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The beastly form fell away. In the blink of an eye, Arthur was himself again. Devilishly handsome, smug as shit, and grinning maliciously as he slammed the back door shut.

He threw himself in the front seat and peeled out of the driveway before a single coherent thought could take shape in my mind. I wrenched my head around, watching the trailer ruins grow smaller and smaller as we sped out of the trailer park. Darkness enveloped it as soon as the flashing lights shut off.

When I spun back around, I drew a single breath to scream at him, “How did you even find us!” My first thought, and maybe not the question I ought to have wasted my initial breath on.

I should have been cursing him out, not trying to hold a reasonable conversation.

He chuckled darkly under his breath and whipped the truck onto the state route in front of another early riser on the road that blared his horn loudly at Arthur for cutting him off.

“Well... Everly, of course,” Arthur intoned.

My world went still. Distantly, my heart thundered in my ears, but I couldn’t sense anything else. No sight, smell, or sound. Just the pounding of betrayal in my chest and head.

I didn’t know how Everly could have done it, but a hazy memory filtered back in of Shira’s phone screen before dinner. When I’d turned it on, finding a dozen notifications, then going to the messaging app. There had been a number right below Riss’s I didn’t recognize. A number I didn’t give any credence to because why would I ever suspect my sister would steal Shira’s phone to text her captor?

How could she... After everything I went through to get her back, she brought it all crashing down on top of us, literally, with a single text.

My second and third thoughts grew a little clearer. As my body started to shake, rage bubbling up inside me, I realized this could only go one of two ways.

Either I would be dead at the end of this drive, or he would.

There was no point asking for details. No point finding out what malicious plan he had in store. I had plenty of imagination for that.

No, I devoted my brain power to something else. Something far more demanding had been stirring in me for days. Maybe weeks. Maybe years.

Something dark and twisted and wrong. Something wicked that thirsted for vengeance.

I leaned back in my seat, crossing my arms over my chest best I could with one of them cuffed to the door handle. Then I fixed Arthur with a coy glare in the rearview mirror.

“You’re actually the exact person I want to see right now.”

“Huh?” He rightfully looked confused, but it was his own fault for misjudging me. For thinking I was anything like Everly, albeit a more stubborn variation.

My lips twisted in a smirk. He didn’t have a clue what was coming for him. Neither did I, if I was being honest, but as my free hand closed around the handle of the gun in my pocket, I let the monster in me free.

It said, “I can’t wait to get started.”

Chapter 40

The moments alone with Arthur blurred into a small eternity that lasted less than a minute. Before we’d made it more than a mile away from the development, the gun fired three times, and in that span of a few breaths, Arthur semi-shifted, swerved on black ice, hit the guard rail, and rolled the car four times. His eyes had flashed like fire, steam had filled the car, and blood splatters had suspended themselves in midair as gravity’s axis spun out of control.

When time returned to normal, I was still attached to the door via the handcuffs, but the door was no longer attached to the car. I half-remembered skidding across the road on the door like a bobsled before slowing to a dead stop.

An oppressive silence rang in my ears while something warm and damp trickled from my nose. Salt and iron reached my lips that I licked away absentmindedly.

Gun. Gun, where’s the gun?

I pushed up and immediately collapsed back on the car door as my entire body gave out. Every inch of me protested from my bruised and possibly broken wrist, to my legs that just wouldn’t respond anymore. I’d reached my physical limits.

But my anger wasn’t satiated.

My eyes flitted about wildly, skating over the smoking wreck bent around a tree off the side of the road. When at last I spied the handle of the gun in a pile of slushy snow and dirty salt chunks, I acted on instinct the only way I could—I began to crawl.

The car door scraped behind me as I pathetically made my way back towards the remains of the car. If Arthur was still inside, I didn’t have seconds to spare. My heart pounded erratically and drowned out every other sound until I was inches from the black handle, reaching out my scraped up, bloody fingers towards it.

Broken glass rattled inside the wreck.

I gasped raggedly and froze, eyes trained on the car as something big and black shifted around inside. Its shadow pushed against the dented roof.