Fuck me.
We drove about another hour toward Tennessee mostly in silence. We’d gotten such a late start thanks to Derek being late, and only three hours into our car ride, the sun had already sunk below the skyline.
The highways were dark and foreign, and we hadn’t passed any exits for at least the last forty miles, but the next one we saw, I was pulling off to go on a booze hunt.
Hell, maybe I could get a quart and ask Derek to take a crack at driving for a few hours so I could sleep. My eyes were already heavy, and every second spent looking at the sheet of black road sucked the moisture out of them. My pupils were like dried up raisins, and I needed a few hours of shuteye and a few drinks of whiskey before I fell asleep at the wheel, screaming about her yet again.
We would not have a repeat of last night.
God, I fucking hated that nightmare. Always the same every single time. Same cast of characters to play the same beginning, middle, and tragic ending.
No matter what I did differently in the dream, the ending never changed. It was always Rebecca dead and bleeding in my arms, using her dying breath to tell me it was my fault.
My fault for not saving her. My fault for not being enough for her. My fault for letting her go.
Her blood was on my hands because I wasn’t good enough. Because somewhere along the way, I’d changed from what she wanted to something that bored her. To something that drove her into the arms of an inevitable and grisly death.
Scarlett’s reaction to Rebecca’s name yesterday had been enough to tell me that she was still alive. She was still twisting others around her manicured fingers and bending them to do her will with one cat-eyed wink and a show of her long legs.
At least Scarlett’s reaction was genuine enough that I believed she didn’t know I had any connections to Rebecca or knew anything about the Vitalis. She had no idea I knew she was fucking around with one of them or that her father was practically using her as bait to get to them.
Here was a woman who played life as a queen but was in every way being used as a pawn.
It was enough to put a sour feeling in my gut.
A hand reached across the radio to slap over to a different station, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“Hey, put that back,” came Scarlett after an hour of silence.
Derek blustered. “What, did you know that song?”
“No, but I liked it.”
“You like classical music?” I cut into their bickering to ask.
Her eyes shifted to mine in the rearview mirror, and she nodded. “I took piano lessons for five years before my teacher moved away.”
“Piano lessons are such a rich kid thing to do.” Derek scoffed a deriding laugh, turning his attention over his shoulder to Scarlett. “You also had a pony, didn’t you?”
That’s it.
“Are you done being a dick yet today?”
Derek’s eyes flashed with surprise like he didn’t know he was being such a little dipshit. “I’m not being a dick. I’m making conversation. There’s a difference if you didn’t know.”
“I do know, and what you’re doing right now is not that and it’s not remotely professional. I suggest you stop before she claws your throat out.”
Or I punch your nose through to the back of your fucking skull.
In the backseat, the redhead watched the exchange with curious eyes.
“Oh, and you’re the mark of professionalism? Is that it?”
His tone was drenched in sarcasm that I wanted to drown his smug face in. Picturing him gasping and sucking down wet cuts of air with wild eyes before I smothered him back down into his own filth was the only thing keeping me sane at the moment.
“Is that why you got lost in the woods with the boss's twenty-something-year-old daughter for an entire night? Because you were being ‘professional’ with her?”
Despite Scarlett’s best efforts to fuck that up, yes.