“The question is: do you love her enough to let her go?”
My feelings for Molly weren’t mere love; they were obsession and need, a soul-deep connection as necessary to me as air to breathe. If I let Mallory go, I might as well lie down on the earth and die because there wouldn’t be anything like life after. It was twisted and unhealthy as fuck, but I couldn’t expect anything else at this point.
I was a devil. I couldn’t deny it, and now, she probably knew I was a monster who’d had a tracker implanted in her hand and never told her.
But I washermonster, and I could never let her go.
3
MOLLY
When I woke again, the car was stopped. I jerked in my seat and cried out, my hands immediately burning. My wrists had been pulling on the zip tie and were raw. All the blood felt like it had drained out of my arms. I bit down my pained response and looked around me.
Nikolai was nowhere to be seen.
Stillness prickled over me before the urgent need to move and get the hell out of there filled me. We were at a truck stop, and a purple dawn was creeping over the horizon. The inside of the car was all fogged up, and I rubbed my face against the glass to clear it. I jolted as I saw a long, flatbed truck pull into a space not too far away. Nikolai had left me here? He was certainly confident I was out of it. The bottle of water must have been drugged, after all.
I watched as the flatbed driver climbed out and jumped onto the gravel.
I opened my mouth to scream, but only a dry croak came out. Damn it, my mouth was parched and sore from screaming, and I had nothing left to shout with. The trucker was an older man, hardly a match for Nikolai, but I was desperate, and I couldn’t see Kirill’s crazy brother anywhere. I tried to tap on the glass as the man grew closer, but his eyes were downcast at his cell phone, the white light illuminating his kindly features as he walked toward the rest stop.
I tried to scream again, and it came out as a croak. Growing desperate, I searched for some way to attract attention. I lit upon the suddenly brilliant idea to get my heels up and bang them down on the horn, but when I tried, the pain in my arms made me cry when it felt like the zip ties were going to cut my hands right off. I could probably manage it, but not in the few seconds I had before this man passed by.
With a fearlessness born of true desperation, I drew back and lunged at the door, smacking the glass with my forehead to produce a dull thump. The man walked on, undisturbed. With a silent roar, I drew back again and lunged forward, hitting my head so hard my skin split and warmth dripped down my forehead. The trucker’s step faltered as he looked up from his phone and turned his head to look right at me.
“Help! Help me,” I croaked, my eyes staring desperately into his. “Please.”
The old man stopped and blinked at me, clearly horrified by what he was seeing. He hesitated a moment before coming toward the car.“Miss, are you hurt? Who did this?” he asked, his voice muted through the glass.
“Please help me. He’s coming back,” I urged in a rough whisper.
“I’ll get help inside,” the man said.
I frantically shook my head.No. No time!
He must have seen my panic as he stepped toward me. “Well, I can cut you free, but you need to open the door,” he called, assessing the situation. “Can you reach the window winder?”
Right, this was an old car, another junker Nikolai had stolen to cover our tracks. It had an old-fashioned turn handle for the window. With an effort of pure will, I wriggled myself up in the seat, the pain in my wrists making me scream in my raw, soundless throat. I crouched on my heels, lifted one foot, and rolled it across the handle. The window nudged open an inch. I did it again, gritting my teeth and trying to keep my weight off my wrists as much as possible.
Finally, the gap was big enough for the man to reach through.
“Okay now, you’re nearly out. Let me do that for you,” he muttered, reaching in and winding the window down the rest of the way. He leaned into the car to see my wrists before pulling a small pocket knife from his jacket.
“Hot damn, Miss, you’re real cut up,” he said, sounding worried.
“It’s okay. Please, just cut me loose. Don’t worry about it,” I urged him.
Muttering to himself about crazy folks in the world, he started to saw at the zip tie. I cast my eyes desperately around the parking lot as the rising dawn lightened the gloomy shadows with each passing second. Time was running out; I felt it with stone-cold certainty in my belly.
“There we go, Miss,” the man muttered as the last bit of tension loosened from my wrists, and I sagged forward.
I couldn’t even lower my arms quickly. The pain was something else, not to mention they seemed paralyzed in an overhead position.
“We need to call the police,” the man said, backing up.
I put my hands to the window and pulled myself out, hands still raised, landing hard on the ground. “No! No police. I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me. Get in your truck, leave here, and don’t look back.”
“I can’t just leave—”