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The road we were on had no street lamps, and all I could see were trees. The road beneath us didn’t feel paved, more like gravel or dirt. The man had shaggy brown hair and was wearing a dark t-shirt, but that was all I could see of him. His build was hard to make out since my head was positioned right behind the driver’s seat.
My mind was still hazy from whatever he’d fucking injected me with. My vision kept going double and I had a pounding headache.
But I was alive.
I surreptitiously tugged at the zip ties, testing the tightness. They weren’t loose enough to slip my hands through.
“How ya doin’ back there?”
I froze. Fuck, he’d caught me—
“Girl, you are gonna make me a rich, rich man,” he said, half-singing the last few words. I closed my eyes, sagging with relief when I realized he was just talking to what he thought was an unconscious body. Fucking asshole. “What luck, huh? Thorne was smart to release that footage to the news. I never woulda found you. Maybe I’ll pull over and get a taste of you before handing you off.” He laughed and started humming to himself.
Another wave of fury rolled through me, and I opened my eyes again, glaring at the back of his head. What I wouldn’t give to have my goddamn pocket knife right now.
Something briefly glinted on the floor, and I looked down. Glanced back up at what little I could see of the man’s head to make sure he was still facing forward.
I inched as slowly as I could toward the edge of the seat and peered over it. A bunch of tools were scattered across the floor, a dirty towel partially covering them. From what I could make out, there was a screwdriver, some kind of paint scraper, a chisel, a hammer…
An array of weapons lay beneath me.
What a fucking idiot.
I let my gaze fall on the screwdriver again. The handle was facing towards me. I raised my eyes to his neck, visible through the break in the head rest and the top of his seat. Anger and disgust rolled through me.
Court was going to be so upset. He was going to think I’d abandoned him again. That I’d willingly left.
Those thoughts only fed my anger until it had spread through my entire body. I pushed against the opposite door with the balls of my feet, inching my body further up the seat. When the car hit something in the road—a rock, a tree branch, whatever the fuck it was—I was able to jostle myself up even more until I thought I could move my hands without him noticing.
Keeping my eyes glued to the back of his head, I slowly reached down until I felt the handle of the screwdriver with my fingers. I rolled it into my palm, then froze when the tip of it hit another metal object and made a loud noise.
“Shit, forgot to put the tools in the trunk,” he muttered to himself.
I let out a quiet breath, gripped the screwdriver, and waited. When the car hit another bump and jolted, I lunged up and plunged the screwdriver into the back of his neck.
“Ugh—”
The car swerved sharply to the left, accelerating quickly off the road and into the trees.
Fuck.
I ducked my head and covered it with my hands, screaming as it kept accelerating. I was whipped into the door, my head cracking against the window when the car smashed into a tree. The momentum tossed me from the seat onto the floor, a sharp blow piercing my side. It felt like I’d been punched, all the air knocked out of me. When all movement stopped, I sucked in a breath.
Dazed, I blinked a few times as something ticked repeatedly from the front of the car. A horrible pain flared through my side. Sitting up with a groan, I let my gaze fall on the man in the front seat. He was slumped forward, face pressed into the steering wheel, one of his arms at an unnatural angle, the screwdriver sticking out of the back of his neck. A trickle of blood disappeared into his shirt.
I sat in the back seat for a few moments, catching my breath and watching him, making sure he wouldn’t move again. The ticking kept going, the headlights illuminating the beginnings of a dark forest. I realized the ticking was one of the blinkers, a yellow light flashing in sync with the sound.
I had to move.
Leaning away from the door, I grabbed onto the handle and pulled it, shoving the car door open with effort. I was still annoyingly weak, and after crashing into a tree without a seatbelt on, I was a little more than lightheaded.
I stumbled out of the car, my legs giving out beneath me, then cried out when the pain in my side multiplied and stole my breath. I lay there panting, then looked down at my feet.
Shit. I’d forgotten my ankles were tied, too. Rolling onto my side, then my stomach so I could get to my hands and knees, I shuffled back to the open door and steadied myself on the foothold. I rifled through the tools on the floor, pawing through useless item after useless item until a small pair of pruning shears was revealed beneath the filthy towel.
Awkwardly turning them toward me blade-first, it took a few tries to get the zip tie between the fat blades, but then I was snipping free of the ties and doing the same to the ones on my ankles. I fell back and lay panting up at the sky, the exhaust pouring out of the tailpipe reminding me that the car was still on and the dead guy still had his foot on the accelerator.
Shit.
