Chapter Twelve
Fear grips every muscle in my body.
“Laik, where are you?” My voice drops an octave.
She doesn’t reply, but I can hear her breathing—hear her stifling her cries.
Mania creeps in. “Laik?” I clamp it down.
In the silence, I can hear my own sharp breaths drifting in and out, then the echo of a scream so cataclysmic, and instead of forcing the phone from my ear, I draw it closer.
Harlen turns his eyes on me.
I don’t look at him.
“Oh, god, Chase.” Laiken is crying hysterically now.
I grip the phone so tight, my fingers numbing out. Pressing my eyes closed, I fight to put some steel into my spine.
“He-he is…” Laiken swallows her words. “Hurting her.”
My vision blurs.
“What do you mean, hurting, Laik? Who is? What is he—”
Another bloodcurdling scream cuts down the line, severs me.
Laiken’s voice comes, raspier now. “He sh-sh-sho us, and now…”
I open my eyes, look down at my phone when silence spills out.
Call failed, glows back at me.
“He sh-sh-sho us, and now…” Were the last of Laiken’s words before the call was cut.
A fist is in my stomach, my heart in my throat.
Silence has invaded the line, and yet, I remain frozen in time.
“He-he is…hurting her.”
The terror in her voice had pressed a blade to my veins.
My hands shake. Harlen reaches for the phone, takes it from me. I don’t try to stop him. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. He taps across the screen, holds it out in front of him.
I can’t hear it, though I can feel it, our joint inhale, our stilted breaths as we listen, chests combusting with hope, awaiting a dial tone.
A lifeline.
Her voicemail picks up before it has the chance to come.
“It’s Laiken, hit me.” Her giggle, then…beep!
My hands are clammy, I drag both through the top of my sweaty, blood-stained hair.
Black dots are a swarm of darkness in my vision, a cluster of something monstrous and rapacious. It was rage and panic and dissociation. It was knowing. I squeeze at my temples with my palms.
I should have kept them closer.
“Try, try…” I attempt to lay out my words, only to stop when I watch Harlen press on Jade’s contact, doing exactly what I couldn’t.
Our picture, of me and my sister, this summer at the river, appears on what was now a blank, lifeless screen. She was so happy, so…
“It’s Jade, you know what to do…” Beep!
My heart drops like a stone to the pit of my stomach.
Harlen stuffs my phone into his front pocket. He turns away, then spins back again, his light brows raised with uncertainty, his hands through his hair.
“Did she say they had been—”
“Shot,” I say for him, fists curling around themselves, nails cutting half-moons into the flesh of my palms.
My sister and Laiken, shot. I wouldn’t think about it, couldn’t, not now, not until we got them home.
I place one foot in front of the other, moving past Harlen toward the corner of the house. I don’t bother going inside to look for Colton again, I knew he wasn’t there.
My feet beat against the forest floor when I feel Harlen run up on me, and I shove my hand into the front pocket of my shredded jeans, closing my fingers around my keys. Before I can make sense of what I’m doing, I’m running, ripping the door to the driver’s side of my truck open, hiking myself in.
My heart is pounding.
Blood racing in my ears.
I knew I shouldn’t drive.
Alcohol, and broken ribs, and whatever the fuck that bitch put in my drink had rotted me from the inside.
My vision, still blurry.
My senses, fucked.
But tonight shouldn’t and should have meant life or death.
I could handle the sore throat that came with shouldn't. I couldn’t harbor the agony that would come with should have.
I wouldn’t lose my sister.
I wouldn’t lose Laiken.
The engine roars to life before Harlen manages to slam the passenger door closed and when I reach behind his seat to back out, I ram the ass of my truck into the car that parked us in.
Our bodies jolt forward, the crunching sound of metal loud.
“Fucking cunt,” I seethe, spinning the wheel in my palm, wrenching the truck into drive before flying forward.
I dodge gnarled tree limbs draping from thick trunks, though my front wheels catch every rut.
The truck dips and sways, my body lifting from the seat, my shoulder tapping the window at my side.
Harlen’s fingers are clenched around the handle overhead as I work my way through the maze of trees, screeching onto the slate-gray driveway.
“Hands In The Sky (Big Shot)” by Straylight Run is loud through the speakers and I notice the time bar of the song at 2:35.
And I want to turn it off, sink into silence, but there is something about the track that adrenalizes me.
Shifting gears and hammering my foot on the gas, we spin onto the road.
I didn’t know where the girls were, or where I was going, but what I did know was that I wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing.
The road warps in front of me, the gaudy glow from my headlights contorting with the dark-grainy asphalt as I take corners too fast, driving at speeds that should kill us.
I was so disconnected from what I was doing that I hadn’t realized the police cruiser up my ass until Harlen punched my bicep, breaking my stupor.
I should have kept them closer. It was the only six words I could hear, and they were on repeat, over and over again, a tripped circuit in the back of my head.
I turn and look at Harlen, my foot pressed firmly to the gas as bright reds and sapphire blues strobe across the strong planes of his face.
“We runnin’?” he asks, one hand still curled around the handle above him, the other spread like the limbs of a spider at my beat-up and sun damaged dash.
My abs tense, a broken rib stabs into me, my fingers tremble at the shifter.
We both knew I didn’t have the wheels to run. I was going to get caught. Whether it happened now or later was up to me.
When spinning lights flash through my front window, the same red and blue syncing to the ones at my rear, I realize that the choice had been made for me.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been pulled over for reckless driving—among other things. Me and Devil’s Peak PD were well acquainted.
With reservation, I tear my truck off the road and rip up the handbrake. Wrenching the keys from the ignition, I roll down my window and peg the metal to the blacktop, knowing intimately what came next.
I beat the wheel of my truck with the palm of my hands. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Harlen sits eerily still beside me, fingers to his mouth, picking at his crusted bottom lip as he looks out the window, distant hope for the two girls that are our entire world sharpening every line and groove and muscle in his face.
I keep the window down, suck on my cheeks, anger ratcheting through my chest. Then, I slam my head back against the headrest, and do it again and again, until Harlen stops me.
My chest is rising and falling, my heart feels as if it’s at the fringes of a heart attack.
“I should have kept them closer,” I whisper, then repeat, “I should have kept them closer.”
The car jolts, taking a kick to the wheel on one side, then the other, before Officer James’ high-pitched voice crawls through the open window.
“Keller, put your hands above your head and step out of the vehicle.”
I wanted to take a screwdriver to my ears, and maybe another to his carotid.
Officer James—Colton James’ corrupt father’s voice was tainted with glee.
I fucking hated him and his soon to be dead son.
A muscle flexes in my neck. I couldn’t help but think being pulled over tonight was a setup. After the beating, and the girls disappearing, it was clear Colton wanted to take what was mine because I had a go at what was his.
I should have kept them closer.
I open my vengeful eyes, not moving my skull from the headrest when I roll it toward Harlen, eyes locking on his icy ones.
“Ch-ch-chase, help.”
My pulse grates through my teeth hearing Laiken’s phantom plea.
“I can’t lose them,” I whisper. “I can’t lose them.”
Harlen drops his chin to his chest and rotates the chrome ring on his index finger with his thumb. He doesn’t speak, because if there’s one thing Harlen didn’t do, it was make open-ended promises.
He doesn’t tell me they will be okay, that they will make it out of whatever hell this is alive, because he couldn’t, he wouldn’t.
He doesn’t say anything except, “I know, brother. Same.”
My hand shakes as I unclip my seatbelt, and Harlen follows, popping our doors and kicking them open in unison, we raise our hands above our heads.
I turn over my shoulder, look at Harlen through the cabin. “Get Skinner, yeah?”
He nods.
My feet are at the ground for no less than a second before I feel a knee launch into my stomach, landing among the massacre of ribs this piece of shit’s son had splintered earlier.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I seethe, spittle coming from my mouth.
I curl over and clench my teeth and before I can think or catch a breath or tame the rage that twists down my spine like a cobra, I see it coming for me again, round two, toward my face.
But I catch it, twist it until he grunts, shoving him back.
And it was the only retaliation the grub needed for him to lay into me like a palette of bricks.
I knew he was going to anyway, but now he’d have a reason to throw me in lockup for the night and laugh at me from the opposite side.
I hoped Chief Wynston was on duty. He was an ally to the Devil’s Peak MC. He would let me go. I would be okay.
My cheekbone crunches against the window of my truck, the weight of my skull shattering the glass beneath me.
“My sister…” I try to speak, but the weight and pressure of Officer James’ hand at the back of my head rotates my face until my nose and lips push into shards of glass, silencing me.
“Shut the fuck up, you fuckin’ deadbeat,” Officer James hammers his elbow between my tensed traps.
Every word disintegrates on my tongue when I feel small cuts opening the flesh of my face.
My arms are pulled behind my back, cuffs cool and sharp, snapping around my wrists.
“You have the right to remain silent…”
I tried to speak again, but I couldn’t.
I should have kept them closer.