Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Ally pinned her attention ahead to the long and dusty road, the loud roar of Sarah’s speeding car adding to the sense of devastating alarm. Sarah had only just hung up from updating Dean that she and Ally were on their way. As usual, Ally remained a few steps behind on everyone’s plans. “So… umm… where next?”
The driver’s side window sat half-open, and a prickly breeze whipped through the car’s cabin. Sarah flicked a lock of hair from her forehead and spoke. “The sheriff has a safehouse for us. Your family will be informed to leave town for the moment. Just in case, you know.”
Silence filled Sarah’s unfinished sentence. But Ally did know.
She knew all about the Syndicate hunting down Emilia and for nothing more than a shot at a big payday. How they’d hounded Dean for no reason other than an unwillingness to let him have a new life away from their sordid dealings. How they’d kidnapped Sarah to get to him. How they now targeted Chip, a flimsy secondhand connection to begin with. Even then, they weren’t below hurting Ally just to eke a little more revenge.
So now, not even her family was safe. Not her parents. Not Laila. Oh God, what about Whitney? She was just a child. But nothing and no one seemed sacred to the Syndicate. Only money and vengeance.
Even as the open road shaded over, and the car drew near the woods surrounding Mirabelle River, her mind stayed on what her family would be doing right now. The panic of their rushed escape. The terror she could barely endure for herself, much less imagine in her parents, in poor Whitney. They, of all people, didn’t deserve this.
Giant oaks, elms, and spruces loomed on either side of the car in blurs of brown and green. Occasionally, an intersection would open, allowing a quick burst of sunlight before the thick forest swallowed them again.
Sarah barely slowed at each crossing, seeming to trust the rarity of another Harlow resident passing through, or that they’d at least do the predictable thing and let the speeding car pass first.
Throat too tight for words, Ally stayed silent, her mind too overwhelmed to hold on to a single clear thought.
“Ally.” Sarah’s hand landed on her shoulder, the woman glancing over with an unconvincing smile. “We’ll get through this.”
Ally wanted to cry at the reassurance. Wanted to cling to those words until she actually believed them. After all, Sarah had come for her. She’d overcome their differences and offered comfort now. So, Ally held back on voicing her doubt and opted for nothing more than a shaky, tight nod.
“Dean and the sheriff make a good team.” Sarah’s expression hardened on the road, and she took her hand back, as though she saw through Ally’s weak attempt at bravery. “They’ll have outside reinforcements coming in.”
Sarah’s flat delivery belied doubt. Like her encouraging words were, in part, also intended to keep her motivated too.
Even if we survive, then what? Do we live out the rest of our days in hiding?
A lifetime void of any real life?
The car shot toward another intersection, and wanting to acknowledge Sarah’s efforts, Ally turned back to her friend and prepared to offer a weak thank-you. Only the driver’s side window behind Sarah filled with an ever-growing white blur.
Ally’s mind pieced the image of a van moments before her entire world exploded, and a sharp scream tore through her throat.
The unstoppable impact. The BOOM.
The wrench of her body. Head hitting her window before inertia swung her loose the other way. Sarah’s car screeched and spun from one side of the road, all the way to the other, then slammed to a sudden stop into a tree.
The unforgiving violence dropped to an eerie kind of quiet, the engine no longer running, though the soft ticking from within joined the smell of wet earth, burned rubber, and oil.
Ally groaned and focused on Sarah. The tree’s thick trunk filled her crumpled window and blood wept from the top of her forehead where she’d likely made contact with the steering wheel.
Though pain crept into Ally’s lower back, she was thankful to see Sarah dab a hand to her new wound. As if by instinct, Ally followed the same gesture, ignoring the multiple aches along her spine and shoulders where whiplash already set in, her fingertips touching the side of her head.
Just like Sarah, Ally’s fingers came back slick with blood, and she twisted to find her window a glistening spiderweb of cracks, the center-most point level with her head and splattered with red.
The engine made a reluctant choking noise, and she peered over to Sarah stabbing at the start button, her breaths bursting in and out as she slammed her foot to the accelerator and yelled for the damn thing to start.
But nothing happened. Before Ally could form any bright ideas, her door swung open, and she peered up to find the solid-set man from the bus stop glaring at her.
Disallowing any room for escape, he filled her door and wrestled with her seatbelt, seemingly unaffected by her screams in his ear, or the scratches she soon inflicted on his forearms.
The seatbelt released with a jolt, and he wrapped his meaty hand to the front of her sundress, yanking her from the car in one long sweeping movement, her legs collapsing beneath her so that she skidded onto the rough forest floor.
Her attacker pulled her from the ground and shoved her back into a tree, his fingers wrapped around her throat, as though every rough gesture reprimanded any defiance.
“Hurry up and get the other one.” He spoke in a rough yell to his lanky friend behind him, this man’s dark stare not leaving hers.
She wanted to yell too. Wanted to warn Sarah. But the pressure at her throat made air hard to come by. Helpless, all she could do was glance around wildly. Her attacker’s attention didn’t budge, his lip curling in a sign he took pleasure from her pain.
The wild beat of her heart filled her ears and pounded at her ribcage. His focus slipped to his hand at her neck, and his tongue darted out to lick at his cracked lips, bringing focus to his unkempt, dark facial hair speckled with gray—only for his mean scowl to move lower still. To her chest. “Not often we get two ladies.”
Sarah’s screams filled the air, along with the frantic thuds of a scuffle, and Ally took that chance to avert her gaze to Sarah.
The other guy had his hand hooked under her armpits and dragged her backward through the open passenger door. She twisted in his hold, forcing him to lose grip and fall back to the ground. Ever the fighter, she tried to crawl over and past him but stumbled while doing so, and he wrapped his arms around her ankles, slowing her escape.
Breaking one leg free, she kicked him in the eye.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” Blood poured from his upper cheekbone, and he lashed a hand out, catching the front of her orange t-shirt and tugging her face closer. “You’re not the one we came for. I should put you down right now.”
He wrestled a gun from his back pocket and pressed it into Sarah’s temple.
“No!” The command escaped Ally on a shrill scream, shrill because of the hand compressing her throat. “The Syndicate. They’ll want her too.”
The man holding Sarah kept his gun in place, along with his focus, only moving to flick the safety on the gun. “Wanna bet?”
“You came for me because of Chip Overton, right?” The pounding in her head mingled with the growing sickness in her tummy, but she nodded as best she could to Sarah. “That’s his sister.”
There’d be hell to pay for outing Sarah, but that would come later. Right now, Ally set her mind to surviving one moment at a time.
The man with the gun shuffled to standing, leaving Sarah on the ground, her hands supporting her from behind while she stared up at him. He pulled the trigger, hand veering at the same time.
Sarah winced, the bullet skimming mere inches from her head and hitting the earth behind her, silent tears quick to streak her earth-smeared cheeks.
“Now, you get one thing straight”—he used the gun’s muzzle to tap her chin up, ensuring she had nowhere else to look but at him—“I don’t know who the Syndicate are. I don’t care either. Only that they’re paying good money to bring you in. So maybe I won’t kill you. Maybe. But I sure as hell will shoot. And that’s without saying all the other things I could do to you without leaving you dead, got it?”
He paused for a moment, and the man holding Ally rubbed a thumb down the side of her throat, as though sending a message on the other things he would personally do besides killing her.
The man before Sarah rose and peered about. “Are we all done here?”
Though Sarah’s complexion turned sheet-white and her throat bobbed in restrained fear, she gave a slow and silent nod.
“Good.” Once again, the man yelled, swatting the gun through the air in a move-along gesture. “Then, get up and get in the fucking van.”
The van in question sat yards away, idling in its mangled state, the front passenger side smashed in, and the windshield cracked. Sarah stood, walking on despite her likely pain and fatigue, her stare connecting with Ally’s in a soulless and resigned gaze.
The man holding Ally pulled her into a walk ahead of him, his hands gripping tight at her upper arms and crushing her against him from behind. “You might be able to get me not to hurt you.”
His beer-scented breath struck her neck, and he gave a soft chuckle, his thick fingers sliding under her bare arm and grabbing at her breast. His touch nothing like the soft and considerate man she’d loved and left behind in Boston.
The ache in her head intensified, and a wave of dizziness rocked her, her ears ringing with a thin and tinny sound. Her focus fell to her shuffling feet, to the blurring earth and leaves below.
A need to vomit rose in her gut and burned her throat. Not just because of the man touching her. But because something wasn’t right here. As though her injuries from the crash ran deeper than the merely visible surface wounds.
“You really gonna risk your life for a piece of ass?” She lifted her attention to the other guy glaring from outside the open van door, gun still pointed at Sarah as she disappeared inside.
The man holding her shoved her the last few steps to the van. “Two of them. Two of us. You know what I’m sayin’?”
The other man caught her and chuckled, looking her dead in the eyes before adding, “Yeah, maybe you got a point.”
As much as she tried to hold back, those words and this man’s new smirk stirred the sickness rocking her body, and she doubled forward, puking on the ground at his feet.
His friend hollered a menacing, mocking sort of laugh, but she peered up at the man before her, his smirk fallen to a cold and disgusted grimace. One that left her fearing he’d abandon his deal with the Syndicate and kill her now.
“I’m sorry.” Her apology came as a pleading cry. For the first time in her life, she wanted pity, but all he did was push her onto a seat and slam the van door shut before her very eyes.
In an odd moment of stillness, her mind latched to all the action movies she’d ever watched that had left her hugely misinformed.
Neither man bothered to tie her or Sarah up. They didn’t even restrain her with a buckled seatbelt. Only the low thunk of the van’s central locking alerted her to her narrowed chance for escape. That, and the threat of being shot.
The man who’d held her to the tree now sat in the front passenger seat, his torso turned as he pointed a gun at her and Sarah. A perpetual sleaze ball, his leering returned. Not wanting to vomit or cause any more trouble, she focused on the gray fabric seat in front of her, absorbing the first jolt of the van rolling forward.
Her incessant nausea rose again, and she pressed her eyes shut, scrambling for composure. She was being taken farther from freedom—perhaps closer to her last moments alive—the pain and fog in her head offering a louder warning.
As though her fate had already been sealed before she’d even stepped into this van.
As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t look at Sarah, a woman who’d escaped the Syndicate once before, only to gamble that escape on trying to save Ally today.
Tears trickled down Ally’s face.
Nothing about this situation was fair, and maybe she couldn’t look at Sarah, but she could reach out and offer the only thing left to give. Solidarity.
She did just that, wrapping her fingers around Sarah’s hand on the seat and imparting what would perhaps be her final words. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry that she had anything to do with Sarah being in this situation.
Sorry for the stupid fight.
Sorry for every hasty misunderstanding. That she’d deemed a decade of friendship tainted because of some panicked promise Chip had convinced Sarah to make.
Ally was sorry.
Sarah wouldn’t have come for her today if, at some point, this friendship hadn’t turned true.
Ally feared Sarah hadn’t heard her, and long moments passed before a gentle squeeze on her hand confirmed her concern unfounded. Sarah accepted the apology. For better or worse, they were in this together.
Ally’s tears fell thicker and faster, and she closed her eyes to slow the dizziness gripping her brain. She’d been so childish. So insecure and too quick to react, every perceived slight heightened because of a squabble over a man.
The van shifted and mingled her shame with fear, forcing her eyes to open to witness the road change to a long driveway leading to an abandoned farm. The Dalton farm. Empty for three years now, the Daltons long ago moved to the city. The farm so vast and far from town that it still failed to sell.
Ally’s hope fizzled to nothing, and a sob squeaked up her throat, this place one of the most isolated in an already remote town. So isolated the no one would find her and Sarah. Not for a long time. Not until it was far too late.