by Rebel Hart
At first, my heart calms with the sound of his voice. I feel safe. He’ll take care of me. But then the memories of the past few days come flooding back. Everything that Theo told me replays in my mind.
I faintly remember the conversation between Coach Granger and Jada just before I drifted off. I know Emmett didn’t kill Malcolm, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t try to kill me. Theo said he was the brains behind his father’s murder. That he’s only been motivated by money, greed, and power this whole time.
I start to squirm, half expecting to be tied up. But my hands and feet are free. I lift my arms and legs and climb back onto the backseat, still feeling heavy and unable to fully control my body.
“Pull over,” I command him. “I want to get out.”
“Ophelia, I need to talk to you,” he shoots back urgently.
“Pull over!” I scream louder. I grow frantic and panicked as I piece it all together, assuming Emmett had to have been the one who drugged me. After Coach dragged him out of the dance, he found some way to sneak back in and slip something in my drink. Or maybe he had help. I don’t know, but I’m positive it was him. “You did this to me,” I mumble through my groggy voice.
“No!” he insists. “I would never do anything to hurt you, Ophelia.”
“You and I both know that’s not true,” I argue back, refusing to minimize what he’s done to me any longer. That’s what got me into this mess with him in the first place. Always telling myself that it wasn’t so bad or trying to convince myself that there were two versions of him.
“It was you all along,” I tell him. “You’re the one who has been hurting me all along, and…and I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.”
“No, please don’t say that,” he begs. “Listen to me…”
“No!” I cry out. “I’m not listening to you anymore!” I reach for the handle, not caring if I fly out of the speeding car. But nothing happens when I pull it. “Pull over! Let me out of here!”
“Ophelia, please…” he tries again.
“I don’t care if you love me!” I shriek. “If you ever loved me at all, it hasn’t stopped you from hurting me! It was your idea to kidnap me! To hold me hostage in your mansion! And then it was your idea to murder Thomas! You turned me against my own father, who was only trying to help and…”
“You’ve got it all wrong!” he swears. “I don’t know who did this to you, but it wasn’t me. Where was Bridgett when this happened?”
“Stop it, Emmett! I’m not falling for your shit anymore! Let me out of here right now or I’m going to grab the wheel and force us off the road! I’ve done it before,” I remind him. “I’ll do it again. I don’t even care what happens, I just want to get away from you!”
I imagine my dreams of college and everything after it slipping away into nothingness, just as I did when I lost consciousness. It hurts to think about. I don’t want to die, but I’m not certain that won’t happen anyway if I leave it up to Emmett.
“What if Bridgett was working together with Theo this whole time!?” he suggests. “Think about it…We don’t know her. They just moved here. She comes from California where Theo used to live up until recently. What if he knew the Hendersons would steal everything away from me!? And he’s working with her to try and get Jameson Automobiles back!”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I groan as my head starts throbbing, trying to figure it all out. The only clear and resounding conclusion I can come to is that Theo is right about Emmett. My dad and Bridgett aren’t the enemies, he is. No matter how much my heart wants to believe otherwise.
“I overheard something when I was locked up,” he explains. “These detectives were talking about what they found in the car and said some of your DNA was there too. I think whoever framed me was trying to pin this on you too.”
“What?” I ask in disbelief. “You’re lying. I know you’re lying. You’ll say whatever it takes to get back into my head, but I’m not going to let it happen this time. And anyway…I know who killed Malcolm, and it had nothing to do with Bridgett or my father.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Just because he didn’t do it, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t take it as a chance to bring us down.”
“You’re not making any sense!” I scoff, wishing this decapacitating headache would go away. I curl into myself across the seat, shielding my eyes from the lights as they whiz past.
“He framed me so he could get his hands on my designs without having to give me any credit or money for them,” he proposes. “And when that didn’t work, maybe he thought he’d try to go after you. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but I know they didn’t find your DNA until their second sweep of the car. And doesn’t Theo have friends in the Jameson police force? He used them to help make sure none of us were blamed for my father’s murder.”
“But you were,” I insist. “You were to blame. It was your idea to kill your father.” I cling to Theo’s words, but there is some possibility to what he is saying. Theo is one of the only ones who could have gotten both our DNA into that car after it had already been retrieved from the wreckage. “Why would he do it?” I ask again. “It still doesn’t make any sense.”
He grows quiet again. I try to open myself up to this possibility that Emmett isn’t behind all of this. Could Bridgett or Theo have drugged me? Maybe to make another attempt at pinning Malcolm’s murder on me or something worse?
“You swear you’re not the one who put something in my drink?” I ask. My voice cracks from the dryness in my mouth and I wish more than anything I had some water. I spot a bottle in the drink holder up front.
Emmett’s eyes catch mine in the rearview mirror. He sees what I’m staring at and picks up the water bottle, offering it to me in the back seat.
“I would never do that,” he says firmly.
I grab at the bottle and frantically twist off the cap before chugging it down. Some of it spills out of the corner of my still partially numb mouth and drips down my neck.
“Theo’s one and only goal was to come back for everything he feels the Elites stole from him,” he suggests. “He went from being one of the main guys behind Jameson Automobiles, having almost as many shares in the company as my father, to having nothing. No job, no money. They ran him off to the other side of the country and then they made sure to rip you and your mom away from him too.”
“Yeah,” I nod, thinking we can definitely agree on that much. I relish in the lingering cool feeling in my throat from the water and start to wonder where Emmett is taking me. “Where are we going anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I needed to see you and talk to you. I tried to come back and find you, but you were passed out. I just knew I needed to get you away from the school and whoever did this to you.”
“And what’s your plan now?” He shakes his head cluelessly. “Keep going,” I add. “If I’m going to be trapped in here with you, you might as well finish your idea of what’s really going on here.” My voice is dripping with bitterness, causing him to hesitate as he continues staring me down in the rearview mirror, darting his eyes back and forth rapidly between me and the road. “Emmett, I want to believe you,” I say softly. And it’s true. Every piece of my heart would rather believe his version of things. “But I can’t until you start making more sense of this.”
“He tried to start this new car manufacturing company, right?” he continues. “But how was it ever going to be a success if everyone within range of the Elites still hated him?”
I stare out into the trees flying past the window, lighting up under out headlights. “But why offer you a job?” I wonder. “Why bring you into it at all if he didn’t want to share the profits or give you credit for your ideas?”
“All he knew was that he needed to get back into everyone’s good graces,” he suggests. “First, with you and your family. Then Jameson. Bringing me into it obviously won me over, and it helped win your mom and stepdad over. The only person it didn’t convince was you.�
�� A wave of sadness washes over his face. “I’m so sorry, Ophelia. We should have listened to you. You were the only voice of reason the whole time.”
The sincere regret in his voice hits up against my heart, begging me to fall back into the trap of believing him. It’s starting to work, but I’m so afraid of caving in and regretting it all later when I realize Theo was the one telling the truth. And there’s still so much that doesn’t add up.
“If he did win us all over…why frame you? Or me for that matter? And when that didn’t work, why drug me?” As I fire off questions, some of it starts to click into place. “To win the town of Jameson back over,” I mumble to myself.
“Huh?” he grunts.
“Maybe if everyone felt sorry for him…”
“He could rise back to the top. People might support his company,” Emmett finishes my sentence for me. “A man grieving the death of his daughter. People might pity him and with no one left in town who remembers the old Elites’ grievances against him…what could stop him from winning everyone back over?”
I go through it all again like a checklist. A timeline of events in my throbbing head. First Theo comes back into town and strikes this deal with Emmett to get rid of Thomas. Everything becomes up for grabs. The Elites are weakened. The future of Jameson Automobiles is uncertain. He uses it as a window to sneak back into our lives, building the foundation of Jameson’s new competitor as he goes. He gets his hands on Emmett’s expertise and ideas while worming his way back into our family.
“Family,” I blurt out before I even fully realize why it’s important. “Family!” I yell again, even more confident than before. “Theo didn’t just lose Jameson Automobiles. He lost me and my mom. Maybe he really was trying to come between my mom and Brendan the whole time. If he got us back, and started a successful company, he’d feel like everything was made right again.”
“But you wouldn’t budge,” he reminds me.
I wonder if it could really be true. Theo had gotten as much as he could out of his relationship with Emmett, so he could have used Malcolm’s murder to get rid of him. It not only left him with all of his designs, it gave him a window to get into my head. When that still didn’t work, maybe he did plant that evidence on the car, trying to take me down too. Maybe he panicked when Emmett was bailed out, not knowing who would have stepped in to help him.
If anyone would have defended Emmett’s innocence, it would have been me. With me gone, Theo wouldn’t have had to worry about Emmett anymore, whether the charges stuck or not. Everyone else would have thought he was guilty. He had the most motive for killing Malcolm after all. Not only would killing me have secured Emmett’s fate no matter what the courts decided, it would have given him sympathy from my mom and possibly the rest of the town.
Theo already managed to drive at least a little bit of a wedge between my mom and Brendan. If something tragic like my death happened, would it bring my mom and Theo back together?
I feel myself giving into it all more and more. I feel a whimper in my chest, all of my rattling fears and anxieties. I don’t know who to believe. I study Emmett from the backseat, or what I can see of him anyway. I focus in on all of our times together, trying to convince myself that he could be telling the truth. I remember his smell, the feeling is his skin, and the sound of his voice against my ear. I love him, so I have to believe him, right?
Then I remember the crashing, crumbling feeling that came with Theo’s side of the story in my backyard. All of that made perfect sense too and I felt so stupid for not seeing it sooner. I ask myself what I really know. I know next to nothing about Theo, really, beyond my suspicions of him being a lying, manipulative snake. But Emmett…I’ve seen Emmett’s destruction firsthand and I’ve been the victim of it more than once.
If Emmett was really bad, how could he have gone without hurting me for so long? He has made every possible effort to prove himself to me ever since he was freed from his father. It’d make sense that all the violence and rage stemmed from the pressure of the Elites, just like he said it did. And even his own family doubted his ability to do the necessary evil required of whoever ran Jameson, both the company and the town.
“What do you think, Ophelia?” he asks suddenly. “We can try to prove this. I can try to find something to make you believe me, but I don’t want to let you go until I know you’ll at least give me a chance.”
Won’t let me go. The words trigger another flood of memories. The other day when he almost didn’t stop when I asked him to. The car. Being trapped in it with him.
“What were you going to do?” I ask, my throat closing up as I start to cry.
“What do you mean?”
“When I first came here,” I sob. “That time I grabbed the steering wheel and we crashed into the light post. What were you going to do? You had those things in your backseat. The rope, the gloves. None of the other Elites were around. If I hadn’t crashed the car…what would you have done to me?”
I collapse back down against the seat, completely overwhelmed with uncertainty and fear. All the trauma of Jameson and everything Emmett has done to me. My shame of believing in him and trying to let myself love him. He’s rambling off an explanation from the front seat, but I can’t even hear him. My brain shuts down and won’t take in a single word of it.
“Do you hear me!?” he pleads. “Ophelia! Do you hear me!?”
“Just stop,” I whisper, clutching my ears and pulling at my hair. I don’t know if I’m talking to him or myself. I just know I’m tired and feel like I can’t take another second of this. He keeps calling out for me, begging me to listen. Begging me to believe him. “Stop!” I scream again.
A set of headlights slice into my piercing scream. They back at us through all of the mirrors in the car, blinding us. I hear Emmett swear followed by the jolting crash of something ramming into the back of the car. We swerve, but he straightens out and tries to drive faster. Then another crash, and another. Until finally, the car flies off the road.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
BOOK 3
The crash snaps me from my state of shock, and I am suddenly impossibly alert. I shoot straight up and see Emmett shaking his head.
“You’re bleeding,” I announce as I notice the red stream coming down his forehead. My voice is frighteningly calm, almost sounding foreign to me.
He shakes his head again, and lightly touches his fingers to the gash on his forehead. We both jump as his car door flies up, revealing a figure crouching down in the darkness. Before I can see who it is, a bright light flashes right in our eyes. I wince and look away, only turning back when my car door flies open too.
Then I see the all too familiar sight of a gun barrel pointing straight at me. Before I can react, a hand reaches towards me. I squirm for the door, but a searing pain burns into my scalp. Another familiar feeling. My hair being pulled. I’m drug from the car. I kick, but my throat is still too dry, preventing me from screaming even though that’s exactly what I’m doing on the inside.
I’m shoved forward into the darkness. I want to run, but I feel the cold pistol push into the back of my head. Then Emmett is shoved next to me.
“Start walking,” a man’s voice demands from behind. It’s familiar, but disguised by an eerie, primal rage.
We shuffle forward into the night, barely able to see where we’re walking. The man shines his light onto our path, but it’s shaky and hard to follow. Then it starts to rain, and as the light bounces off of the drops that fall into our eyes, it’s even more impossible to see where we’re going. We walk like that for what feels like a mile before finally being pushed up to a tall, chain-link fence lined with barbed wire across the top.
The man’s hand reaches around me, pulling at an opening near the top of the fence. He forces it down and shoves me through. I quickly decide that I’ll try to run as soon as I’m on the other side, but I’m hit with the fear of being shot for trying. The instinctual hesitation causes me to trip. I fall flat into the muddy groun
d, sinking down into the wet earth with a big splash that covers me in thick, dark sludge. I feel a sharp, cold pain to my shin as it catches on the fence.
I scream as I’m lifted back up into the air, being pulled by my hair again which is now drenched from the pouring rain. Once I’m forced all the way over to the other side of the fence, Emmett’s body crashes into me from behind, nearly knocking me over again. I try to turn around and make an attempt at identifying our assailant, but his bright light, along with the downpour and the pitch-black night, keeps me from being able to see his face.
Big tire tracks begin disappearing from the ground as they rapidly fill up with water, turning to slush as we’re pushed through them. Our feet sink more and more with each step, causing us to stumble every few feet. We come to rows of broken-down vehicles with dirty windows and raised hoods with exposed wires and hoses poking out of the rusted engines. I feel hard pieces of debris that litter the ground beneath my shoe, but they all sink into the mud and puddles as we traipse through.
We’re pushed on through the vanishing roads that weave through mounds of scrap. The man keeps shoving the gun back into our skulls every so often to remind us of the threat. My sense of smell heightens with my lack of sight. The drenched air is filled with wet earth, motor oil, grease, gas, and rusting metal. There’s a pungent smokey taste seeping onto my tongue from the polluted smell.
Emmett hisses and winces suddenly, holding up his hand to reveal another bloody gash from something he’s scraped up against in the darkness. The man doesn’t let us top, and everything around us continues flooding at an alarming rate.
I take another step forward and shriek at the emptiness beneath my foot. I nearly topple forward and am saved at the last minute by a quick tug to the back of my hoodie. I’m flung back just enough to keep from sliding off the edge of a steep drop that overlooks a pit of rusty, shredded cars. The sharp, twisted metal gleams, and I immediately know that if I had fallen, I would have died in the razor-sharp sea of crushed vehicles. I whimper through my labored breaths as I watch the floodwaters rise around the cars. Whoever goes down there is either impaled or drowns. And as more water rushes past, forming a mudslide, I feel dangerously close to sliding in.
