I stuck my unwounded hand beneath the plexiglass and grabbed his arm. The car swerved to the right, onto the shoulder of the road, and he righted the wheel with his lefthand.
“Stop it!” He jabbed at my hand with his elbow, but I grabbed it again and hung on. “Kaci! Stop! You’re going to wreckus!”
“Then pull over!” I let go of his right elbow, then I reached under the shield to the left of the driver’s seat and grabbed his left arm. The car swerved to theleft.
“Damn it!” He turned right, over-corrected, and the car began to spin. “Fuck!”
I grabbed the broken “oh shit” handle and held on while he tried to control the car. But the spin was tootight.
An inarticulate scream filled the vehicle as it tipped into a roll, and I didn’t realize I was the one screaming until my impact with the roof knocked the breath—and the shriek—right out ofme.
Glass crunched and metal groaned. The roof of the car dented toward me. Then we were rolling again. And again. I slammed into the roof, and the rear windshield, and the plexiglass. By the time the car finally came to a halt, I was bleeding from several gashes on my forearms and one on my head, and I could no longer read the letters I’d written on the rear windshield. Both because my vision was swimming and because I’d smeared them more with everyimpact.
Jared groaned from the frontseat.
I pushed myself upright and realized I was sitting on the roof of the car, my head brushing the seat bottom aboveme.
“Kaci?” My name sounded slushy coming from Jared’s mouth. I peered through a clean spot on the bloody plexiglass to see him blinking sluggishly, barely conscious, hanging upside down in his seat, pinned by his seatbelt.
I really should have worn one ofthose.
There was a gash on his forehead and a smear of blood on the steering wheel. I felt bad for a second. Hurting him hadn’t been my goal. But then I banished guilt from mymind.
The bastard kidnapped me. He deserved what he got. Which was a concussion and one hell of an explanation to make up for thepolice.
Not to mention his Alpha/grandfather.
I had to be gone before either of those happened. But the back doors were still locked and the plexiglasshadn’t—
Wait. Our roll had dented the roof hard enough for it to hit the top of the plexiglass shield. Shoving it downward and ripping free the screws that had held it in place on the passenger’s side. The panel was halfloose.
Heart pounding, I grabbed the right edge in both hands, trying to ignore how much blood now covered my arms and was still oozing from various cuts and scrapes. And how badly my headthrobbed.
Seated on the roof of the car, I braced my feet against the bottom—now the top—of the passenger’s side door and wrapped my fingers around the top—now the bottom—of the plexiglass. Then I pulled with every bit of strength Ihad.
The panel creaked. Or maybe that was the remaining screws holding it in place. My vision began to swim from the strain—or maybe a concussion—but I pulled harder. Then, suddenly, the plexiglas snapped in half, about a foot from the remaining screws holding it to the driver’sseat.
I fell back from the momentum, and the broken slab of shield smacked me in the face. I folded it back all the way, edging around it until I could slither beneath the headrest of the front passenger’s seat and open the frontdoor.
“Kaci!” Jared sounded more alert. His eyes were open. He fumbled with his seatbelt, struggling to press the button with hands that obviously weren’t communicating very well with his brainyet.
I crawled out of the car into the dirt and stood, bracing myself against the inverted vehicle until my head stoppedspinning.
“Kaci!” Jared’s seatbelt clicked, then there was a thump, followed by a groan as hefell.
I stumbled back from the car, wiping a paste of my own blood mixed with dirt onto my pants, and took a look around. It was still mid-day, the sun high in the sky and already baking the top of my head. Not a good time to be stranded in the Nevadadesert.
Assuming this was even Nevada. We might still be in Utah. Or maybe Arizona. I hadn’t paid attention to the signs we’d passed and without my phone, I had no idea how long I’d been locked in the back of thatcar.
But the reason the car had flipped was suddenly obvious. We’d passed the soft, sloping shoulder I’d been aiming for and rolled off a steeper incline into the dirt at the base of a series of hills. Unfortunately, there was nowhere for me to hide in the barren, craggy landscape, and I saw no houses I could run to forhelp.
There was nothing but dessert brush and rockyhills.
So, I shoved hair back from my face, smearing sticky blood paste across my temples, then ran up the incline toward the highway as fast as I could make my traumatized, disoriented bodygo.
“Kaci!”
I looked back when I got to the road and saw Jared’s head and torso sticking out of the same door I’d opened, clutching at the dirt to pull himself out of the vehicle. Damn it. I’d hoped he’d be incapacitated. Or at leastunconscious.
