Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
AKIO
While the world burned around me, I stayed glued to my spot and scanned the stadium. Someone–and my prediction: Poison–had released the video thirty minutes ago, and the crowd had trampled a handful of students and parents while trying to leave.
My hands tightened into fists as I watched EMTs tend to wounds and broken bones. Other victims were driven off in ambulances to the hospital. And three of Redwood’s finest police officers stood around Principal Vaughn’s head on the field.
I leaned against the fence to get a better view. None of the cops on the field were Pick, but Pick had been here tonight. I knew that I had seen him a moment before the chaos. Yet now, he wasn’t even on campus anymore.
“Akio, right?” someone asked to my left.
After peering over, I stiffened and stood up taller, spotting Nicole’s father. I didn’t know whether or not I should tell him about Pick—because if he had known, then surely, he would’ve done something, right?—but I decided to keep my mouth closed.
“What’re you still doing here?” he asked. “Yui is probably looking for you.”
Yeah, right. Mom doesn’t give a fuck about me.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
The police chief looked onto the field. “Just great. What are you doing here?”
“I didn’t want to be trampled,” I lied, nodding to the others. “Like the rest of them.”
Once he peered at the last few victims being treated, he placed his hands on his hips and rocked back on his heels. “Have you seen Nicole? You and she have been getting pretty close lately, haven’t you?”
I paused. “No. We’re just working on a project together.”
He clenched his jaw. “That’d better be all that it is because she’s taken.”
As the words left his mouth, my chest tightened. My first instinct was to ask who she was taken by because Nicole had never mentioned anyone else to me, but she kept a lot of secrets to herself. And I still didn’t think she wanted anyone to know about us.
So, I nodded. “Okay.”
After eyeing me for a few more moments, he turned around and headed toward the entrance to the field. “You should get out of here for your own good. I doubt Yui would like to know that her son is hanging around a crime scene. Makes you look suspicious.”
When he was at least fifty feet away from me, I reached into my pocket for my keys and walked out of the stadium and to the student parking lot. A single light flickered over my car. I walked through the nearly desolate lot and spotted Nicole’s parking space empty.
Which meant that she’d made it out.
Imani’s car was still parked in her normal spot, and while I hoped that she and Allie had gotten out alive and were safe, I didn’t have time to go looking for them. I had missed my goddamn chance to prove to Nicole that I could be a different man than who she thought I was.
If I had just kept my eyes on Pick…
I slipped into my car and turned it on, the soft hum of the engine coming to life. After readjusting my rearview mirror, I caught sight of a police car driving around the campus, as if to check the perimeter for any stragglers.
The whole purpose was to be undercover, but undercover Redwood Police cars were sometimes even more obvious than the regular ones, with tinted windows and even blacked-out plates. Not legal, of course, but this was Redwood.
I started after him and drove about thirty feet behind him, lights completely off so it wasn’t obvious, and I stopped far behind him whenever he came to a streetlight or a Stop sign. Instead of circling Redwood, he headed back toward the police station.
When he came to the light before Fitz Road, he rolled down his window, hung his arm out of it, and looked into his rearview mirror, his gaze locking on to mine. Pick. Knowing that I had been caught—and that I had caught him—I flashed my high beams, blinding him for a moment.
He parked and stepped out of his car, but I was already out of mine, running toward him. I didn’t have my gun—I’d left it in Imani’s car—but I didn’t need it tonight. If he’d hurt Nicole the way that she’d said he had, I wasn’t going to let him off with a single bullet.
No easy death.
Before he could seize hold of his gun, I snatched him by his jacket and hurled him to the ground. I dropped my shins onto each of his shoulders, straddling his back and then grabbing fistfuls of his hair. I smashed his head into the pavement over and over and over.
Until he stopped struggling.
Until blood was splattered everywhere.
Until I could pick him up off the ground and throw him into the back of my car.
While I took off down the road with Pick in my backseat, I listened to the rev of an engine behind me, and then a motorcycle flew past me. The only person in Redwood that I knew had a bike like that was Kai Koh from Poison, the guy who hated me the most.
And he had just seen that I had kidnapped a cop.