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If anyone would have defended Emmett’s innocence, it would have been me. With me gone, Theo wouldn’t have had to worry about Emmett anymore, whether the charges stuck or not. Everyone else would have thought he was guilty. He had the most motive for killing Malcolm after all. Not only would killing me have secured Emmett’s fate no matter what the courts decided, it would have given him sympathy from my mom and possibly the rest of the town.
Theo already managed to drive at least a little bit of a wedge between my mom and Brendan. If something tragic like my death happened, would it bring my mom and Theo back together?
I feel myself giving into it all more and more. I feel a whimper in my chest, all of my rattling fears and anxieties. I don’t know who to believe. I study Emmett from the backseat, or what I can see of him anyway. I focus in on all of our times together, trying to convince myself that he could be telling the truth. I remember his smell, the feeling is his skin, and the sound of his voice against my ear. I love him, so I have to believe him, right?
Then I remember the crashing, crumbling feeling that came with Theo’s side of the story in my backyard. All of that made perfect sense too and I felt so stupid for not seeing it sooner. I ask myself what I really know. I know next to nothing about Theo, really, beyond my suspicions of him being a lying, manipulative snake. But Emmett…I’ve seen Emmett’s destruction firsthand and I’ve been the victim of it more than once.
If Emmett was really bad, how could he have gone without hurting me for so long? He has made every possible effort to prove himself to me ever since he was freed from his father. It’d make sense that all the violence and rage stemmed from the pressure of the Elites, just like he said it did. And even his own family doubted his ability to do the necessary evil required of whoever ran Jameson, both the company and the town.
“What do you think, Ophelia?” he asks suddenly. “We can try to prove this. I can try to find something to make you believe me, but I don’t want to let you go until I know you’ll at least give me a chance.”
Won’t let me go. The words trigger another flood of memories. The other day when he almost didn’t stop when I asked him to. The car. Being trapped in it with him.
“What were you going to do?” I ask, my throat closing up as I start to cry.
“What do you mean?”
“When I first came here,” I sob. “That time I grabbed the steering wheel and we crashed into the light post. What were you going to do? You had those things in your backseat. The rope, the gloves. None of the other Elites were around. If I hadn’t crashed the car…what would you have done to me?”
I collapse back down against the seat, completely overwhelmed with uncertainty and fear. All the trauma of Jameson and everything Emmett has done to me. My shame of believing in him and trying to let myself love him. He’s rambling
off an explanation from the front seat, but I can’t even hear him. My brain shuts down and won’t take in a single word of it.
“Do you hear me!?” he pleads. “Ophelia! Do you hear me!?”
“Just stop,” I whisper, clutching my ears and pulling at my hair. I don’t know if I’m talking to him or myself. I just know I’m tired and feel like I can’t take another second of this. He keeps calling out for me, begging me to listen. Begging me to believe him. “Stop!” I scream again.
A set of headlights slice into my piercing scream. They back at us through all of the mirrors in the car, blinding us. I hear Emmett swear followed by the jolting crash of something ramming into the back of the car. We swerve, but he straightens out and tries to drive faster. Then another crash, and another. Until finally, the car flies off the road.
28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The crash snaps me from my state of shock, and I am suddenly impossibly alert. I shoot straight up and see Emmett shaking his head.
“You’re bleeding,” I announce as I notice the red stream coming down his forehead. My voice is frighteningly calm, almost sounding foreign to me.
He shakes his head again, and lightly touches his fingers to the gash on his forehead. We both jump as his car door flies up, revealing a figure crouching down in the darkness. Before I can see who it is, a bright light flashes right in our eyes. I wince and look away, only turning back when my car door flies open too.
Then I see the all too familiar sight of a gun barrel pointing straight at me. Before I can react, a hand reaches towards me. I squirm for the door, but a searing pain burns into my scalp. Another familiar feeling. My hair being pulled. I’m drug from the car. I kick, but my throat is still too dry, preventing me from screaming even though that’s exactly what I’m doing on the inside.
I’m shoved forward into the darkness. I want to run, but I feel the cold pistol push into the back of my head. Then Emmett is shoved next to me.
“Start walking,” a man’s voice demands from behind. It’s familiar, but disguised by an eerie, primal rage.
We shuffle forward into the night, barely able to see where we’re walking. The man shines his light onto our path, but it’s shaky and hard to follow. Then it starts to rain, and as the light bounces off of the drops that fall into our eyes, it’s even more impossible to see where we’re going. We walk like that for what feels like a mile before finally being pushed up to a tall, chain-link fence lined with barbed wire across the top.
The man’s hand reaches around me, pulling at an opening near the top of the fence. He forces it down and shoves me through. I quickly decide that I’ll try to run as soon as I’m on the other side, but I’m hit with the fear of being shot for trying. The instinctual hesitation causes me to trip. I fall flat into the muddy ground, sinking down into the wet earth with a big splash that covers me in thick, dark sludge. I feel a sharp, cold pain to my shin as it catches on the fence.
I scream as I’m lifted back up into the air, being pulled by my hair again which is now drenched from the pouring rain. Once I’m forced all the way over to the other side of the fence, Emmett’s body crashes into me from behind, nearly knocking me over again. I try to turn around and make an attempt at identifying our assailant, but his bright light, along with the downpour and the pitch-black night, keeps me from being able to see his face.
Big tire tracks begin disappearing from the ground as they rapidly fill up with water, turning to slush as we’re pushed through them. Our feet sink more and more with each step, causing us to stumble every few feet. We come to rows of broken-down vehicles with dirty windows and raised hoods with exposed wires and hoses poking out of the rusted engines. I feel hard pieces of debris that litter the ground beneath my shoe, but they all sink into the mud and puddles as we traipse through.
We’re pushed on through the vanishing roads that weave through mounds of scrap. The man keeps shoving the gun back into our skulls every so often to remind us of the threat. My sense of smell heightens with my lack of sight. The drenched air is filled with wet earth, motor oil, grease, gas, and rusting metal. There’s a pungent smokey taste seeping onto my tongue from the polluted smell.
Emmett hisses and winces suddenly, holding up his hand to reveal another bloody gash from something he’s scraped up against in the darkness. The man doesn’t let us top, and everything around us continues flooding at an alarming rate.
I take another step forward and shriek at the emptiness beneath my foot. I nearly topple forward and am saved at the last minute by a quick tug to the back of my hoodie. I’m flung back just enough to keep from sliding off the edge of a steep drop that overlooks a pit of rusty, shredded cars. The sharp, twisted metal gleams, and I immediately know that if I had fallen, I would have died in the razor-sharp sea of crushed vehicles. I whimper through my labored breaths as I watch the floodwaters rise around the cars. Whoever goes down there is either impaled or drowns. And as more water rushes past, forming a mudslide, I feel dangerously close to sliding in.
