ Alex said under his breath.

I shot back in my seat. If I’d wanted a confirmation about what the Unit was doing, here it was.

When we got outside, Alex became quiet. He scanned the car park several times before stepping out of the shadows by the entrance. He took my hand this time, pulling me along behind him. I was holding the shopping and he had his other hand resting behind his back on his gun. My heart was racing; coming outside again felt like being a rabbit out of a hole.

We got back to the Toyota and I waited for him to unlock the door, bouncing on the balls of my feet. But Alex didn’t unlock the doors, he just opened the trunk, took the holdall out, then shut it again.

‘Come on,’ he said.

We walked several rows down and stopped by a brand new black Lexus. I hoped that we were just admiring it but I had a sinking feeling I knew what he was about to do. He slipped down the side of the car, pushing me ahead of him. My eyes darted around the car park to see if anyone was coming, adrenaline starting to pump. Alex stayed as cool as ice. In one fluid movement he pulled something out of the holdall and held it against the key lock. The thing in his hand beeped and the electric locks on the car flipped up.

He looked at me and tilted his head. ‘Coming?’

I swallowed, looked around me again and jumped into the passenger seat which he was holding open. He walked quickly around to the other side, threw the bags into the back and got in. The same machine, held by the ignition, switched the engine on. I stared at him in disbelief as we swung out of the car park, and slid down in my seat as far as I could go. It wasn’t enough that we had Demos and the Unit after us, Alex had to bring the police into the equation too?