Chapter Four
WILL DRIVES FAST.
And for me to say that, it means something.
“I thought your car was busted,” I all but shout over the growling of the engine. “Seems fine to me.”
“I lied.” Will doesn’t turn around, just yanks the shifter and adjusts his sunglasses. “Will you turn this shit off?” he gripes to LJ, who’s sitting shotgun and fiddling with the stereo dials to crank up the volume on some rock song I vaguely recognize.
“Why, so we can listen to your pretentious jazz?” LJ grunts. “No fuckin’ thank you.”
“Classic cars deserve classic music,” Will says. “Isn’t that right, greasemonkey?”
“Zeppelin is classic,” LJ grouses.
“Leave me out of this,” I mumble. I couldn’t give a shit what music we listen to. “Where are we going, anyway?” The Porsche is handling the curves and climbs of the forest road like a dream—obviously—but I’m far outside my mental map of the area. The trees are getting denser, the patches of sky and light fewer and farther between.
Will and LJ look at each other.
“Home,” they answer at the same time.
They’re a weird pair, I have to admit—the smooth-as-ice rich boy and the rugged guy with, as I can now see, a tattoo of a bear claw spread across his left shoulder blade.
“Home?” I frown. “So you guys are...what? Roommates?”
LJ bursts out laughing, a husky deep sound like a strong pull of whiskey. Will’s jaw tightens with a small smile as he shifts into third.
“Sure,” LJ says, coughing. “We all split a fourplex in the senior dorms.”
They’re fucking with me. I fold my arms, not blushing.
“We live in the same...house,” Will says smoothly. “It’s...probably easier to understand once you see it.” He glances at LJ. “You call Rob yet?”
“Oh. Yeah.” LJ shifts in his seat, pulling his phone out of his back pocket, and Will takes the opportunity to flick the music from Zeppelin to something with saxophones and a slow, languid percussion. “Goddammit, Scarlet.”
“Driver should always choose music,” Will says mildly. “Unless you’d like to make a suggestion, grea—I mean, Maren?”
“I’m fine with whatever,” I say idly.
Music is the least of my worries right now, and I can barely hear anything over the rush of my pulse in my ears anyway.
I’m starting to look around through the windows, trying to pick out anything that could be construed as a landmark, but no dice. And why does it even matter anyway? What am I going to do, call 911 and say I’ve been kidnapped? If the sheriff came to pick me up, that’d just make things worse. Besides, I went voluntarily. Does that even count as kidnapping?
Will makes a hard right and tears up an even smaller road I hadn’t even noticed coming up. It’s barely wide enough for the Porsche and more like a horse trail than anything designed for a car.
“You’ve got no respect for the suspension, I see,” I mutter under my breath.
“What’s that?” Will says, glancing at me in the rearview.
“Nothing,” I say quickly and fold my arms.
I’m trying not to feel dread at the thought of where they might be taking me...but a road like this can’t lead anywhere good, I can’t help but think. The roommates thing was a joke, but if they live together out here in the middle of the woods...
Oh, Jesus Christ. It’s going to be some drug den or a meth lab. That would explain all the fancy shit they have and why they’re so secretive.
And I guess that would also explain why they claim to be criminals too.
I feel suddenly, stupidly, incredibly foolish for pointing that out. Running away from my legal guardian to evade a conservatorship I don’t deserve to be trapped in isn’t even in the same criminal universe as the drug trade.
I wouldn’t have picked Will for a kingpin, not necessarily. But LJ has the look of someone who’s been in a few serious fights where you don’t want to see the other guy.
“Yo Rob,” LJ’s voice growls into his phone. “You there?”
Rob must be the leader, I figure. An icy surge of fresh panic washes over my chest. Any group of guys like this who report to a leader cannot be up to anything good.
“All right. Yeah. No, I’m not sure,” LJ says. I crane my neck as inconspicuously as possible, trying to listen for the other end of the conversation over the phone, but it’s hard over the rumbling of the engine.
Will shifts, and I jerk back into my seat.
“Easy!” I cry.
“Sorry, greasemonkey,” Will says, flashing a smile. “Not my fault you’re not wearing a seatbelt.”
I glower at him. He has a point, though. I should buckle up, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. The bruise from last night is less acutely painful but still tender, and the thought of a belt crushing into my flesh makes me wince.
“I’ll take my chances,” I say. I suck in a deep breath. “Listen, people are going to be looking for me.”
Will cocks a confused eyebrow at me. “What?”
“I just mean...” I look at LJ, who seems to be wrapping up his conversation with El Jefe, and pause.
What I meant was that people were looking for me in a “hunt her down” kind of way. But maybe it’s to my advantage to imply the other sense. That someone’s really worried about me. That my family is desperate to get me back. That they’d better not harm a single hair on my head.
My heart squeezes. It’d be nice if any of that were true. But I can fake it well enough.
“My family,” I lie. “If I go missing, they’re going to go through hell and high water to find me.” I fold my arms. “So, I don’t know, don’t kill me or anything.”
Okay, not the most convincing pitch. But it’ll have to do.
LJ chuckles, hanging up his call. “Wasn’t planning on it, Princess.”
Will snorts derisively. “You think so little of us that we’re out here trying to kill innocent girls for sport? Please.” He glances back at me. “If we’d wanted to, we already would have.”
“Well, then...” I falter. He’s smiling—it’s a joke to him. Goddamn these guys. “My father’s very close with the sheriff,” I say, upping the volume in my voice so maybe I’ll believe myself. “Just so you know. He’ll be out here looking for me any minute, I’d think.”
It’s only half a lie, I reason. And at the mention of the sheriff, the guys exchange a look. But to me, they say nothing.
“What’d Rob say?” Will asks LJ.
“Didn’t get him. Just Tuck. Rob’s out back.” LJ rolls his eyes.
“Of course,” Will scoffs. “Is there at least food ready?”
“Sounds like it, thank Christ. I could eat a horse.”
We’re winding up to the top of a hill now, and Will starts to slow. At first, I’m not sure why, and then I see it out ahead of us: a gate flanked by two stone walls that stretch out in either direction as far as I can see until they disappear into the trees. The gate is at least twelve feet tall, with a heavy-duty locking mechanism in the middle and a security camera perched on a pillar.
“Jesus,” I whisper.
“Told you we weren’t living in the dorms,” Will says. The Porsche glides to a stop and purrs as something at the top of the gate blinks, presumably scanning the car, and the gates glide open with only the softness of clinking sounds.
“What the hell is this place?” I mutter. I guess drug dens need security, but what do I know?
The trees seem to get more manicured-looking as we pull our way closer to our eventual destination, and I try to picture what’s down at the end of this long driveway, guess what’s around each curve. I’m picturing something rotting and ramshackle. Not quite a busted-out RV that smells like meth, but close to it. One of those old farmhouses that’s been abandoned and condemned for years now, taken over by a chemistry set, rows of old furniture, beer cans, guy stuff everywhere. Or maybe it’s even more makeshift than that: a series of tents or a lean-to made of sticks. I literally have no idea, and I almost laugh at how naive I am. My first real brush with crime beyond witnessing all the white-collar corruption in town, and I have no clue what I’m in store for beyond some movie clichés.
Finally, we pull up to our destination, and it’s not what I thought.
This is no moldering, sagging farmhouse. It’s a goddamn mansion.
And if this is what a drug den looks like, then Hollywood has lied to me.
Three grand stories rise before us in classic southern architecture with tall white pillars soaring up to support an elegant balcony that juts out from massive windows. A presidential driveway loops around with all kinds of vehicles parked all over the place: a couple more sports cars—all foreign makes, I note—and even a motorcycle. I’d always thought John’s brick antebellum townhouse in the heart of the county was as ostentatious and immense as it gets—even though I was forced to live in the shittiest part of it, it was hard not to notice how lavish it was.
But this place...this is something else entirely. This is practically a castle.
Will brakes a bit dramatically in front of the steps up to the porch, and I sink back into the leather behind me.
“Here we are,” Will says.
“Home sweet home,” LJ adds and climbs out of the passenger seat.
“You live here?” I all but gasp.
“That we do, little greasemonkey,” Will says, grinning at me. “And you’ve had the misfortune to trespass on our boss’s land.”