Page 220 of Breathe Like Hell

A truck flew around the bend, speeding past the dense pine forest with all its secrets and shadows, veering off the shoulder, heading straight towards me so fast I could hardly make sense of what I was looking at.

And for some reason, I couldn’t move.

I just stood there, frozen, watching the glow of headlights swallow the darkness at a speed that felt impossible. A statue of fear.

Time slowed for an instant.

Tires skidding off the road, wind raking through the trees at my back.

I couldn’t move. Even as four thousand pounds of steel barreled directly at me. I was paralyzed, stuck staring at the bright lights magnifying, getting bigger and bigger like two artificial suns. Reflecting in my wide, glassed-over eyes, illuminating my pale face and stiff body, racing toward me.

Prey.

If my predator doesn’t kill me, something else will.

The forest was close, but not close enough. I didn’t have the time or the strength to get there.

I thought again of the dead doe I’d seen on the side of the road all those weeks ago, wondering for the hundredth time if she’d been running or still when she was hit. If she’d died instantly or had to lay there waiting for it to happen. Then I pictured the doe I’d seen disappear into the forest as a child and thought about how I wasn’t sure what noise caused her to run off in the end.

I’d never know those answers.

It didn’t matter now, though.

At the last second, I shut my eyes.

The world is cruel and I can’t run forever.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

MASON

Nothing on Earth could’ve ever prepared me for the sight of a truck slamming into Dakota head-on, going sixty miles an hour.

Her body was thrown in the air, limp the second the vehicle hit her. She crashed back down onto the road, skidding to a stop on the rough asphalt, her body broken and small and unmoving. The truck crashed into a thick pine tree, metal crunching and glass shattering. I could smell her blood from here.

Micah got to her before I did, cradling her bleeding skull in his palms.

She wasn’t screaming, wasn’t whimpering in pain, wasn’t making any noise at all. That lifeless silence rattled something so deeply inside of me I felt like I was going to throw up.

There was so much blood on her face that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Her nose, her ears, lacerations around her hairline. Her lip was split open, and gravel had embedded itself in the soft skin of her cheek, road rash ripping dark and raw along her jaw.

She wasn’t dying.

She was already gone.

The anchor of her in the back of my mind had blinked completely out of existence.

Her fragility had never struck me quite so severely as it did now.

The angles of her limbs were all wrong and the side of her head was crushed, Micah’s fingers pressing against broken skull fragments. I shoved my fingers to her throat, feeling for a pulse and not finding one.

My brain wasn’t working correctly.

Her hair was spread on the pavement like a halo around her head, a pool of blood spreading below her faster than it should. None of the things I was looking at were being processed in my thoughts. As if I was looking at some artificial rendering of Dakota, and not the real girl.

But it was real.

Dakota Masters was laying dead on the pavement right in front of my fucking face.