Heat rolls off him in waves that I can feel from three feet away, pushing back the cold, warming my numb fingers without him laying a hand on me.
“You are so warm,” I hear myself say, and I have no idea where the words came from.
He stares at me. Not at my body. At my face, into my eyes, past them, searching for something I can’t name with an intensity that makes me forget there are two paralyzed men at our feet and a gun in my hand.
“It is my Bouda,” he says. His voice is deep, carrying an accent I can’t place. “We do not like the cold.”
“Huh?”
“Are you hurt?” He asks me.
Before I can answer, the store door slams open. The clerk is standing there with a rifle pointed at the stranger.
“You disgusting fucking shifter!” He charges the weapon. “You’re not ruining my store!”
The stranger goes still. His gaze moves from me to the rifle, and his whole face changes.
“Poachers,” he says.
“Poachers?” That doesn’t make sense. The store owner isn’t a poacher. He’s some ignorant radical with a gun and too much hate in his mouth. But he called the stranger a shifter, which means he is one. After what I just saw, that tracks. Normal people don’t cackle and shut down two grown men with sound. Normal people don’t stand barefoot in a blizzard with steam pouring off their skin.
The owner raises the rifle. The stranger moves.
He’s around me before I can blink, crouching low, and his hands close around the undercarriage of my Lexus.
“Oh no, wait!” I grab for his arm but I’m too late. “What the hell are you doing?”
He lifts my car off the ground like it’s nothing. The muscles in his arms flex hard, veins standing out against the tattoos, and he straightens up with my entire vehicle over his head. Then he throws it.
I scream as my Lexus sails through the air. The owner fires but the shot goes wide, and the car slams into him and keeps going, crashing through the glass storefront in an explosion of metal and brick and fluorescent light. I stand there with my mouth open. My car is gone, half buried in the gas station.
I turn to the stranger. He’s looking at me with a face I can’t read, almost innocent, genuinely confused about why I’m upset.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“He was going to hurt you.” He says it like that explains everything, like throwing a car through a building is a perfectly reasonable response to a man with a rifle. “You are my new queen.”
Then he drops to one knee in the snow and bows his head.
I stare at the top of his head, at the steam rising off his shoulders, at the two frozen men on the ground, at the wreckage of my car sticking out of the gas station like a battering ram punched through the front wall.
“Fuck this.”
I turn and run. My boots slip on the ice but I keep going, arms pumping, putting as much distance between me and this man as the night will give me.
I should’ve kept my Black ass at home tonight. Should’ve stayed in bed, let the power get cut off, eaten cold spaghetti in the dark. Anything would have been better than this. I am so done with all of it.