Page 90 of Twisted Elites

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t lie to me!” he roared.

Hopeless, desperate tears ran down my cheeks. “If you explain everything to the police, they’ll understand. There’s a defense called diminished responsibility, and—”

“I’m not mental,” he snapped.

“Corrine’s obsession with Prakash affected you more than you realize.”

He put his foot on the accelerator, lurching the Aston Martin forward. “Did you ever watch Thelma and Louise?”

My heart stopped.

My stomach plummeted.

My fingers unhooked the seatbelt.

This was the end.

Chapter 23

What happened next was difficult to describe, but if I imagined my mental state as a clock face, twelve o’clock would be calm, six would be fear, nine would be terror, and eleven would be blind, useless panic.

Cormac sped toward a hairpin turn, bellowing something about meeting Corrine. With each accelerating second, the wind roared louder in my ears to the point where Cormac’s rantings became a dull roar.

As we approached certain death, my fear notched up from nine to ten to eleven.

Then it dialed forward to twelve.

I didn’t know how things worked after a person died, but if there was an afterlife of any kind, there was no fucking way in hell I would let myself be shackled to Cormac. With the belt no longer restricting my movements, I sprang out from my seat and jumped.

Jumped a split second before the Aston Martin leaped off the mountainside.

I became weightless for a heartbeat while velocity warred with gravity. Pushing aside Newton’s laws of motion, I cradled my head in my hands for the inevitable landing. It came with a painful thud, a roll, a crunch, and then darkness.

* * *

The throbbing in my head was nothing compared to the pain searing down my left side. My arm was either broken, dislocated, or shattered into several pieces. It hurt so much, I couldn’t tell the difference. My left hip also throbbed in time with my head.

“Willow?” A voice echoed through my empty skull. “My name’s Wesley, and I’m a paramedic. You’ve had a nasty accident, but you’ll be okay.”

“Ark?” My throat was so dry, I could barely form words. From the jerky movements and slight incline of the smooth surface beneath my body, I guessed I was on a stretcher being carried up the mountain.

“How is she?” shouted Sebastian’s voice.

“Stand back,” said someone else.

“Willow!” Leopold’s voice broke.

I cracked my eyes open to find a female paramedic staring down at me, her blonde hair backlit by the sun. “M-my phone.”

Her face morphed into a frown. “Don’t worry, it’s probably in the car you jumped out of. I’ll tell one of the officers to fetch it for you later.”

“No.” A flash of pain made me squeeze my eyes shut. I tried to raise my right arm, but it had been secured with a strap. “Down my top.”

* * *

Something squeezed my right arm so tight, it felt like it would burst. My eyes snapped open. I lay in a hospital bed, and the curtains were drawn. Hopefully, this didn’t mean that the staff thought I’d somehow contributed to my situation. Jumping out of a moving car was an act of self-preservation, not recklessness.