could already hear him pulling his boots on. “I’m calling Maria right now.”
Maria’s his wife. Twenty-two years a social worker, most of them in child protective services. If there was one human being on the planet who’d know exactly how to handle two kids running from a man like Rourke, who’d know how to do it so the system protected them instead of chewing them up, it was Maria.
I swung my leg over the Road King. The old engine caught warm and steady on the first turn, that deep heartbeat sound, and I saw Eli’s face turn toward it in the front seat of the Honda, eyes going wide over the collar of my jacket.
“Stay close,” I told Tasha through her cracked window. “Anything happens, anything at all, you lean on that horn and don’t let up. I’ll be back to you before you finish honking.”
We
