Brody’s mouth was open. Not in surprise. In something more basic. His hands were still on the wheel but no longer gripping it; his fingers had gone slack like those of someone falling asleep. A dark stain was spreading across his gray shirt from a point just below his left collarbone, soaking the fabric with a speed that didn’t seem possible.
“Brody.”
The car veered right. Ren grabbed the wheel with one hand and pulled, but Brody’s foot was still on the accelerator, and the vehicle lurched forward in an erratic arc that carried them out of the lane.
The impact came from Brody’s side.
Metal against metal. The most violent sound Ren had ever heard, a roar of iron that compressed his eardrums and slammed him into the passenger window with a force that emptied his lungs. The seatbelt bit into his chest and shoulder. His head bounced off the side window, which cracked but didn’t give. For a second, maybe two, the world stopped making sense. Up and down blurred together. Gravity pulled him in a direction he didn’t recognize.
Then, silence.
No. Not silence. A sharp, continuous ringing that bored into his left ear. And beneath it, as if through water, Jax’s voice shouting something through the speaker of the phone that had fallen to the floor among the broken glass.
Ren blinked. The taste of blood filled his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue, or his lip, or both. The cap Brody had put on himwas somewhere on the dashboard, crumpled among shards of windshield.
“Brody.”
He looked at him.
The driver’s door no longer existed as such. Brody’s legs were trapped against the seat as the door panel folded inward, a result of the disappeared gray sedan striking with such force, and Ren could see it now embedded in the side of their car like a steel parasite. The steering wheel pinned him against the backrest. The stain on his shirt was no longer a stain; it was an entire map, dark red, spreading from his collarbone to his seatbelt.
Brody’s gray eyes were watching him. Open. Conscious. But with a watery brightness Ren had never seen in them before.
“Get out of the car.”
Brody’s voice didn’t sound like Brody’s voice. It sounded wet. Broken by something that was bubbling inside his chest.
“No.”
Ren unbuckled his seatbelt with fingers that trembled uncontrollably. He turned toward Brody, knelt on his own seat and pressed both hands against his chest. The blood was warm. Warm and slippery, and it wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop. He pressed the wound with both palms, and Brody hissed in pain, arching his back as much as the twisted metal would allow.
“You need to go.”
“Shut up.”
“Ren…”
“I said shut up!”
He tried to move him. Slid his hands under Brody’s arms and pulled. Brody let out a groan, an animal sound that rose from thedeepest part of his chest, and Ren saw why he wasn’t moving: the warped door had him trapped from the knee to the thigh of his left leg. The metal had folded around him like a jaw.
“I can’t get you out.”
The words came out without permission. He hadn’t wanted to say them. Saying it made it real.
“I know.” Brody coughed. A fine spray flecked his lips. “That’s why you have to go.”
Jax’s voice erupted from the floor of the car, from the phone still connected among the shattered glass.
“Ren! REN! Someone answer me, for fuck’s sake!”
Ren lunged down and grabbed the phone. His hand was shaking so badly he nearly dropped it.
“Brody’s been shot! They shot him and I can’t get him out, the door has him pinned!”
“Where are you exactly?”
“I don’t know! Near the mansion, three or four blocks away!”
