“Why?” I grit out. “Why Madison?”
Vincent tsks. “Come on, Mackenzie. You know it was never supposed to be Madison.”
It’s like he’s somehow managed to snag the air from my lungs. It’s like he has the organ in a vise, and he’s squeezing, making sure I can’t pull in a stable breath. He’s suffocating me without laying a single finger on me.
I choke, stray tears of anger leaking. “Why me?”
“You were the easiest target. You were the one no one would miss.”
Everything I’ve ever felt about myself crashes down. Suffocating me. Drowning me. All of it tenfold. It’s one thing to feel that way about yourself, but to listen to someone speak it into existence, to hear that a group of assholes thought the same thing is truly heartbreaking.
Not only was I deemed unimportant enough not to be missed after being murdered, but I also got my sister killed in the process. It was never meant to be her. It was supposed to be me.
It was always supposed to be me.
The realization is a punch to the gut. I press down on the accelerator once we reach the winding road that trails around the state park.
“You’re a bastard,” I whisper-hiss, pressing down harder on the accelerator.
“Slow the fuck down, you psycho bitch. This is a fucking cliff.”
“You took everything from me.”
My vision is blurring, the edges are quaking, and a spill of red is leaking into my line of sight, blinding me. My anger is boiling in my veins, thrumming through every nerve and cell, so much so, my jaw is aching with how hard I’m grinding my teeth.
“You had nothing to begin with!” Vincent suddenly shouts, making me jump unexpectedly. My hands jerk on the wheel, and the car swerves dangerously close to the edge of the cliff for a second.
“Keep it the fuck together, Mackenzie!” he shouts, sounding slightly panicked.
I slam my eyes shut, shaking my head, trying to get rid of all the voices that are on a boisterous repeat.
I can hear my sister shouting the same words at me, “Keep it together, Kenzie!”
My mom in her soft chastising lilt, “Please,, sweetie, calm down.”
My dad’s rough, deep, reproachful baritone, “Get yourself together, Mack.”
My grandpa’s soothing tone. “You got this, Peanut. Hold it together.”
The voices are blending. They’re growing in volume like blaring sirens in my ears. I can’t hear myself think. I can’t focus.
“Open your fucking eyes, you dumb bitch!” Vincent curses. He grips the wheel, yanking it, and the car jerks. My eyes fly open, and I realize we’re losing control. My anger, my guilt, my sadness, all of it combusts, and like a rubber band snapping beyond its point, I let go of the wheel and start blindly swinging at Vincent.
He shouts, trying to hold on to the gun and keep the car on the road, all the while trying to fight me off. My gaze snags on the pistol, and I start fighting him for it. I don’t realize it, but my foot presses harder on the accelerator. He fights. His fist slams into my face repeatedly, but I keep trying, fighting against the binds of my seat belt.
My fingers curl around the cool handle, and just as I try to yank it toward me, he curses, and next thing I know, we’re airborne. I slam on the brakes blindly. The tires screech until there’s no more road for them to screech against. Everything follows in slow motion. My grip on the gun falls, and darkness and trees swirl past the window as we spin like we’re on a Tilt-a-Whirl. My stomach jolts, and bile rises.
The scraping noises come second, then pain.
The sound of glass shattering. Pain.
The sound of metal crunching. Pain.
The sound of my own scream. So much pain.
When I wake, it’s in a world of agony. I’m shrouded in darkness. There’s something tight banding across my body. And the smell. Christ, what is that smell?
Something drips. It sounds like the faucet back at my old apartment. No matter how tightly you close the valve after shutting the water off, it still drips.
Drip, drip, drip.
Slowly, I blink my heavy eyes open and try to move, but in doing so, pain rips across my body, and I choke from the overwhelming agony. I try to see past the darkness, but everything is black. I slam my eyes shut and open again, but each time, nothing changes. I hear a sharp intake of breath beside me, and though it takes all my strength, I crane my neck to the side, finding Vincent, hovering upside down. It takes me a second to realize we’re both upside down.
The car must’ve rolled down the cliff, and when I look out his window, I can see the moonlight streaming in and the trees. I glance toward my side, and it’s pitch-black.
It takes me a second to process. To realize I’m trapped. My door and my side of the windshield are against the earth and a tree, caging me in. Tears of fear and pain spring to my eyes.
I take stock of Vincent. He’s hanging, covered in blood, but his eyes, pinched with pain, watch me closely.
I try to get my body to move. Anything I can do to run and get away from him, but he must see the calculating gleam because he starts reaching to unlatch his seat belt. His entire face shrouds with pain.
“Fuck!” he hollers as he unlocks his seat belt. His body slumps forward, and the car rocks dangerously. Outside his window, I can only see the sky and the tops of the trees. I can’t tell if we’re on flat land or if one more quick movement will have the car rolling again.
I try to move, but pain rips through my body again, keeping me immobile. When I look down, a sob catches in my throat. There’s a shard of something sticking out of my body. The sight of it makes me even more lightheaded from hanging upside down. When I look to the side, I see him watching me, his eyes trained on the shard of metal piercing my body. His brows dip, dark shadows passing over his features when he looks back up at me, searching my face.
He scoffs, the sound is wet and terrible sounding. “Of course, you’d fucking survive that. Your sister fought till the end, too.”
I curl my teeth over my lips in a snarl, but the strain has fire erupting from my wound. Every part of my body hurts, even my face. As I stare at him, I try to put the pieces together, but before I was missing something; I thought it was all of them. I just never understood how it could be possible. I get it now.
I can only hope Vera and Kat will see past their anger once they start reading and follow through with my wishes. It’s the only way.
God, Jack is going to be so pissed off with me.
“It was you,” I choke out through the pain. “You were the only one who did it, didn’t you? Nothing else was making sense,” I whisper, my face pinching with agony. “But that’s because you did it all on your own, didn’t you? You knew this whole time who I was because you were keeping tabs, making sure I stayed away, and all the while, you tried to keep the rest of the guys in the dark.”
His face sours. With shaking arms, he pushes himself upright, rocking the car dangerously. He has a mean gash on the side of his head that’s leaking blood. By the way he’s looking at me, it’s obvious I look no better, if not worse. At least he doesn’t have something impaled through his body.
Each breath is getting harder and harder to pull in. The pain is all-consuming. My grasp on reality is slipping. It feels like I’m hovering between sleep and consciousness, and the darkness is threatening to pull me under.