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Alec lifts the trunk of his Cobra and shoves Mackenzie inside. She looks so small and broken, her head flopping about. I think she’s still out from the chloroform but then one eyelid blinks.
Fuck. She’s awake. Trust a bunch of prep school students to have no fucking clue how to chloroform someone.
I should tell Alec.
I don’t.
“Get the bag over her head.” Alec tosses the canvas sack to Chad. But as he bends over her, Mackenzie lashes out with her foot, kicking him in the knee.
The rest of them move in to hold her down again and tie her hands. She doesn’t stop thrashing, but her fists are slow and wonky. She’s still fucked from the drugs. She’s trying to scream but all that comes out are little breathless squeaks.
She’s still thrashing as Alec slams the trunk down.
“Let’s ride, boys.” He slams his hand down on my shoulder. “Marlowe, you’re with me.”
I don’t want to be with him. I don’t want to be anywhere near this mess. I don’t want to be part of whatever Alec has planned for some poor girl.
That’s not some poor girl. That’s Mackenzie Malloy – the bitch who got your brother killed.
The rage surges inside me again. I imagine Felix’s car next to Alec’s in the lot. He had his whole life ahead of him, a life that he deserved, that he earned with his brightness and his intelligence and his kindness. And she gets to live and he doesn’t.
I slide into the passenger seat beside Alec. He scratches the edge of the dressing on his forehead. I tell myself that I’m going along as the sensible one. But the way my blood is pounding in my veins, I know I have no sense left.
Whatever goes down tonight, there’s no walking away from it unscathed.
We drive for a long time. Mackenzie gets her voice back on the freeway. She screams. And screams. And screams. An unending banshee wail that curdles my insides. Alec turns the music up, but the drum and bass can’t drown her out. The guys pass around a bottle of vodka, but just the smell of it makes me sick. After a while, the party atmosphere in the car gives way to tense silence, but Alec doesn’t seem to notice. He tells dirty jokes and laughs the whole way.
“You’re awfully quiet, Marlowe,” Alec says after I refuse the bottle a fourth time. He sucks on the neck as he drives with the other hand. “I’d have thought you’d be more into this. After all, we’re doing this for you.”
This isn’t for me.
The knowledge hits me with a jolt. I’m right. I see it in his glinting eyes. That’s what Alec told the guys to make them do this with him. He knows that I have more power at Stonehurst Prep, and that Cleo and the guys would do anything for me.
But this is Alec’s revenge. He’s loving every moment of it.
The wind whips through the open car window, tugging the dressing from his forehead. I study the puckered skin from where the plastic surgeons are still working to repair the brand.
Abruptly, like a faucet being turned off, Mackenzie stops screaming.
I wish and wish and wish she would start again. I don’t like the silence.
I liked knowing she was alive, even when it was painful.
The silence reminds me too much of home, of the gaping hole in my life now that Felix is gone. Of the Pharaoh's tomb where Dad and Grace and I shuffle around like mummies, waiting for our judgment day.
I stare out the window, curling my fingers over the edge. We’re right out in the desert now. Alec pulls over in a clearing, well off the main road. The guys pull up around us in Dave’s Merc and Miles’ wrangler. Dave grabs a cooler from his backseat and starts passing around beers. I wave him away. I know I need to be sober for this.
I have a bad feeling.
I think it’s Felix’s ghost on my shoulder, screaming in my ear that I don’t want to do this, that whatever Alec has planned for Mackenzie is going to make me into the monster, not her. He was always a much better person than I am.
“Let’s open up our present, boys.” Alec grins ear to ear as he pops the trunk of her car and—
Mackenzie’s a blur as she swipes at him with her feet, trying to kick him. The ropes on her wrists fall away – how the fuck did she untie them?
The sun catches a glint of metal. A knife.
She has a knife. What the fuck?
