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of SUVs, Mercedeses, and BMWs, he didn’t have any trouble finding his car. Roxanne was the only Sublime Green 1971 Dodge Challenger R/T in the lot, probably in the whole damn state, the only cruise missile packing a 426-cubic-inch Hemi and a set of Hooker headers under the hood. She was pure American muscle from her rubber to the pair of wide black stripes racing over her body from her nose to her tail, and he would have bet her pink slip that she was the only thing in the lot that could do a quarter mile in under twelve seconds.
    Holding Katya tightly to his side, he let her feet drop to the ground as he jimmied his key into Roxanne’s passenger door lock.
    “My head,” she moaned into the front of his jacket, her hand cradling her forehead. She was slumped against him.
    He gave her a quick once-over and didn’t see any blood or scrapes.
    “You’re okay,” he said, and hoped to hell it was true.
    Regardless, he had her in the car, strapped into her seat, and was dropping himself behind Roxanne’s steering wheel in under thirty seconds—well ahead of the pack.
    As a getaway, this one was looking good. Dylan was still out there somewhere, but Dylan could take care of himself, and in far more dangerous situations.
    If he was worried about anybody, it was still Kid, waiting it out in Colombia, waiting for J.T.’s body to come out of the jungle. Hawkins should never have left him. Never.
    Shit.
He fired up the 426 Hemi, and Roxanne roared to life, shaking like a wet bitch and growling deep in her throat.
    Well, he had left Kid, following orders, and he’d ended up here with Katya Dekker, and sure as hell, enough bad crap had come down that he’d ended up saving her—again.
    Hell. He slid Roxanne into first gear and power-shifted his way up to a rubber-burning launch out of the parking lot onto York Street. By the time he hit fourth, the Botanic Gardens were no more than a faintly lit memory in Roxanne’s rearview, and they were cruising for the freeway at forty over the limit, punching lights and leaving a trail of smoke.

C HAPTER
    3

    K ATYA DIDN’T KNOW which was her most serious problem: the utter depth of her own stupidity, the number of G-forces pushing her back into the bucket seat of the rocket she was riding, or Christian Hawkins. It looked pretty much like a toss-up to her. Any of the three could prove to be lethal.
    Her pulse was racing like a freight train.
    It was the car that had cleared her brain, the sound of it, the feel of it. She’d lived her whole life gliding along the world’s roads in her mother’s Cadillacs, her father’s Town Cars, her own little Mercedes when she’d hit sixteen, and a never-ending series of boyfriends’ Beemers, Hondas, and SUVs. But at eighteen she’d tasted power, the bone-shaking, body-trembling, pulse-pounding power of more cubic inches than any sane underwriter would insure. The night Hawkins had pulled her out of the middle of a drunken fraternity-boy brawl in LoDo, he’d taken her home in the kind of car that put the bad in badass. “Get in the car, princess” had been his first words to her, spoken as he’d stood between her and the unruly group of young men who only minutes before she had called her friends—before they’d decided the night’s game would be to see who could get a piece of Katya’s prom dress, before the game had degenerated into getting a piece of Katya, before Jonathan had pulled out a knife to cut off a piece of pink tulle and, in his drunken clumsiness, cut her.
    It had been incredibly stupid to get in a strange boy’s car that night, a fact she’d been too hurt and frightened to assimilate until he’d gotten in with her and started the engine. She’d never been in a car that came to life in every metallic molecule all at once, growling and shaking, and she hadn’t been in one since—until tonight.
    She’d thought it was Alex covering her as she lay facedown on the lawn, stunned by the first explosion. She’d thought it