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Until a car suddenly sped up behind us.
Again, I didn’t think anything of it right away. People drove like idiots all the time.
Paranoid, I took the next turn.
Then the next.
And that was the general rule, right? Take two sudden turns and if someone is still behind you, they are likely following you.
“Oh my God,” I hissed, gripping the wheel tighter.
“Fuck,” Alaric said, quick to assess the situation. “Jesus Christ,” he added, reaching for his phone. “Head toward the closest busy area,” he demanded.
I wanted to.
Really, I did.
I would have, too, if I hadn’t taken those turns.
But I had accidentally put us on a back road even more rural than the street my house was on.
There was a whole lot of nothing here.
I toyed with the idea of maybe trying to, you know, do a quick spin around like Donovan had done.
But I wasn’t Donovan.
I barely managed to drive my car at normal speeds, doing everyday movements.
Not evading someone in a much better car who seemed intent to, I don’t know…
That was the thing.
They were close enough to ram into the back of my car. To drive me off the road.
But they didn’t seem to want to do that.
They were just… staying close.
“Alaric, this just keeps leading further into nowhere,” I said, fingers going white on the wheel.
“Shit. You’re going to have to turn around,” he said. “Levee is coming,” he said, keeping the phone by his ear. “Speed up, then make the turn,” he demanded.
I was shaking.
Literally, my entire body was almost violently jolting, making me look as though I was seconds away from having a seizure.
My vision was a little swimmy, too, but I had no choice but to follow Alaric’s instructions, slamming my foot into the pedal as my heart hammered in my chest.
Bile rose up in my throat as I got enough space, then started to push the car into a turn.
It happened so fast.
I don’t think I was even processing it until each frame of that moment passed.
A slight turn, a crash, the car flying, spinning in dizzying circles.
Another, smaller crack.
Alaric’s head slamming into something.
When the car stopped, he had his head against that panel behind the window, a little blood trickling down his temple.
Unconscious.
Vaguely, as if from very far away, I could hear screaming.
From the phone, lost somewhere in the floorboard.
Our loved ones, worrying about us.
Had I hit my head too?
Why did I feel so floaty, so disconnected from everything?
It wasn’t until I felt hands grab me that I even realized my door had been opened.
Then my seatbelt loosened, and I was being pulled away.
I should have fought.
I knew that. I always thought, were I in this sort of situation, that I would fight. But I felt too bizarre, too outside of my own body. I wasn’t sure I could even lift an arm to punch if I wanted to.
It wasn’t until I was being shoved into a trunk that I could even force my head to turn to see my attacker.
And even when my eyes landed on them, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.
Not some terrifying bad guy.
Not a guy at all.
It was a woman.
“Maeve!” Alaric’s voice screamed as the trunk slammed.
Then there was a horrifying pop pop sound.
Gunfire.
I knew it well enough from the sounds of it Alaric and Triss made when they were doing target practice at the clubhouse.
I had no idea who pulled the trigger. Who may have gotten shot.
All I knew was that a moment or two later, the car was speeding away at a nauseating pace.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Donovan
I regretted my coldness about two minutes into the ride.
It wasn’t her fault that shit was going down right then, that it had kind of been sprung on me, that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.
I had to make it up to her.
Maybe I could convince the guys to, I dunno, stop at a bookstore or something. Get her a fancy notebook.
Or maybe the flower shop. She liked hibiscus. Apparently, the necklaces she and Triss wore had been given to them on their sixteenth birthdays by their garden-loving grandfather, giving them each a pendant with their favorite flower.
Then, well, you couldn’t go wrong with an apology.
But first, I had to deal with this situation.
With the mafia.
My former employers.
See, you didn’t have a whole fuckuva lot of options for employment when you decide to retire from running street races. Unless you wanted to go legit. And, quite frankly, that was probably never going to suit me. Lifestyle-wise or financially.
Like it or not, unless you were willing to do a shitton of schooling, were techy, or came from old money, chances were that you were not going to make the kind of money I liked to make and do it in a legal way.
So when someone associated with the local mafia crew got my name from someone in the racing world, they’d approached me for a meeting.
