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I look down at the speedometer. We’re going 200. I sink my foot into the pedal, watching as it slowly ticks up. There’s a lightness that comes with it, and I suddenly remember why I used to drive so much to clear my head when I was younger.
“Alex, I don’t like this,” Alize says. “You’re going too fast.”
I hear her, but it doesn’t matter to me. Not when we’re in a hell of her own making. She shouldn’t have lied to me. She shouldn’t have kept the truth from me when she knew it. I start to slip away again, back into my own mind.
And with the thoughts come all the discrepancies. She was always so fucking shifty whenever the topic of her father came up, especially recently. She would never answer my questions directly, even getting upset when I wanted clarity.
Meanwhile, I’ve been an open book.
I bared my soul to her, and she keptthisfrom me.
“Give me your phone.”
My voice surprises even me. It’s sharp, loud, clipped. I take my eyes off the road, watching the confusion and fear twisting her features. There’s hardly any light coming into the cabin, but in the faint glimmer, I can see the horror written all over her face.
She looks like a scared little mouse, backed into a corner.
“What? Why?” she says, clutching her tiny purse closer to her body.
“I said, give me your fucking phone.”
“No,” she says.
I accelerate even more. I take one hand off the steering wheel and pull my gun out of my waistband. Her eyes flash to it, and I can see the moment she remembers what happened on the plane.
“This one is loaded,” I shout. “Give me your phone, Alize.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” she shouts back. “Why are you acting like this? I’m not giving you my phone while you’re going nearly 300.”
My eyes flick back to the road then. We’re barreling down the lonely road so fast I can’t really tell where we are on the journey. I can’t fucking do what I want to do to Alize,andmake sure we don’t crash and explode into a fiery wreck.
And as much as I fucking hate her right now,Ineed to be alive if I’m going to put a bullet through her father’s skull for what he did to my mum. So I slow down. I retreat into my mind at that moment too, turning over what Lev said to me.
Thanks to my speeding, we get to the estate quickly.
By the time I pull the car into the garage, Alize is visibly shaking. But she’s holding the gun I gave her, eyeing me like she thinks she’ll be able to do something tomewith it. In hindsight, maybe it was a bad idea to give her a gun.
“What are you going to do with that?” I ask, running my tongue along my teeth. “You don’t have the guts to kill me, and you know it.”
She still aims it at me.
Her hands are shaking so much the barrel of the gun trembles. Her eyes are wet, her jaw clenched. My own heart squeezes like she’s got it between her teeth, and there’s so little air in this tiny cabin. Not enough to stop me from feeling like I’m choking on something invisible.
I hate myself. I hate her.
I hate the fucking universe for playing this sick joke on me, for having me fall in love with the daughter of my mum’s killer. This–thisis wrong.
“Shoot me,” I whisper, watching as she tightens her grip on the gun. Her finger hovers on the trigger. “You’ve already ripped my heart out of my chest, I doubt there’s anything worse you can do to me now.”
Her eyebrows lower over her hazel eyes, and the anger starts to rip through her sadness. How did I miss this about her? Alize likes to act like she’s weak, innocent—easy to break. But she never breaks. No, shealwaysgets what she wants.
We’re here, aren’t we?
We’reengaged,aren’t we?
Even though I never pictured myself here.
But what should I have expected when she threatened to kill herself to get me to leave her alone? She’s manipulative but saves her moments for when it really matters.
