Hans (Alliance #4)

I bite down on the completely inappropriate urge to laugh.

A man with a basement full of guns and camera angles of my house, who also keeps body bags in his truck, has to be a red flag. Right?

I stay turned in my seat, my eyes glued to where I last saw Hans.

If he’s running into the backyard withthat, then the man must be dead.

On cue, Hans reappears with anoccupiedman-sized bag slung over his shoulder.

It hasn’t even been a minute.

He must be good at bagging bodies.

Hans stops at the back of the truck and bends forward with a heft of his shoulder, causing the body to thud into the truck bed.

The impact reverberates through the vehicle, and my mouth pulls into a frown.

Ew.

Hans slams the tailgate back into place, then pulls a retractable cover across the top of the truck bed, blocking anyone’s view of what’s inside.

He opens his door, but before getting back into the truck, he takes a little bottle of hand sanitizer out of the pocket in his door and slathers his hands with it.

“Safety first,” I try to joke.

Hans drops the bottle back into the pocket, then climbs in. “Can never be too careful.”

“From the number of scars you have, I’m guessing you learned that the hard way.” I clamp my mouth shut, but Hans just lifts a shoulder.

“The hard lessons are the ones you usually heed more.”

I think about that and have to agree.

Hans drives us off our street, through our little neighborhood, and toward the main highway.

“So…” I drag the word out. “Is there a reason we’re taking the corpse on a joy ride? Do cops like delivery service on murder victims?”

“We’re not involving the cops.”

His words shouldn’t bring me such relief, but I don’t want to spend my life in prison for accidentally killing someone.

“But what if people ask?—”

Hans is shaking his head before I finish. “Nothing happened for them to ask about.”

“But—”

“Nothing happened, Cassandra. No one died in your yard. You want to talk about it, we can talk about it. But you only talk to me, okay?”

I roll my lips together, then nod. “Okay.”

“Far as the world is concerned, all that happened was you came over to my place, and we decided to go to a hotel for the night.”

“Hotel?”

Hans turns us off the highway and onto a side road. “We need a little space from Holly Court.”

I don’t think I’ve been down this road, and from the looks of it, there’s not much out here.