Page 43 of Poisoned Promise
I tell myself it’ll be okay.
Over and over, I repeat it as we weave through empty streets and onto a long, singular road.
My car starts spluttering every so often and lurches back as if it can't keep up with the current speed.
Every stutter and falter gives the car behind a chance to catch up.
And then start to overtake.
“Felix,” I say, glancing to the side. “Shit, Felix. Tell me you’re close. Tell me you’re fucking close!”
“Almost!” Felix replies, having remained on the call the entire time. “I’m almost there, Dove. I’m almost there.”
“If they kill me,” I gasp as the car crawls forward. Its front door moves parallel to my back door and my heart pounds up into my throat. Sweat breaks out across my forehead and my clammy palms slip against the steering wheel.
“They won’t kill you,” Felix says sternly.
“But if they do—!” Alex’s face floods my mind as the car pulls back a few inches until the front of the car is parallel with the trunk of mine. Then they crash into me and the moment my back wheels fail, my stomach flies up into my chest.
The car spins violently. I’m thrown against the door with my head cracking into the glass. White-hot pain spears through my temple and another crunch of metal echoes through the air.
“Felix!”
I spin and the tailing car speeds forward, slamming into the side of me and sending us both crashing off the road and catching on the cusp of a dark embankment.
“Dove!”
12
FELIX
“Toph!”
“I know!” Toph milks everything he can from the car as we race down the dark road. Trees whip past the windows as fast as my heart races, becoming a blur of sensation in my chest as the call from Dove falls dead.
She called me.
Me.
She reached out to me and now I’m not going to get to her in time.
Panic this intense hasn’t gripped me in years, but in the painfully long minutes it takes for us to locate Dove’s car, it’s like someone’s got my heart in their fist and is squeezing as tight as they can.
Nausea curls in my gut and sweeps up with a pulse of warmth as Toph suddenly slams on the brakes, making us skid to a stop while the headlights illuminate the carnage in front of us.
One car, presumably Dove’s, with a cracked windscreen and dented door, rests awkwardly on the edge of the road tilted down toward the embankment while another with a smashed headlight and windscreen takes up the rest of the road.
The beam from that singular headlight focuses on two people grappling on the road and my heart punches up into my throat.
“Dove!” I’d recognize her hair anywhere.
Ripping the seatbelt free, I fly from the car and sprint toward the two people.
A man kneels on top of her, holding her by the hair with one hand and slamming his fist into her face with the other.
He punches her again and she yelps, then I throw myself forward and body slam into the assailant.
We land hard a few feet away and roll once until I’m on top, then I grab him by the collar. My fist crashes into his face and blood spurts in all directions as hot as the anger flooding through me.
