“You little bitch,” he says.
And I swear, if I could… if I had anything in me that could match him, I would unleash hell right here, right now. He reminds me too much of Duvall. He drags up the same disgust, the same panic, like a match to gasoline.
I slam my head forward.
It’s stupid. It’s desperate. It’s all I have.
My forehead connects with his nose.
It doesn’t matter.
He smiles like I’ve just told him a joke. His elbow snaps up into my jaw. White explodes behind my eyes. My knees buckle. He grabs the back of my head and smashes it into the van panel.
Sound drops out. Cassian’s shout fades into the distance.
Then the dark takes me all at once.
I’ve never blacked out this quickly.
No one has ever treated me this brutally before, not with such total indifference to whether I lived or died. Honestly, it would’ve been a perfectly normal outcome if I’d suffered a brain hemorrhage and dropped dead right there on the spot. But either I got lucky… or it’s my strange nature as a Grim Reaper.
I didn’t die.
I open my eyes.
When I do, I’m somewhere completely unfamiliar. It’s nothing like the parking lot at all.
For a second my brain just stutters, trying to make sense of shadows and cramped space, trying to stitch reality back together. It takes me a moment to realize where I am, but when it clicks, a sharp, sick dread slides straight down my spine.
It’s the back of the fucking van.
I lunge upright like my body is spring-loaded. My shoulder slams into the side panel, pain sparking hot along the joint, but I barely register it. My fingers scrabble blindly for a handle, a latch,anything.
But a guillotine drops behind my eyes.
Pain detonates at my temples. My vision fractures into shards of light and dark, splitting, swimming, refusing to hold steady. My knees buckle before I can catch myself. I hit the floor hard enough that my teeth click, the impact rattling through my skull like it’s hollow.
And then there’s nothing.
For a while, I see and hear absolutely nothing. I don’t know if it’s seconds or minutes. Eventually, I try to move my fingers, but I can’t even tell if I do.
“Hey,” someone whispers close by. “Hey, hey… are you okay?”
My throat works before my vision does.
“I…” I can barely feel my tongue. “Yeah.”
“Shh. Don’t talk so loud.”
My eyes finally manage to focus on something: a smear of darkness pressed into a human shape. I swallow, and the motion scrapes all the way down.
“Who are you?” I ask.
If I could come to my senses, I’d know. But in this moment, whatever understanding I had has been knocked clean out of my head. It’s only when I hear the answer that adrenaline finally punches through the haze, flooding my bloodstream and dragging my focus back into place.
“Hailey,” the whisper says.
She’s still a pale blur in the dark.
