Page 58 of Sinners Atone
Confused, but not stupid enough to argue, I turn around and start my journey home.
Unfortunately, leaving the bright lights of Cove doesn’t mean I get to leave him behind too. He falls in step behind me, his shadow stretching out along the road in the glow from the headlights trailing us.
The sight of it is starting to make me panic.
“You have a weapon?”
Gritting my teeth, I pick up my pace, trying to keep distance between us. “What, like pepper spray?”
“Like a gun.”
I choke out a laugh. I’d think he was kidding if I thought this man was capable of cracking a joke. “No,” I state. “It wouldn’t fit in my purse.”
His angry glare bores into my back. “So you can’t fight, can’t protect yourself. You wear those ridiculous shoes that you definitely can’t run in, and yet, you still insist on walking these streets alone after dark.” He mutters a curse under his breath. “You know what happens to girls like you?”
“They make it home safe and sound because bad things don’t happen on the coast.”
“They end up as a statistic on a Wikipedia page,” he spits back.
My heart flips, and the road ahead jolts. The irony comes out of left field and punches me in the gut, landing too close to home.
Good, I think bitterly. Because nothing else I do seems to finish that goddamn sentence.
His comment has thrown my thoughts off track, and now all I can focus on is the dreaded midnight email waiting for me when I get home. But it’s also behind the safety of mylockedfront door, so I force myself to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
“What, you wanna be kidnapped? Raped? Murdered?” he carries on, voice growing darker by the syllable. “You’re a walking target. A sitting duck. And what the fuck were you thinking, putting your location on Instagram?”
My spine straightens, and I come to an abrupt stop. Curiosity and surprise spin me around. “You looked at my Instagram?”
He stands in the middle of the road, his looming frame backlit by the car’s headlights, and regards me with a look of contempt so violent my wrist burns from the memory of his grip.
I wait for the familiar shiver of trepidation, but it doesn’t come. My head is still in the phonebooth, along with the worst part of my soul. I hate that he brought it out of me.
Hate that he just won’t go away.
Fueled by frustration, I tilt my chin and return his glare. “I’m not a damsel in distress, and while I appreciate the concern, I don’t need your help. Besides,” I add, fumbling around in my collar for the cord hanging from my neck, “I have a whistle for emergencies.”
When met with his blank stare, I start to feel all itchy, so I give the whistle a pathetic toot. “See? More than capable of getting out of sticky situations.”
A dense beat passes. Then another.
His nostrils flare as his eyes fall to my lips and harden to black ice. Rage radiates out of every pore, and when he steps toward me, I wonder, for a heart-stopping second, if those hands I’m still thinking about will find their way to my throat.
It’s worse. They find their way to my hips instead, and then I’m balancing over his shoulder, staring at my whistle as it swings in and out of my vision.
“Wait!” I squeal, kicking my legs against the iron-clad grip on my calves. “Put me down!”
My plea falls on deaf ears, and the ground moves beneath Gabriel’s boots in a gray blur. The glow from the headlights spread wider, and so does the knot in my throat. I stuff the whistle back in my mouth and shout for help between loud, desperate blows.
He’s rough when he folds me in half. Even rougher when he drops me into the open car trunk.
And when the ink, scar, andgreendisappear behind the falling door, his voice is the roughest thing of all.
“Get out of this sticky situation, then.”
“Jonah was a real man. Six foot, biceps the circumference of my waist. He was fresh meat, straight off a plane from Cape Town. You ever look at someone and just know you’d make beautiful babies? ’Cause I was a smoke show back then too, even after I had a kid. Every time I stepped out to the store, I’d turn more heads than a car crash.” Her laugh breaks into a crackling smokers cough. “Not that you’d know it from my mugshot, of course.”
She’ll rant about her mugshot for the next ten minutes, so I pick up the angle grinder and drown her out with the sound of metal scraping metal. Green sparks fly, and the garage fills with the smell of burned dust.
