Free Surrender by Stephanie Tyler Page B

calf.
    “Get to the van!” Marnie called, and Grace ran, Carmen now behind her. At some point, Carmen must’ve run back to the apartment to grab her daughter and a bag she’d packed.
    Marnie got behind the wheel, and in seconds, they were flying down the road.
    Grace hadn’t heard any sirens, which wasn’t unusual for this area. None of the neighbors liked or trusted the police enough to call them, even when they were in serious danger.
    Grace had escaped from hell, and now she consistently put herself in the line of fire of her own free will in order to make sure no woman or child suffered for longer than they had to. Tonight, Carmen had gotten out of her apartment with her most precious possession, her five-year-old daughter, a small tote and a little money and into a van with a woman she’d never met who would drive her to salvation.
    Carmen would eventually settle somewhere. Grace would never know where, because it was safer for all of them that way, but she liked to imagine that all those women and children had a great life, that the women remarried and the kids grew up happy and healthy and unaffected by anything they’d seen in their early years.
    She knew, according to the statistics Marnie told her, that many of the women ended up with another abusive partner, because that was all they knew.
    Now Grace held her breath as she heard Marnie calling to her, waited through the deafening silence until the old truck drove away and exhaled when no shots followed. Marnie was safe and Grace would do anything to keep her that way.
    And then Dare was slamming back in the house, using a candle low on the table so the light wouldn’t be seen from the street, especially when he pulled down the blackout shade.
    He obviously knew this place as well as she did.
    “Where were you tonight?” he demanded now.
    “Right where you found me.” She paused. “Thank you for not shooting my friend.”
    With that, he unlocked the cuffs and held her phone out to her. “Marnie keeps calling and texting. She wants to know if you’re okay—if you’re safe. Who’s after you?”
    “No one you’d know.”
    “You’d be surprised who I know,” he told her, his voice edging toward dangerously low. It sent a wave of pure panic through her nervous system. She’d been through too much tonight all ready. Her body hadn’t come down from the earlier scuffle with a madman, and now she was confronted by her past, ready to rise up and drag her all the way back in with sharp claws and a biting sting that she’d never get used to.
    “I used to do dangerous things. Take bad risks after Darius and Adele rescued me, because I could. They didn’t try to stop me, like they knew it had to work itself out of me, like a fever.” The weight of the admission still hung on her, though Dare didn’t seem to be judging her. But he’d been trained well—who knew what lay behind his poker face?
    “I still do them,” he muttered. His hair dropped over his bare shoulders, chest glistened, jeans stuck to his hard lower body, molded there. He’d been barefoot when he’d run out with the gun.
    “Me too,” she whispered, talking back the recent lie. He seemed to approve, clicked the safety, but he held on to the gun. He still had that predatory look in his eyes. He was Darius’s son, but he looked nothing like him.
    She stared around the old cabin where she’d once been permitted to roam freely. Her wrists ached, but she ignored the pain in favor of continuing to study the man who could hold her fate in his hands. Wondered how much to reveal.
    She and Darius had talked about Dare a bit, but Darius had always said he’d never told his son what he had to do, that the boy had to follow his own conscience in order to be any kind of good man.
    She believed Dare was a good man . . . or else there was some kind of hoodoo magic he was dabbling in, because her body wanted to surrender to him, not fight him.
    The jolt of pleasure at that thought threw her