AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Daphne rolls across the road. Her snow things are shadowy, muted colors. Don’t lay still. Please, don’t lay still. Get up, get up, get up.
She stumbles upright, the angle of her hands wrong. They’ve tied her up.
“Daphne’s out of the van. She fell out of the back doors.” Brake lights. “They’re stopping. No grip on the ice.” The van fishtails. Daphne doesn’t have her balance. She’s hurt. From the men or the road or both. Her face flashes white in my headlights, and then she sprints for the shoulder. “She’s running.”
Her hood came off when she landed on the asphalt. Her hat, too. Daphne’s dark hair streams behind her as the glow from the brake lights expands to cover everything.
She’s off the road. On clean, white snow. The van tilts sideways over both lanes. Its wheels spin. They’ll be moving again soon. Or one of them will decide to climb out and chase her. I can’t give them time to plan.
My mind clears. Stars hang like crystals in the sky. Christ, it’s beautiful. The world, I mean. It’s safer when it looks like art, but when it’s clear like this, when it reminds me of Daphne, it’s gorgeous.
“I’m going to hit them.”
“Hit them with what?” Leo’s horrified.
“With my SUV. The van’s stuck in the middle of the road, and I’m not letting them out. They’re not going to get away with it. You should hurry. And if you can find my phone, call my brothers.” I’m going faster than I assumed. If I press the brake now, I don’t think I’ll stop. It might make things worse. I need to hit them head on at full speed. At the very least, it will stun them. Cause confusion. If I’m lucky it’ll disable the van. If there is a God, perhaps the men inside will die.
“Jesus Christ. Emerson, don’t.”
“Tell Daphne I love her.”
His argument is lost to a shrill whine in my head, like a whistle, like an alarm going off inside a museum. I catch tell her you love her yourself, motherfucker and it’s ironic, isn’t it? I flirted with death many times before I met Daphne. I worried so much about those moments before impact, before I hit the ground, before the dark closed in. I didn’t want to die in a panic. Now, all I can feel is the sweet ache of how much I love her.
My little painter.
The distance between my SUV and the van halves, then halves again. My body tries to save me. It pummels me with instructions that I ignore, one by one. I dismiss every sense of safety and rightness and keep my foot off the brake. My toe comes up off the gas. My left foot comes up off the floor. It tries desperately to stop the door from opening.
Instead, I push down harder. Accelerate faster. Until the distance is nothing. Until the distance is gone.
The crunch of metal surrounds me, rattling my skull, my teeth. Something punches my chest. Seatbelt and airbag. My lungs have come loose. It takes three tries to get a breath. Fuck, that was a hard hit. A door kicked in. A fist through my ribs.
I wrench the door open and climb out of the car. I can’t hear a fucking thing. There’s a quiet shouting from the van, or from my car, I can’t tell which.
I can’t see her.
Dragging footprints lead from the road to the trees.
Black branches shoot up to the stars, tangling around one another. Thorns carve through the bark. The adrenaline from the crash—I hit the van with my SUV, holy fuck, holy Christ—pours into every vein, panic along with it. Those woods are dangerous. Anything could happen in the dark. A hundred doors splinter and let light in. Gray pushes into my vision and I press at my eyes, willing it away. Not going to black out. Not now.
My little painter is in those branches and thorns, running for her life.
She’s my life. And I’m not letting her go.
