Trinity freezes, her eyes wide as saucers. I need to educate this woman on the fight-or-flight response. She must’ve been absent the day they taught that in class.
I rip open the van door and push her forward. “Get in.” As she fumbles with her seat belt, I hustle to the driver’s side, hot-wire the ignition again, and toss the package in her lap. “Open it. That’s too big to carry easily.”
Then I peel out of the parking lot, not especially excited about putting the soccer-mom mobile to the test against an angry fleet of Russian mercenaries.
Chapter 30
Trinity
“Open the damn box, Trinity.”
“I’m trying! Don’t yell at me!” I claw at the tape with my nails, my fingers trembling as Brody drives as fast as possible down the narrow residential street.
This is no place for a game of Catch the Minivan. There are walkers, joggers, bikers, electric scooters, anddogwalkers everywhere. Despite that, Brody’s handling the situation the way he has every harrowing “event” we’ve suffered through thus far.
I touch his veiny forearm, the muscles shrink-wrapped beneath olive skin and ink. “Can I do anything to help?”
He slants me one quick glance. “Oh, now you’re talking to me?”
“I was never not talking to you.” I jerk my hand back and curl it into my fist on my lap. “There’s a lot happening. I was just processing.”
“Processing.” His knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. “Sure.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Hold on.”
He takes a sharp right next to a park. I grab the dash, my heart flying in my throat.
The walkers-joggers-bikers-skaters just multiplied like mosquitos after a heavy rain. “We should get out of the city. Otherwise, we’re going to kill somebody, and we only murder bad people, right?”
“‘We’ don’t murder anybody. Get your shit together and open the box.”
Brody blows through a yellow light that changes to red before he enters the intersection, causing one of the innocent bystanders to scream. “Look where you’re driving!”
I clutch my seat belt, too scared to watch the Dodge narrowly scraping its way through pedestrians but also too anxious to glimpse away.
Brody continues accelerating down the street. “We want to be in a high traffic area. We can’t out-drive them, so we need to slow them down and give them a reason to not shoot our tires out.”
He checks the rearview mirror, and I spin around to peer through the back windshield.
The caravan of Escalades is close, just a few cars separating us from the leader of the pack. “I should’ve killed Andrei when I had the chance.” I face forward, clutching the half-open box to my chest. “I’m sorry.”
“We’d be getting chased by Andrei’s thugs whether you killed him with that frying pan or not.” Brody shoots me the briefest of smiles. “And you’re no killer, princess.”
His words are meant to be kind. Reassuring. How he finds the time to provide encouragement when he’s literally driving for our lives is beyond me. Even while my common sense screams at me to not get any more attached, warmth spreads in my chest like wildfire.
Two nights ago, after the best sex of my life, Brody switched on the dome light to find a spare shirt to clean up, and all I could fixate on was the trail of blood running down the back of his leg.
He pulled a stitch. Not a big deal, in the grand scheme of things, but…it felt like a message.
A reminder from the universe about the fragility of love. That what I love dies.
Since Angelica passed, my life has been a long, lonely walk of penance. Solitude is my destiny. This is how I’ve maintained focus on finding the people responsible for her death.
I can’t bring her back. My mission to hunt down her murderers is all I have left, and I need to walk that path alone.
Still, my walls cracked for the first time when we spent the night in the minivan. Brody busted through concrete-reinforced steel with a wrecking ball. As the stone broke free, I saw my life’s purpose slipping away.
