55. Thea
55
THEA
The gun was shoved into my side with a vicious punch, making my ribs flare in pain.
“I said keep driving ,” the woman snarled. “Faster!” She jabbed me with the metal barrel again as if to make her point.
The voice was so familiar yet different. Changed enough that I couldn’t quite grab hold. And the way the figure was tucked behind the passenger seat, right on the floorboards, meant I couldn’t get a look at her through the rearview mirror.
“If I go any faster, Deputy Allen will know something’s wrong.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was calm, collected, like it wasn’t even a part of me. As if the words hadn’t come from my mouth.
A curse sounded from behind me. “Those pigs. Always sticking their noses in business that isn’t theirs. Always making things so much worse. Why can’t they just leave us alone?”
“He’s trying to help. To keep me safe.” I didn’t know why I tried explaining that to a woman holding me at gunpoint. She obviously didn’t give a damn about my safety. But somehow, I feared silence would make her angrier.
“You don’t need to be safe! You have to be gone. Everything will be fine if you’re just GONE.” She pulled the gun back, then jabbed it into my ribs again.
The force of it sent me doubling over against the wheel, wheezing as the car drifted to the side, sending us over the rumble strips.
“Get back on the road! Can’t you do anything right?” she snarled, pushing up so she was sitting in the center of the back seat, right in line with the rearview mirror.
Everything swirled, twisting in my mind until I could put the pieces into place. It took precious seconds for my brain to compute the image I was seeing as I righted the car.
“Why anyone likes you is beyond me. You can’t even drive a car,” she snapped.
“Raina?” I croaked.
Her name was a question on my lips as my gaze snapped back and forth between the road and the rearview mirror, still trying to make sense of what was happening. It felt like some sort of fever dream.
She ignored my pseudo-question, her gaze tracking over me. “You’re ugly. Shaped like a skinny boy. You dress awful most of the time, and then you slut yourself out the rest of the time. Shep will thank his lucky stars when you’re out of his life. I’m doing him a favor.”
Raina’s words hit me like ammunition from a machine gun. Blow after blow. The cadence of them was so familiar. So similar to Brendan’s. The breaking-me-down that didn’t even make sense. Dowdy one second, a whore the next.
That push-pull, along with the manic feeling of the words themselves, had my heart beating faster. My palms dampened as I tried to grip the wheel tighter and attempted to stay in the here and now. “You want to help Shep?”
“I’m helping everyone. We’ll all be better off with you gone. You ruin good men. You ruin everything .”
My mouth went dry as memories slammed into me. “You ruin everything. You tear people’s lives apart, and you don’t even care.” The words echoed in my mind, the image of Brendan, bleary-eyed as he started to slur, right before he shattered a glass against the wall. The memory of how I’d curled into a ball on the bathroom floor and wished for it all to be over. The pain. The anxiety. Everything.
“Watch it!” Raina yelled, jabbing me with the gun again and hitting the tender spot she’d already abused.
I’d let the car drift into the lane for oncoming traffic on the road leading up to the Monarch Mountains. Thankfully, no one was opposite us, and I quickly righted my vehicle. I blinked, trying to clear my stinging eyes, along with the memories.
I adjusted my hold on the wheel, my gaze flicking up to the rearview mirror. Raina’s face filled it, but beyond that, I saw Deputy Allen’s squad car. He was close. I just had to find a way to give him a chance to help. Maybe I could crash my car?
The feeling of the gun’s barrel against my side told me that was a very bad idea. Raina’s finger was on the trigger. If we made any sort of impact, she’d likely shoot me for sure.
“What do you want?” I rasped.
Raina’s hazel eyes flashed a molten gold. It wasn’t the kind I found in Shep’s amber gaze; it was pure anger. Rage. Her grip on the gun tightened. “I told you. I want you gone.” She let out a shuddering breath. “I tried to warn you to leave, to stop , but you just wouldn’t listen. I slashed your tires, sent that photo, destroyed your stupid little greenhouse. But you’re too dumb to hear me!”
“Why?” It was the most simplistic of questions, but I didn’t understand Raina’s motives. I’d always been kind to her.
Those eyes flashed again. “You think I don’t know you’re trying to steal my husband? That you’re trying to break up our marriage? That you’re making him hurt me?”
Each sentence was a blow that had me spinning one way and then the other. They didn’t entirely make sense either.
“Raina, I don’t want Russ to hurt you. I want you to get away from him.”
She moved so fast I didn’t have a prayer of blocking the blow. She reared back the hand with the gun and clocked me in the side of my head. Spots danced in front of my vision as the car veered to the side, making Raina grip the seat to stay upright.
“You bitch!” she snarled. “All you want is for me to hurt. You tempt Russ. Tempt him to stray. He told me what happened at the bar. That you came on to him, touched him. And then played the victim. He was so mad when he came home.”
My stomach roiled. I didn’t want to hear what’d happened next because I knew it would be bad.
“He threw me into a wall so hard it knocked me out. Could barely move the next day. All because of you.”
My breaths came in quick pants, each inhale making my lungs burn where Raina had hit me with the gun. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
She grabbed the back of my hair so hard I saw stars. “You’re not. You’re a whore. Just like the rest of them. You try to fool everyone into thinking you’re so innocent and perfect. But you’re not. They’re going to see. Going to see it all now.”
Panic flared brighter.
“Turn right. The road up the mountain,” Raina ordered.
“No,” I whispered.
I couldn’t. Following her orders would only bring bad things. The worst of them.
Raina gripped my hair harder, shaking me. “You will listen to me. You will obey.”
“No.” It was all I could do. Quiet resistance.
Her other hand moved, and a deafening crack sounded next to my ear. The driver’s side window shattered, sending glass everywhere. I jerked the wheel to the side, nearly sending us down an embankment.
“The next one goes into your kneecap if you don’t listen.”
The lights on Allen’s squad car lit up as the siren pierced the air.
Raina swung around to look at it and then back to me. “Look what you did. You’re going to pay for that, too. All your failings.” She shook my head. “Turn the car, or I will kill you here and now.”
Tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes—ones of frustration and fear. Because I didn’t know what to do. Listen or resist ?
I glanced at the turn she wanted me to make. We’d been slowly gaining altitude as we wound around the road that led to the mountains. But this one would take us directly up. It was also flanked by plenty of tall trees. Ones I could possibly send the car into. It was my only hope. I’d just have to pray that if her gun went off, the bullet wouldn’t hit me, or that it wouldn’t be a lethal shot at least.
“Turn!” Raina yelled.
I jerked the wheel, making the turnoff and sending gravel flying. Raina’s hold on my hair tightened as she used me to steady herself, making a fresh wave of pain dance across my scalp.
I managed to keep the car on the road, straightening and heading up the side of the mountain. The incline would make it hard to get enough speed to crash like I wanted and needed to. I pressed my foot to the gas, praying I wasn’t making a mistake and sending us careening over one of the steep drop-offs to my left.
Raina kept a hold of my hair, gripping it tightly as she turned around. “Fucking pigs,” she snarled and leveled her gun at the back windshield.
Fear spiked, and I prayed she wasn’t a good shot. That she wouldn’t hit Deputy Allen.
Another crack sounded, and glass spiderwebbed. Then another shot and another. How many bullets does a gun hold? I had no idea. She could be out for all I knew, or she could have a dozen left.
A laugh pierced the air, but it had a sickening quality to it. “We’ll see how he does getting up the mountain missing a front tire.”
My gaze flicked to the rearview mirror for a split second, just long enough to see through the smashed-out window that Allen’s vehicle had slid to a stop. My gut soured. If I crashed now, there’d be no backup. I just had to hope that I could hit with enough force that it would cause Raina some injuries.
That thought had nausea swirling. Even with all she was doing, I didn’t want to hurt her. She’d had enough pain in her life. Agony that had clearly twisted her mind in unbearable ways.
I knew what it was like to not trust your own brain or memories. They became a gnarled knot you couldn’t see the beginning or end of. Like a cord you couldn’t identify. You didn’t know what it had once been because it was something entirely different now. Something you couldn’t see your way out of.
But I did see now. I knew. The truth had finally found me. And falling in love with Shep had helped me—as if he’d pulled away a veil that had been left over my eyes. I could see the world through new eyes now, all the shades and colors as they truly were.
It was a gift I’d never be able to repay.
But I would be brave enough to fight for what we had.
My gaze locked on the road ahead. Through the trees to my left, I knew there were sharp, cliff-like drop-offs. I wasn’t about to risk going through those trees to a rocky death. But only forest was to the right.
Those trees had been one of the things that had soothed me when I moved to Sparrow Falls. Their endless beauty and calming scent. I just hoped they could rescue me one more time.
I turned the wheel toward them and pressed the gas pedal to the floorboard just as Raina screamed.