My hand stung, but I didn’t care, and then I gasped as another realization hit me.
“All those accidents… all those times… that was you wasn’t it? That was you all along, trying to kill me!”
His jaw clenched again and he refused to look me in the eye, and I knew. I knew I was right. All those times I thought we were getting closer, all those times we spent together that I thought meant something really hadn’t.
The things I replayed in my head when I lay in bed at night hadn’t been romantic. They were attempted murder.
Why had I never seen a vision of this? Of all things, why couldn’t I have seen this?
“Kill me now,” I said low, the words sounding as raw as my throat felt.
This earned me a glance.
“If you want me dead so bad, kill me now.”
I saw his hand flex on the gearshift. I could taste the temptation in the tiny space between us. He really wanted to kill me…
I punched him in the shoulder, taking us both off guard. I didn’t stop hitting him. I kept at it, punching, hurling my fists as hard as I could, landing blows wherever allowed.
“Piper, stop it!” he said, turning, grabbing both my wrists and squeezing. He was breathing hard and his chest was rising and falling rapidly. The temperature in the car was intense from my anger and the fact we never turned down the heat. But as soon as he grabbed me and our eyes collided, everything around us kind of slowed down…
In his eyes I saw a flash of regret and a flash of determination. I didn’t know which was stronger and I never got the chance to ask.
Because the minute he took his hands off the steering wheel to grab me, he lost control of the car.
It fishtailed, spinning us in circles until we slammed against a dense patch of frozen trees, bouncing off and hurtling farther away from the road, only to crash into another patch of trees. When the car finally came to a halt, a large mass of snow fell from the tree we’d just rammed and fell onto the hood, breaking the already cracked windshield. Glass rained down upon us and then everything fell still.
Chapter Fifty-One
“Realization - The act of realizing or the condition of being realized.”
Dex
I blinked open my eyes, aware of stinging pain in my face and hands. Memories of Piper hitting me and of the pain in her eyes came over me. If those weren’t hard enough, I was assaulted with even more memories of my car going out of control, the panic of not being able to do anything as we hurtled toward the trees and of the realization we were going to die.
Those memories were like a bucket of cold water to my fog and I was instantly alert, sitting up and turning toward Piper.
I never thought anything would be worse than the feeling of being recalled.
There was.
Seeing Charming over her with blood on his face and a wild look in his eyes had been shattering. I felt horrified and broken apart looking down at Piper—seeing her bruises, hearing her gasp for air.
How had things come to this? How did my basic life on the streets, my daily struggle to survive turn into this?
In the seat next to me, she was bleeding and battered and her still form unleashed a panicked frenzy within me. This was the closest I’d ever come to actually killing her and all I could think about was what I could do to make sure she didn’t die.
It was then I realized with absolute clarity that I wasn’t going to kill this girl.
I couldn’t.
I reached across the seat and grasped her gently. Her head rolled backward revealing deep purple rings around her neck and various shallow, bleeding cuts in her face. No, I wasn’t going to kill her, but the idea of killing Charming was very, very appealing.
“Piper,” I said, my voice shaky and weak. “Piper, please wake up.”
There was no sound, no response, and a desperate sound ripped out of me as I released her and climbed through the destroyed car, cutting myself on jagged pieces of broken glass to get closer to her. I was practically in her seat when I lowered my ear to her chest to listen for her heart beat.
It was there and her chest rose and fell with air.
