Return of the Assassin (All the King's Men) Read Free Page B

a vicious swipe of her arm. "Do I look fucking okay, Trev? Huh?" She shouldn't have yelled at him, but right now she was about to implode, and she still trembled like a wet dog in the snow as adrenaline broke through her system. "Shit!"
    Trevor ignored her outburst and gunned the SUV down a winding road that circled one of the hundred or so lakes in the area. Sometimes South Florida seemed like one big lake with islands all around. "We've got to get out of here."
    With Dacians on their ass, the safest thing to do was to hightail it out of town for a while and make it harder for them to follow. And based on Trev's conversation with Colby, hightailing it involved flying.
    "Where are we going?" she said as she wrung her hands, the attack beginning to wane. Her foot bounced on the floorboard like she was playing "Chopsticks" on a hi-hat.
    He shrugged. "I don't care. Anywhere but here. Any suggestions?"
    She stared down at her shaking hands. All this had started in Chicago. Whether Malek was the catalyst or not, her panic attacks started after she left Chicago. This was her chance to man up, go back, face the situation, and be the hard-ass she had been trained to be. And maybe going back would finally put an end to the incessant e-mails she kept getting from some jackass named Micah, who worked at AKM. Micah wanted her to return to Chicago, too, and she could only imagine it was because Malek had fallen into mated male suffering. But she refused to reply.
    To be honest, she was surprised no one had come after her, yet. Mated males didn't do well without their mates, and the king's law went to exceptional lengths to protect them, even if it meant hunting down a female and dragging her kicking and screaming back to her mate. Not that many females resisted a mate's call. Statistics would probably show that 99.99 percent didn't. Gina just happened to be in that .01 percent that did.
    The agony must be unreal for him. One more layer of guilt wrapped around her as she thought of what Malek could be going through right now without her.
    Damn it, she didn't need to develop a conscience. She didn't want another mate. Period. End of story. Malek would just have to find a way to cope…the same way she had after dealing Armand the eviction notice from her life…because that shit hadn't been easy, and she wasn't going back there. Ever.
    Unfortunately, Malek had already reawakened her despair with his damn declaration that he had mated her. Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut? Because then she wouldn't be in such a mess now. She wouldn't know he had mated her, and she wouldn't be harboring even more guilt than she already was.
    She liked Malek. He seemed different. Sweet. That was why her conscience ate at her now. Malek didn't deserve to be in such a pickle, suffering God only knew what agony, because of her. He had said that day in her cell that he wasn't worthy of her. Ha! He got it backward, because she wasn't worthy of him. If only he knew the truth, he would see that mating her was a mistake, and maybe that would be enough to ease the suffering and help him heal from her absence and go on without her.
    She knew most males weren't like Armand. But enduring such violent trauma at Armand's hands had left her shattered and unable to fathom ever getting that close to a male again. The thought that history would repeat if she took another mate was irrational, because Armand was the exception, not the rule. But she couldn't help herself. Not after all she suffered. Armand had been like an IED she stepped on at the side of the road…only all the damage from the blast was on the inside, and she had the PTSD to prove it.
    Still, desperation made people do strange things, and she was desperate for these mind-numbing anxiety attacks to stop before they killed her. Like it or not, only one solution seemed evident. She needed to go back to the source. To Malek. So she could face him and put an end to his fantasy that they were supposed to spend