Page 28 of Risk It All
The car’s wheels grabbed the asphalt and propelled them forward. Cara sent up a prayer of thanks that their vehicle, although battered and crumpled in spots, was still functional. They flew up the incline and around another curve, and Cara locked her gaze on the side-view mirror, watching for the pursuing SUV.
“What’s the plan?” she asked, needing to know. Right now, she felt like they were just flying by the seat of their pants, and that didn’t work for her. Unless it was an impulse stop by an ice cream shop, she wasn’t a fan of spontaneity…especially when it became a matter of life and death.
Kavenski flicked her a lightning-quick glance before focusing on his driving again. “I told you. Get to the next town. Drop you off at the PD there.”
“How far is that, do you know?” She hated the idea of darting to safety while he drove off with SUVs full of professional killers still following him, but she knew she wouldn’t win that argument. In fact, he probably wouldn’t even participate in that argument. Her brain spun with possible alternative plans. She couldn’t stop shivering, although she wasn’t sure whether it was from the cold or from stress and fear. The wind whistling through the car had grown icier, and patches of snow were caught on protrusions in the rock wall bordering one side of the road. They’d started pretty high up, judging from the thin, dry air at the cabin, and they were climbing even higher.
“Five or six miles.” The engine gave an unhealthy-sounding shriek as they rounded the next turn.
Cara felt her lips pull down into a grimace. Five miles seemed like a long way when being pursued by kidnappers with higher-powered vehicles. Her gaze moved to the side-view mirror again, and her heart gave a sharp snap in her chest. The SUV following them around the turn was barreling toward their back bumper. “Incoming!”
Before the SUV could connect, Kavenski jerked the wheel to the left. They flew over the center line into the oncoming-traffic lane. The SUV darted up next to them, and Cara found herself staring at the driver just a few feet away from her window. The ski mask covering the driver’s face made the whole situation so much worse. She stared, mute with fear, as he lowered his window and lifted a handgun…pointing it directly at her.
Chapter 9
Kavenski said something too low for Cara to hear over the rush of the wind and the thrum of her frantically beating heart. The car shot forward just as the gun went off. With a sharp crack, the back-seat window shattered, the safety glass crumbling around a gaping hole.
“Cara!” Kavenski yelled, reaching toward her as if he was going to retroactively ward off a bullet with his bare hand.
“I’m okay!” She was screaming the words, unable to believe that she hadn’t been hit. “It missed me! I’m not hit!”
Cara couldn’t stop twisting her head around and staring at the shattered window, knowing how close that bullet had come. The broken glass made her feel even more vulnerable as the SUV started catching up to them again.
Forcing herself to face front, she realized that Kavenski was still trying to check her over for injuries while he drove. “Just drive!” she ordered, gesturing toward the windshield. “I’m fine.”
Even though his expression was grimmer than she’d ever seen it, he turned his full attention back to the road. Bracing for the next turn, Cara felt her arms shake as she clung to the door with one hand and the dash with the other. A part of her randomly wondered if there was such a thing as overdosing on adrenaline. If so, she had to be approaching her limit—ifshe hadn’t already shot by it.
Their car flew around the sharp curve, centrifugal force pulling her toward Kavenski. Her arm ached with the effort of holding on to the door handle, the cliff edge too close for comfort. From the way that he kept glancing at the narrow shoulder, Kavenski didn’t seem too happy about their position, either.
As they rounded the final part of the turn, the car skipped sideways, the tires squealing as they sought to find traction. Cara’s fingers tightened as she cringed back against her door, certain that they were going to fly off the road and tumble to their deaths. Metal screeched against metal as the side of the car scraped against the guardrail, and Cara hoped desperately that her text to Molly had gone through. If she was going to die on this mountain, she at the very least wanted all her sisters to know that she loved them before she was literally flung off a cliff.
The car bounced off the guardrail toward the center of the road, straightening and shooting forward. Cara blinked several times before the truth sank in. “We’re not dead?”
“Not yet,” Kavenski answered through a set jaw, his fingers pale as he gripped the wheel.
Sinking as far down in her seat as her seat belt would allow, Cara stared through the damaged windshield, willing the town to pop up in front of them. Instead, a dark shape appeared, and her spine snapped straight. The shattered glass, held together only by the inner film, mottled the scene in front of her, making it impossible to make out any details…except that it was getting bigger—fast. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“Truck.” The way Kavenski snapped out the word made it sound like a warning, but there was nothing she could do except sit there and watch the distorted blob get larger and larger. She sent a frantic glance to her right, checking if, by some miracle, the lane next to them had opened up, only to see the masked driver pushing the SUV faster and faster until the two vehicles were almost parallel. Despite the driver’s face being covered, she could still see the gleeful look, the cold amusement that she and Kavenski and some innocent truck driver were all about to die. There was nowhere for their car to go.
Kavenski suddenly braked, making Cara lurch forward before the seat belt and her grip on the dash stopped her. The first SUV shot past them, but the second managed to stop, filling the right lane as effectively as the other one had. The truck in front of them blared its horn, long blasts that turned wavery in Cara’s ears as time seemed to slow. The semi was getting so close that it filled the windshield, blocking out everything else. She could only stare and listen to the thrum and hiss of air brakes as she waited to be obliterated.
As she braced her feet against the floor, both hands in front of her on the dash—despite knowing that none of that would do any good when they were hit head-on by a freaking semi truck—the car jerked to the left. The unexpected movement startled Cara out of her fatalistic paralysis, and she turned her head to look at Kavenski. The car shot toward the edge of the road, flying over the miniscule shoulder and over the edge of the drop-off, just as the semi hurtled by behind them.
They weren’t going to be obliterated by the truck after all. No, they were going to be smashed to bits at the bottom of the cliff.
Cara’s frightened scream somehow turned into an inhale instead, ripping against her throat and getting trapped inside her lungs. The tires bounced off the rocks, picking up speed with each jounce. When her terrified mental scream eased enough for her to think, she realized that they weren’t in the free fall she’d expected. Instead, they were on a steep rocky slope, one that she would hesitate to hike down, much less drive.
“Did you just hurl us off a freaking cliff?” she demanded once she’d recovered enough to speak. Her voice still held a terrified squeak, but she felt that higher pitch was fully justified. “I thought the whole goal was tonotfling ourselves into the void!”
The car hit a sapling, shooting them to the right. “Better this than…” He paused as the car hit a particularly big rock and they went airborne for a horrifyingly long moment. The car landed again, bouncing hard enough to make Cara’s teeth clack together, and then continued hurtling down the mountainside. Kavenski picked up where he’d left off, as if there hadn’t even been a pause. “…being hit by that semi.”
Cara watched, terrified, as rocks and evergreen branches flew by her window fast enough to blur. At the moment, this didn’t seem like a much better alternative than instant death. At least that would be over fast. Watching their downward slide was too terrifying, so she turned and latched her gaze on Kavenski. In just the short time she’d known him, she’d started to rely on his unflappable expression to calm her down. Whether they’d be crushed to death at the bottom of the cliff or not, her screaming and flailing wasn’t going to help. Staring at him, she could almost believe that he was still driving on a gravel road—well, a really bumpy, terrifyingly treacherous gravel road.
There were subtle signs of tension in him, now that she was looking so closely. He had a death grip on the wheel, and his jaw was clenched so tightly that there were white streaks underneath his tan complexion. But even as they basically tumbled uncontrollably down a mountain, he was still in control, fighting to keep the car going in the general direction he wanted it to go.
Dust, thick and choking, billowed up from behind the car and drifted into the broken rear window. Releasing the dash with one hand, she covered her mouth and nose with her arm, trying to breathe through the fabric of her hoodie to filter the air slightly. The right side of the car lifted, bucking underneath her as it hit ground again. A loudbangechoed across the cliffside, and the jolting became a hundred times worse.
“Blown tire?” she asked, her voice still embarrassingly high-pitched. Just when she’d started to think that things might miraculously work out, something like this happened.
