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My blood is ice. My body is ice. Everything is ice, from the air I’m trying to breathe to the nerve endings down in my toes.What is he saying?
“I really thought it would work, too.” He looks crazed. “Guess I’ll have to try harder.”
My body moves, trying to defend itself, and I rake my fingernails over his exposed wrist.
“Bitch,” he says, and slams me back against the seat. It’s plush leather but the hand around my throat makes it hurt like concrete. It forces the air out of my lungs.
How?How could he do this to me?
Why?I loved him. He was my favorite uncle. He was my favorite, aside from my dad.
“Why?” I wheeze brokenly, my eyes filling with tears.
“This is for the greater good, Avery. Sometimes, we have to set our personal morals aside in service of something bigger. My brother, that sentimental fuck, has too many morals for a business built on corruption and blood.”
He yanks me forward again, blocking my hands with his arm, and throws my head back against the seat. I’m going to get whiplash if he doesn’t break my neck first. My hands fall limply at my sides while my mind screams to fight him. Not here. Not now. This can’t be happening.
“Now it’s time to do your part for the family business.” He tightens his grip on my throat. “That basement business—it was nothing personal. It was designed to make you see that everything outside of the family is a bad thing.”
That’s ironic, because my family did this to me.
My family did this to me.
A howling rage starts low in my belly and burns its way up to my mouth, where it comes out in a scream. New energy ignites and I throw my hands out, looking for contact. Rocking back and forth in the seat is all I can do, and I do it with the fury of a woman scorned.
“I’ll never do it,” I gasp. “I’ll never fucking do it, Enzo, fuck you—”
I twist sideways, enough to lurch partway out of the seat, and that’s when Enzo looms over me. He wraps both his hands around my neck and drives my skull down into the armrest. The leather on this one isn’t as thick. It hurts. It throbs.
“Fuck it,” Enzo says lightly into my ear. “You don’t want to play my game? I’ll kill you now. And when you’re dead, Tyler can take over. Remember him? The first boy to rape you? I can make your life so much worse than that, but why bother when you’re easier to deal with dead?”
I’m starting to black out. Starting to say goodbye. Thinking of Rome, and his blue eyes, and how I really believed we could get away from this savage fate.What fools we were to think we could ever get away from this.
I’m losing my grip. I try for a breath and get nothing. Through the haze of impending death I see a shadow at the cockpit door. Nathan.
He moves quickly down the aisle.
“Help me hold her down,” Enzo says casually.
But instead there’s a horrible, choking scream. Blood explodes over my face and neck. Enzo releases me and I fall into the aisle, hitting my head on the hard floor.What’s happening? I can’t—I can’t—
I turn over, onto my back, gasping for every breath as my throat screams with pain. Nathan stands over Enzo. I trace the line from his arm to his hand with disbelieving eyes. To the handle of a knife. To Enzo’s neck.
He stabbed him.He stabbed his own father.
Nathan looks down at his father with a curiously blank face. The absence of emotion there makes my stomach drop, all the way down to the ground. All thirty thousand feet. He narrows his eyes. Enzo makes a gurgling sound, weakly reaching up to bat Nathan’s hand away.
Nathan twists the knife, meeting my eyes in the same instant. “I had to,” he says brokenly. “He would have killed you.”
A fountain of blood pours from Enzo’s mouth, some of it landing on my shoes, and I can’t stay here anymore. I put my hands on the first free stretch of carpet I see and crawl. Up past the meeting table. Up past the single seats. Up to the cockpit door.
I scratch at it with my nails and after a moment it springs open. The pilot has the door open with one arm.
“Miss Capulet? I—”
“Help,” I croak. It’s harder to talk than I thought it would be. My throat must be bruised. Damaged. “We need help. We need the police.”
“Jesus Christ.” He looks beyond me, back into the plane, and his face goes white. “We’re almost ready to land. Find a seat to strap into and hang on—”
