The car sped off, fishtailing halfway down the road, and I took off toward Cassie’s Honda, my anger bubbling over when I threw myself in the backseat. “Follow him!”
The engine screamed like a yowling cat when she floored the accelerator to catch up.
“Damn, he hot-wired that thingfast,” she said, an air of admiration in her voice.
I wanted to tell her that crap was a trap, but she was already a lost cause where deviants and bad boys were concerned.
She swerved around another string of overturned garbage cans—probably Wolf’s doing. “Does this mean we don’t get to set it on fire?”
“You can.Ifyou can catch him…” Monroe said.
I knew she thought that was unlikely, but I was full of anger and determined as hell.
I leaned between the front seats, staring at the Challenger winding through the dilapidated back roads ahead of us. “Oh, we’re burning it.”
Wolf would try to sell it—a car he never would have touched if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted it. He just had to profit from my misery.
Cassie hooked a right at the crooked stop sign, barely able to keep up in her tiny car.
“Drive faster, Cassie!” I shouted.
“I can’t get another ticket!”
She wasn’t looking at me, but I deadpanned the rearview anyway. “If a cop passes us, who do you think they’re pulling over? Us, or the speeding Challenger with the smashed-outwindow and a walking rap sheet behind the wheel?” I glanced at Monroe. “What’s he on now? Three, four arrests?”
Monroe snorted. “As if the Pikestown cops will care. He’s their beloved number thirteen.”
Bitterness tinged the back of my throat at that truth. Wolf Brookes was the best football player Pikestown had seen in years and their best chance of getting their team into the conference championship.
The Challenger disappeared around a pine tree-lined bend. When Cassie rounded the same corner a few seconds later, it had vanished. Just gone. Of course he’d lost us. He was used to losing the police, for God’s sake. Three girls in a ratty Honda were nothing.
Gravel crunched under tires when Cassie pulled onto the shoulder. She glanced around her tattered headrest, an apologetic look on her face. “I mean, Brent still lost his car, right?”
“It’s not the same.”
He hadn’t looked out of his window and cried at the sight of it in flames on his drive. God, how I’d wanted those tears. What it came down to was: I hadn’t been the one to screw him over.
“And now, Wolf-fucking-Brookes is going to profit frommyshitty ex.”
“You weren’t going to profit when you torched it,” Monroe said.
I dropped my forehead against her seat. “You know he only did that to spite me.”
She let out a breath. “I’m sorry I told him.”
“It’s okay.”
I was disappointed, but there was a tiny part of me that delighted in the fact that I clearly still bothered Wolf in some way. I might have ignored him, but he couldn’t ignore me, itseemed. He couldn’t just go home and forget all about me… He wasn’t indifferent.
Still, the thought of him getting a fat wad of cash while I’d had to sell my moralsanddignity just to survive these past few months enraged me.
No, that Challenger was supposed to be mine. To steal, to burn, to cover in damn glitter if I wanted to… If I couldn’t have my revenge bonfire, then I was getting that money.
Two
Wolf
The gate to Billy’s scrapyard closed behind me with a metallic bang.