Eleven Night In PIne Haven

Chapter 4

Cora

I drove with my hands frozen to the wheel.

The city fell away behind me, first the streetlights, then the houses. Ahead there was only black road and thin snow swirling in my headlights. Every few seconds I checked the mirror, and every few seconds my heart dropped when I saw a pair of lights and rose again when they turned off.

“He's not coming,” I told myself. “He's not coming.”

But I had seen him smile.

My whole body would not stop trembling. My teeth chattered. I tried to breathe slowly, the way Nana taught me, but my breath kept catching on sobs I refused to let out.

My phone buzzed on the seat so hard that it slid and hit the door. I flinched, the car swerved, and a horn blared from a truck I had never even seen.

"God," I gasped, wrenching the wheel. "Oh, God."

“Richard (22 missed calls).”

My stomach turned over. A voicemail icon blinked. My thumb moved before I could stop it, the way a tongue goes to a broken tooth.

"Cora." His voice filled the car, low and silky. "I'm not angry. I'm just worried. Come home, and I'll forgive everything. Even the glass." A pause. I could hear him smiling. "But if I have to come and get you, sweetheart, you won't like what I do. Hollis is already on his way."

Hollis. The man with the flat, dead eyes who had once watched me across a restaurant for two hours without blinking.

A cold sweat broke over my whole body. For one terrible second I was back at the dinner table, with the wine running down my neck and his hand around my throat, and I could not tell whether I was in the car or in that room.

"You're not there," I whispered fiercely. "You're not there anymore."

I hit “ Delete” with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking. Then I pulled over at an orange gas station in the middle of nowhere, because I knew with sick certainty that the phone was a leash, and that beast was holding the other end.

A bell jangled when I pushed through the door. A tired man in a green apron looked up from a magazine.

"Evening. Rough night to be out."

"Y-yes." I slid a crumpled twenty across the counter. "Pump four. And, um, is there a trash can for this?" I held up the phone.

He frowned. "Don't think you want to do that, miss. Storm's coming in. You break down there, you'll want that phone."

I thought of the photographs, safe in a secret box inside the internet. I didn't need the phone for them. I needed to be gone.

"I'll keep it," I whispered. I turned it off and shoved it deep into my bag.

"Where are you headed?"

"North."

"Through the pass?" He whistled. "It closes at midnight. Snow's already piling. Wait it out, hon. Please. My wife makes the worst coffee in the county, but it's hot, and there's a couch in the back."

For a heartbeat, I wanted it so badly that my knees nearly gave out. A couch. Hot coffee. A kind stranger who asked nothing of me.

"I can't." My voice cracked. "I “can't” wait."

He looked at me then, really looked, at the red eyes, the shaking fingers, the dried blood on my lip. His face softened.

"Miss," he said quietly. "Are you okay?"

*No.* The word rose so fast it burned my throat. *Please help me. Please don't let me go back.*

"I'm fine," I said, smiling until my cheeks hurt. "Thank you."

"If you change your mind," he called after me, "the couch is yours."

I couldn't answer. I only nodded and pushed out into the cold, before I fell apart on his floor.

Outside, I filled the tank with my breath clouding in the cold. A black SUV rolled slowly past the pumps and stopped.

My whole body locked. My fingers went numb around the nozzle. “Please, God,”I prayed silently. “Not already. Please.”

The driver's door opened.

A woman in a ski jacket climbed out, yawning, a sleepy child on her hip. She smiled and waved.

I nearly collapsed against the pump. I laughed once, thin and ragged, and tears finally spilled hot down my cold cheeks. I wiped them away and ran for my car.

The snow was heavier now, a silent, thick curtain. The wipers swept it away and it came back. Swept it away. Came back. My eyes burned. My back ached. My left hand throbbed where the ring had torn my knuckle, and I touched the lump of it in my pocket again and again, as if it might vanish.

And every mile I whispered the same words into the dark.

"Nana, please. Please let me get there."

I could almost feel her hand in mine, dry and warm, the way it was on that long-ago winter morning. *Be brave, little bird,* she used to say. I had never felt less like a bird.

A sign flashed past in my headlights, red and glittering with ice.

“MOUNTAIN PASS CLOSES AT MIDNIGHT.”

The dashboard clock read 11:52.

*Eight minutes.* Behind me, somewhere, Hollis was driving. Ahead, a mountain.

I could still turn around. I could go back to the gas station, to the couch and the terrible coffee. I could sit there until dawn, and I would be safe for a night, and then Richard's men would find me, and then I would be his.

I pressed the gas.

The car climbed, groaning, into the white dark. The wind screamed around me. The snow came sideways. I couldn't see the edge of the road or the sky. I could only see the small circle of white my headlights carved from the night, and I clung to it like a rope.

"I'm not going back," I told the dark. My voice shook, but I said it again, louder. "I am *not* going back."

Then the road bent.

I felt it before I saw it, a smooth, terrible lightness under the tires. The wheel went loose in my hands like something dead. The back of the car slid sideways, and then the whole world began to spin.

"No!" I screamed. "No, no, no, “please!”

Black pines wheeled across the windshield. I stamped the brake, and it did nothing. The guardrail rushed at me out of the dark.

The car hit it with a c***k like thunder. Glass exploded. My head snapped against the wheel, and the taste of blood filled my mouth.

Silence. A ringing silence, so deep that I could hear my own pulse. The engine ticked. Snow drifted in through the broken window and landed on my cheek.

I opened my eyes. My head throbbed. Something warm ran down my forehead and into my eyebrow, and I realized it was blood.

The headlights shone straight ahead into nothing. No road. No trees. Only white air, swirling a hundred feet above a black drop. The guardrail had bent like a paper clip, and the front wheels hung over the edge. Beneath me, the car groaned and tipped an inch forward.

"Please," I breathed. "Please, please."

I didn't dare move, didn't dare breathe. I turned my head slowly to look in the mirror.

Far down the mountain, a pair of headlights were climbing through the snow, small and bright against the dark. Steady. Fast. They didn't slip on the ice. They didn't slow for the bend.

I knew the sound of that engine.