I smile at him. “Hasn’t anyone told you?” I raise my knife and slam it into his shoulder through the opening. “I’m never unarmed.”
Ezio cries out in pain. I expected him to bring the van to a stop but no, I’m not that lucky.
He hits the accelerator, and swerves the vehicle even harder. I stumble back and trip over Samantha.
I think I hear Blaze and Asch shouting. Somebody is honking at us.
“Watch out, watch out!” Samantha yells.
Ezio drives the van off the road.
For a split second, I float.
It’s a strange sensation, the entire van rotating around me. Samantha’s mouth is open in a scream, but I don’t hear her. Her blonde hair fans out around her, framing her face like a halo.
Then we land, and pain courses through me as I get slammed from side to side while the van slides down the ravine or whatever fucking stupid place Ezio decided to drive us off to.
“You suck!” I shout at him. “You’d rather kill yourself than let us go?”
He doesn’t answer, and I wonder if that means he’s concussed or dead.
I should have stabbed him in the neck, but, again, I did not expect him to decide todrive us off a cliff.
The van crashes into something that knocks the doors open, but we’re still moving. I hold onto the chains, wishing this thing had seatbelts like any fucking normal car. The ones not designed to transport unwilling sex slaves.
I guess the ‘slave’ part implies ‘unwilling.’
Samantha keeps screaming, until the van finally, finally, stops moving.
My chest keeps stabbing me.
Samantha is clutching the side of one of the benches for dear life, and I see her mouth open in another scream as she looks back behind us.
I follow her gaze, seeing that the doors are wide open now. It would be a relief if we weren’t hanging over the edge of a ravine. There’s enough room for us to get out, but we’re going to have to move quickly.
I take a shaky step. The van groans and shudders.
Yeah, we have to moveveryquickly.
“Come on,” I say. “We have to get out of here before the entire van drops again.”
Samantha shakes her head and clings to the bench. “I can’t,” she chokes out. “I can’t.”
“You can,” I tell her firmly.
She lets out a quiet sob, but I see it when she starts to gather her courage. “I… Okay,” she whispers, but she looks back up at the front of the van. “What…”
I look just in time to see Ezio, with his bloody shoulder and my knife still lodged in it, open the driver side door and get out.
The entire van rattles even harder, and it moves forward a few inches.
Samantha’s screeching pierces my chest to meet the knives on the other side.
“Move, now!” I shout, jumping out the back of the van to land on the edge of the cliff. I scramble back enough to see Ezio pushing the van from the other side. “No!” I take a step toward him?—
“Pandora! Pandora, help, help!” Samantha yells.
I glance back. Samantha is holding onto the side of the van door, dangling over the side of the ravine.
