SweetHarts (5 Book Box Set)

by Kira Graham

  Those are definite serial killer markers, I think. Not that I’d know for sure, never having met one, but I do watch crime shows. I know what those freaks do.

  Don’t freak out, I remind myself when I feel Cameron shift in his seat, the song changing so that I’m now listening to the melodic crooning of Jessie J. Yeah, bitch, I’m with you on that one. I do need a flashlight. Unfortunately for me, Cameron is not exactly the type to offer one, I think, holding in a giggle at my stupid, random thoughts.

  Hysteria, Cleo—don’t let it get you.

  What I get instead is a hand inside the zippered pouch of the first aid kit. Yes! Digging around, I blindly try to identify things. Band-Aids. Rolled-up bandages. A plastic thing that feels like tweezers. Little square packages that are cold and must be alcohol swabs. Dang it. I need something—bingo!

  My fingers skate over something metallic, and when I clutch it, it sticks into me, piercing my fingertip. It’s thin and—scissors! It must be a pair of those small scissors that never cut anything, but have to be included for God knows what reasons. They have tips, though, that are sharp enough to pierce a throat, I tell myself, shuddering at the thought of stabbing Cameron. Don’t you judge me. I hate blood.

  It takes forever to pull my hand back from beneath his seat, and by the time I’m ready to move, my stomach is roiling. With my pounding head, my sweaty, clammy skin, and the darkness surrounding me, I feel like I’m ready to hurl.

  Don’t give up now, Cleo. Just take a few deep breaths and do this. You need to save yourself, I remind my shuddering brain. You don’t have your phone, remember—you left it in the bathroom. That means that Dad, Adonis, and Zeus, the freaking stalkers, can’t ping the app on my phone, and, since I don’t know where this loser is taking me, I could be dead before anyone even knows where to look for me.

  That’s not my style, though, truth be told. I’m not some simpering twit who needs saving, anyway. I can save myself. I can absolutely shove these miniscule scissors deep into—I retch a little just thinking about it, but I push myself to start inching up, taking advantage of the fact that Cameron is still singing and distracted. Probably because he’s feeling falsely secure in the knowledge that I should be out for a while still.

  Fool.

  Stop stalling. Just do it!

  Taking my own advice, I stop dilly-dallying and get ready to launch my surprise attack. Then I lunge up between the seats, half-standing and half-crouching against the back seat for traction. I bring my hand up fast and grab Cameron with my left arm, hooking my elbow around his throat and clutching the headrest with my hand, then pressing my other hand up against his neck, digging the scissors into his skin.

  It all happens so fast that I can hardly believe I’ve done it, but I have, I think, feeling a sense of triumph filling me as he barks out a yell of surprise and lets go of the wheel to clutch at my arm.

  That’s it, loser. I have you now.

  “Put your hands back on the wheel, Black,” I hiss, tightening the lock I have on his throat and ignoring the nail gouges that he’s inflicting on my forearm. “Steer, or I’ll shove this knife into your neck and steer myself.”

  Ugh! I feel myself heave.

  “Cleo—”

  “Don’t you talk to me, you freak. Steer this heap to the shoulder of the road and shut it all down,” I instruct him, pressing harder with the scissors to make my point.

  He whimpers so fearfully that I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes. This guy kidnapped me, I think, disgusted by the fact that I was stupid enough to let someone this weak overpower me. This is a lesson, and one that I will definitely think about later, when I’m not shaking so badly that it’s a struggle to keep my arm locked around his throat.

  “Don’t hurt me. Please. I’m sorry,” he chokes out, his hands slipping against the wheel.

  “Shut up! I said to pull over and turn the engine off,” I hiss, wincing when the light from a passing car blinds me for a moment, making my head ache to the point of nausea.

  I’m distracted by my own rising panic. Now that I’m in control, I realize that I’m in over my head, no matter how cocky I wanted to be about this. It’s a good thing that I was cold and controlled when I woke up, but I’m no freaking superhero, and I know it. My arms are still slightly weakened from whatever Cameron gave me, and my head is now pounding so hard that the lights from each passing car send nails though my skull.

  It’s when I’m flinching and trying to avoid another flash of light that he wrenches at the wheel, trying to throw me off. I hang on through sheer, stubborn fear, but another twist slams my head against the headrest, and I lose my grip on the scissors when I try to grab at his shoulders to stop from falling back.

  With the scissors gone, all I have is my strength.

  “Let go, bitch!” he yells, his panicked movements making the car veer so sharply that the tires squeal against the wet road.

  We’re all over the place now, I see with a rising tide of panic. There aren’t many cars on the road, but there are enough that horns keep blasting as we shoot past.

  I have to do something, I think, terror lancing through me when Cameron twists the wheel again, trying to fight me and steer at the same time. This time, when he tries to shake me off, I can’t stop him, and I feel myself get thrown back just as he turns the wheel again, trying to bring the car back under control.

  My own screams blend with his when I feel the car tip, the overcorrection sending us into a skid that makes the car tip again, wobble, and then tip so hard to the left that I literally feel the moment that the tires leave the road and the car starts to roll.

  I’ve heard people say that it happens in slow motion. I’ve watched movies and seen them slow scenes like this down to a crawl, allowing you to see every second that passes, and every small moment that collides into one death-defying screech.

  That’s not what happens for me. Nothing slows down. It all happens in mere moments, and yet, as I’m thrown against the roof, and then down and then up again, my body and head banging into anything that they come into contact with, I can honestly say that I have no idea when we finally come to a stop.

  I hear metal screeching, and I slam against the roof that’s beneath me now, hitting my arm against it so hard that I cry out as I feel something snap. Then it’s wetness against my skin, the smell of dirt and leaves, and a haze that clouds my vision. Hands in my hair. Screaming. Struggle.

  Darkness.

  ********************************************************************

  My head hurts, and my scalp is burning. Something is tickling my left eye, running down my cheek, and warming my lips, I think groggily, moaning when the burn in my scalp gets worse, and something scratches over the back of my leg, where my flesh is so wet and cold that I immediately try to curl into a ball.

  “Shut up,” a voice hisses, pulling harder at my…hair?

  Oh, God! My brain explodes into action, but this time, instead of waking up fully aware of my surroundings and situation, I feel foggy and so lightheaded that I gag against the need to puke. My head isn’t just achy now; it hurts to the point of sickness. And my body—God, I hurt all over, from my head down to the tips of my toes, where I feel one foot missing a shoe as my heel drags against the wet, muddy ground beneath me.

  Cameron is dragging me by the hair, his strength keeping my head twisted up and at an odd angle. My back is against the ground, and I feel rocks and twigs scraping at my skin, leaving cold streaks of burning pain in their wake.

  The car flipped and rolled, I think, my brain trying to play catch-up. That’s why I hurt so much. And my arm. Oh, Lord, it hurts so much that when I pry my eyes open, I almost pass out again. It’s broken. I can see the swelling and the blood covering my skin even with what little light is available.

  “Cameron—”

  “Stop talking!” he screams back at me, stumbling and falling to his knees.

  I drop to the ground when that happens, and my head hits the dirt with a jarring t
hud that I ignore as I twist my head to look back at him. He seems as hurt as I am, but instead of a broken arm, he must have an injured leg, because he clutches at it with a curse, and I can see blood spilling over his fingers from where he’s pressing down on his thigh.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “And whose fault is that?” he mutters, a low, keening sob spilling from his lips.

  We’re surrounded by trees, somewhere wooded and dense enough that the rain isn’t pelting down on us as much as it should be. That makes me wonder if we’d gotten all that far from the hospital before I awoke. I’m not that great at directions, and anyone who knows me will tell you that if I’m not paying attention, I can get turned around even inside a house, and have trouble finding my way out again. But this area looks familiar, and the longer I peer into the trees, the more I think that we’re somewhere near the highway going west towards Mom and Dad’s house.

  That doesn’t help me much, but at least it’s better than running blindly through the trees trying to orient myself, I think, swallowing against a lump of bile that climbs up into my throat, the result of what I suspect is a concussion.

  “You need to let me go. Whatever it is,” I say and then pause, swallowing again when my stomach convulses, and my eyes go fuzzy. “Whatever it is that you’re doing here, you won’t succeed,” I murmur, forcing myself to roll over even when my muscles scream against the action.

  Once I’m on my stomach, I push myself up onto my knees and sway when the world tilts around me, the rolling sickness in my head forcing me to stop and drag in several huge, gulping breaths.

  “I already have. All I had to do was…” He keeps talking, but I lose some of it when my head goes woozy again, and I feel consciousness threatening to fail me.

  “Please. I’m hurt, and so are you. We need to get to the hospital.”

  “Shut up!”

  “No. Listen to me, Cameron. Whatever is going on here, I don’t even need to know. Just go. Go. Get away, and just let me get to the road so that I can flag down some help. I’m hurt, Cameron, and if something worse happens to me, you’re going to be in way more trouble than you already are. My family is going to come looking for me, Cameron, and they won’t stop until they find me,” I warn him, breathing deeply to stave off the sickness and wooziness that keeps getting worse.

  “They won’t find you!” he yells, his face a pasty white in the faint moonlight that peeks through the trees.

  He’s bleeding a lot, that leg wound high enough on his thigh that I suspect he’s a lot weaker than he wants to let on. I’d run—hell, judging from the pallor on his face, I could knock him unconscious and run for help so that I could call the cops. There’s one problem, though, I think, gulping loudly. There’s a gun at his side that I didn’t notice before, and he’s reaching for it right now.

  “Cameron. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do! You don’t get it, Cleo. I never had a choice.”

  “Of course you have a choice! You don’t have to do this. The why doesn’t even matter, Cameron. Just put the gun down and let me go for help. You’re bleeding a lot,” I whisper, holding back tears of fright when he lifts the gun with a shaky hand and points it at me, his own eyes filling with tears as they meet mine.

  “I don’t want to. You don’t understand. I didn’t want to do any of this,” he mutters, tears flowing down his cheeks.

  “Then don’t! Don’t do it. Why are you doing this to me?” I wail, cowering backward and bringing my arm up to shield my face. “We just met. I didn’t do anything to you.”

  Cameron laughs, breathing out a wheeze of air that has the hair at the nape of my neck standing on end. The sound is resigned, as though he’s already made up his mind about everything, and no amount of begging on my part will change it.

  I maybe shouldn’t have called him a douche bag, or told him that he’s as exhilarating as watching paint dry, I think, my mind shying away from reality as the seconds tick by. Now, everything does slow down, and I finally get what those weird scientist alien guys are always saying about time being relative and moving differently sometimes. It’s like a second-by-second movie reel is playing in my head as Cameron slowly raises the gun, points it at me, and shakes his head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The bang that follows is so loud that my ears hurt. Well, this is it. I’m definitely dead now. I may think of myself as indestructible, but even I can’t dodge a bullet. Or have the luck to be miraculously missed altogether, I think, a cry leaving me.

  “You! I hope you burn in hell,” someone screams, the hysterical, rage-driven shriek causing my eyes to snap open instantly.

  What I see shocks me almost speechless, but it’s such a welcome sight that I immediately burst into tears and try to crawl towards where Rose is standing, still pointing a gun at Cameron.

  “Rose!”

  “Cleo? Oh, God, are you okay?” she yells, dropping down to the ground to grab me and pull me closer.

  I honestly don’t know how to answer that, so I settle for hugging her back and breaking into a sobbing mess when she hugs me more tightly.

  “Fucking freak. I hope that Satan does special things to him—”

  “Rose? Not that I’m ungrateful, but how did you find me?” I ask, cutting off her yells because my head hurts, my arm hurts, and my eyes have landed on Cameron Black, who is very much dead but still staring at me.

  Gagging, I wrench my eyes away from his face and try to remind myself that he was going to kill me, and that I shouldn’t care that his life is over. I do, though. I feel immeasurable pity for the man, as well as a sense of regret that he’s dead and therefore can’t answer the one question that plagues me. Why?

  We’d never met before tonight. In fact, we hadn’t ever even run across each other, and, if I were going to bet on anything, I would bet that this was the first time we’d ever laid eyes on each other.

  “A cop I dated owed me a favor for giving his mom free legal advice. He pinged Black’s phone,” Rose tells me, shoving me away to check me over.

  She looks about as bad as I feel, her emerald green dress soaked in mud, covered in rips, and clinging to her body in a wet, ruined mess. Her hair is hanging in clumps around her face, and her eye makeup is so smudged that her eyes resemble a raccoon’s.

  And she’s never looked more beautiful, I think, my mouth trembling when she sniffles and looks back up at me.

  “Jesus, Cleo. I was so scared. When Adonis went nuts at the hospital, and the Harts all took off, all I could think about was the fact that I was the one who’d set you up with this freak,” she whispers, her lips wobbling.

  I don’t tell her that she’s partly right, or that I almost cursed her when I woke up to being dragged through the woods. All I can do is hug her again and let my body relax as pain fills me, reminding me that I’m alive and really, truly, very much not dead.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adonis

  “Stop yelling at the man!” Cleo hisses from her hospital bed, the bruises on her face causing my already unstable mood to grow darker, especially when she winces and rubs at her temple.

  I want to say that I was the one who saved her, and that she’s here because I found her and killed the bastard who dared to take her. But I can’t. The truth is that I was still yelling into a phone, driving aimlessly and searching the streets, when Alex called Ares and told him that they’d found Cleo.

  At first I was relieved, and then I was pissed, and then I was just plain fucking relieved again, because Rose didn’t just find Cleo—she also saved her life.

  The details are still surreal to me, but, as it turns out, Rosetta Sweet has a lot more resources than even a rich boy like me. After I flipped out at the hospital when I saw the footage of Black drugging Cleo and dragging her unconscious body out of the hospital, I said some pretty awful things to that woman.

  Not that they weren’t true, because they were. She didn’t take the threat towards Cleo seriously, and she sure as hel
l didn’t run a check on this Black guy before getting him close enough to her sister to do some major harm.

  And he did do harm, I think, breathing out through gritted teeth when the detective asks her the same question yet again.

  “She said he didn’t tell her! For fuck’s sake, she’s not clairvoyant, asshole. He drugged her, dragged her to his car, and then was going to shoot her. That’s all she knows.”

  “Hart, stop,” Cleo mutters, giving the middle-aged, balding detective a kind smile. “Like I told you before, Detective Sanders, Cameron didn’t tell me why he did any of this. It was bizarre, to be honest with you. One minute, he was the cute but boring date, and the next minute, he was nabbing me and taking me to God knows where,” she says easily, as if she hadn’t just been involved in a car accident that could have killed her—and worse, almost been shot in the face.

  “Cleo—”

  “Hart, shut up! This kind detective is just doing his job and asking the same questions that I myself have no answers to,” she hisses, turning back to the detective with a smile that I would kill to receive. “I did ask him, but I’m afraid that he was a bit of a mess by that time.”

  “A bit of a mess” is a bit of an understatement. From what the good detective told me, Cameron Black was well on his way to being dead even before Rosetta put a bullet in his head. The man was bleeding out, thanks to an injury to his femoral artery. I don’t know all the details yet, but it appears that the guy had a tiny pair of scissors lodged so deeply in his thigh that it severed the artery and caused a fatal bleed that would have killed him long before medical assistance could have helped him.

  That accident, though, is what’s bugging me the most, because from what I’ve heard Cleo tell the cops, she caused it. She attacked Black while he was going over a hundred miles an hour down the highway, causing the SUV to skid dangerously on the slick road, flip, and then roll at least five times.