Chapter 4
Chapter Four
KODIAK
Emma’s hands were locked on the wheel. Her leg pumped the brake pedal in a desperate rhythm, and nothing was happening. Ten yards separated us from impact, and that gap was closing fast.
I grabbed the e-brake and yanked.
“Downshift!” The word ripped out of me. “Emma. Downshift NOW.”
Her right arm flew to the gearshift. The transmission screamed, and the Audi shuddered. Speed bled off—sixty to fifty, fifty to forty-five—but we were still closing on the SUV in front of us and the cluster of brake lights beyond it.
Knowing we were about to hit, I wrenched the wheel. Her hands hadn’t left it, and our knuckles ground together. I didn’t care. I hauled hard, and the car lurched.
Gravel sprayed beneath us. The guardrail loomed, and a wall of metal and concrete rushed up to fill the windshield.
“Brace!” The word barely left my mouth before we hit.
The seat belt jerked tight, and my shoulder slammed into the door. Metal folded, and glass shattered. Airbags punched into my chest and face with a chemical heat that coated my tongue.
Then everything stopped.
My ears rang. White dust—airbag powder, fine as flour—hung in the air. The engine had died, and beside us, the traffic kept moving. Horns blared. Nobody stopped.
I turned, and pain lanced down my neck.
Emma was slumped on her airbag. She was unconscious, and blood, bright red against skin that had gone gray, ran from a gash above her eyebrow.
She wasn’t moving.
“Emma.” She didn’t answer. “Emma!”
I tried to get out of my seat belt, but it was jammed. I yanked at the latch, but my fingers shook too hard to get a grip. Metal bit into my palm, but I ignored it. The belt finally released, and I reached over the console and grabbed her.
“Open your eyes, Emma. Look at me.”
Her eyelids fluttered. She blinked twice and struggled to keep them open.
“Kodiak?”
“Yeah. Don’t move. Tell me where it hurts.”
“My head.” She reached toward the gash, and I caught her wrist. “And my chest.”
The airbag had hit her full force. She was half my size, and the bags had deployed with identical power—the same hit that had knocked the wind out of me had slammed into a hundred and twenty pounds of her, and I wanted to put my fist through what was left of the dashboard.
I checked her over, pressing gently along her rib cage.
She winced when I pushed low on her left side.
“Can you feel your legs?”
“Yes.”
“Can you move your feet?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I need to get you out of the car.”
My side was pinned flush against the guardrail without enough room to crack the door, so I squeezed between the front seats and shoved the rear one open on the driver’s side.
Hers was worse. The frame had buckled on impact, and the whole panel bowed inward.
I braced my foot against the quarter panel and wrenched until the hinges surrendered with a groan that matched the one coming from my throat.
Emma swung her legs out and tried to stand. When her knees gave out before her feet were under her, I caught her around the waist and bore her full weight. She clutched my shirt with both fists and pressed her forehead into my chest.
Her breathing scared me more than the crash had. Each inhale was shallow, guarded, like her lungs couldn’t fully expand, which meant the airbag had probably done real damage to her ribs.
“Take your time,” I said.
“I’m okay.” She wasn’t even close, but I let her have it.
She straightened by degrees. Blood still ran from the gash above her eyebrow, but when she straightened, her focus was sharp.
I walked her twenty yards from the wreck with one arm around her waist and called 911 on the way.
The dispatcher got our location and the basics.
Single-vehicle accident, female driver with a head wound and possible rib fractures.
I left the brake lines out of it. Saying sabotage would mean state police forensics impounding the car, and I’d lose access to the one piece of evidence that might give us something to work with.
We’d spend twelve hours in an interview, answering questions instead of finding whoever had decided Emma needed to die on a highway during rush hour.
I ended the call and guided her to the guardrail. She lowered herself without being asked.
“The brakes,” she said. “Someone tampered with them.”
“I agree.”
I’d checked the undercarriage at the curb before she got behind the wheel.
The lines looked intact from below. A scored brake line took ten minutes and a pair of pliers.
Someone had crouched next to that Audi in her driveway after I’d finished my sweep and made the cut on top, invisible from my angle, barely deep enough to hold under city braking, but enough to fail under sustained highway pressure.
They’d counted on my inspection coming up clean, and it had.
That failure was mine.
She didn’t challenge what I’d said to the dispatcher, which told me she understood why I’d left the sabotage out of it.
I put my hand on her chin and tilted her face toward the light.
Her pupils were equal and reactive. The excuse to be touching her was gone, but her skin was warm under my palm, and I couldn’t make myself pull away.
It didn’t matter that she was bleeding on the side of a highway where someone had just tried to kill her, and my focus should have been on the road and the cars passing us.
“You’re okay,” I said, because I needed to hear it out loud.
“Kodiak—”
“Give me a second.”
I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against hers. So much for the distance I’d been maintaining since the day I walked off that dance floor. Weeks of telling myself I didn’t care about her had abruptly ended because of the terror of her going limp at the wheel.
She gripped both my wrists and held on.
“I’m okay,” she whispered.
Her mouth was so close, and I needed to close that gap more than I’d wanted anything in recent memory.
Instead, I leaned away—not because the urge had passed, but because kissing her right now, given the circumstances, was the worst idea I’d ever entertained.
And the competition for that title was steep.
Confusion came first, then hurt. She didn’t mask it fast enough, and I didn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it. I let go.
“We should move farther from the car. Fuel could be leaking.”
The excuse was thin, but she let it go.
She sat on the embankment, with her arms wrapped around herself. Shock had her shivering, not the cold, though the wind wasn’t helping. When I shrugged off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders, she drew it closed.
“They tried to kill me,” she said. “The bomb was fake. This wasn’t.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“Why escalate? What changed?”
I’d been asking myself the same question since I got her out of the car.
Alice had hit dead ends across the board, and Emma’s investigation hadn’t gained traction yet, which meant whoever was behind this had decided she needed to die before she found anything at all.
This wasn’t a reaction to what she’d uncovered. It was preemptive.
“They’re afraid of what you’ll find before you even get close to it,” I said.
“Monitoring my access logs is one thing. Cutting brake lines means someone made the decision to commit murder.”
She was right, and I had nothing to say that would make her feel better. Instead, I leaned in so our arms were touching.
She stayed rigid, with her chin lifted, refusing to crack.
I’d served with operatives who carried themselves the same way after ambushes.
They’d lock everything down and shove it into a compartment until the situation allowed them to deal with it.
Emma was doing it without a day of combat training, and I wasn’t sure if that made me proud or worried about what would happen when the compartment finally opened.
A state trooper pulled up with his lights flashing and gravel popping under his tires. He was mid-to-late twenties, still young enough to treat each call like a test he could fail. His notepad was open when he reached us.
“Everyone okay?”
“She needs medical attention,” I said. “Head laceration, possible rib fractures.”
“Ambulance should be here any minute.” He looked past us at the wreck. The Audi’s front end was embedded in the guardrail, and the driver’s side hung at an angle. “What happened?”
“I was in the passenger seat. She was driving, and the car pulled hard to the right. When she tried to correct, we hit the guardrail.”
“Speed?”
“Fifty, maybe forty-five when we made impact. We’d already been slowing.”
He wrote without looking up. “Either of you been drinking?”
“No.”
“Any mechanical issues with the vehicle prior to today?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Emma said nothing throughout. She faced the road and let me handle the trooper. He didn’t push her. The blood on her face told him enough.
An ambulance arrived while he wrote. Two paramedics climbed out, and I stepped to the side to give them room to do triage. They checked her pupils and asked the same questions I had. When she tried to wave them off, they ignored her and eased her onto a stretcher.
The trooper took down our names and Emma’s insurance information.
“I can arrange a private tow,” I said before he could call his guy to do it. “Her insurance will want their own adjuster.”
He hesitated, then let it go. A single-vehicle accident with no other parties involved wasn’t worth his attention when he had forty more miles of highway to patrol. He gave me the case number and told me to have the tow company contact him.
I waited until his cruiser left before I called Atticus.
He picked up on the first ring. “Hey.”
“Emma’s brake lines were tampered with. We’re on Route 50, eight miles from the Bay Bridge exit. I told the trooper she lost control, and he bought it. I need Steel here to tow her car before it gets taken to the state lot.”
“How is she?”
“Concussion for sure. Bruised ribs, maybe cracked. She’s in the ambulance.”