Page 78 of No Place Left to Hide

Glass is on my lap, but I don’t know which window it came from.

The seatbelt strap is pulled so tight across my chest that I can already feel the bruise across my body.

Something smells vaguely like smoke.

There are canned goods everywhere.

I blink, trying to clear my vision, but I think the spinning is inside my head, a by-product of being rolled end over end half a dozen times. Maybe more. Everything stopped processing once we hit the air.

I feel my feet on the floorboards and flex them. Pain shoots down my calf, and a stinging sensation tells me I might have a cut there, buteverything moves. I lift my arms and involuntarily scream when my left one throbs with more pain than I’ve ever felt in my life. When I look down, a piece of my bone is visible in the moonlight. It’s sticking straight out of my arm. I gag and look away before I puke into the wound.

I take a few steadying breaths. I’m in one piece. My neck is fine, my head is fine, and my lap is filled with the deflated airbag. I move my elbow back as far as I can and jab the button to release my seatbelt. It unlatches and the pressure on my chest loosens.

I think I’m okay.

Thankfully,Ihad my seatbelt on.

The top half of Jena’s body is stretched across the dash, and her head rests against the spiderwebbed windshield. Her maroon braids trail down her face. Blood drips from her nose and a dozen cuts across her cheek.

She doesn’t move.

My first instinct is to help her. To find something from the mess around me to stop the bleeding. But that can’t be how this ends. I have a plan to see through, same as I did on the lake. Like that night, I don’t have a choice.

The protection of the Goodwin name always comes first. At all costs.

I lean close to my former best friend’s face and brush the braids from her eyes. I hate that it came to this. I hate that our friendship had to end this way. Losing Jena won’t be like losing Claire, because Claire’s loss was a victory. A triumph. Jena’s loss will be a conflicted pain. A deep gouge in my heart, half grief and half betrayal.

But more than anything, she’s a hard-learned lesson: trust no one.

I cup her face, trying to steer clear of the blood. “I’m sorry. No hard feelings, okay?”

I sit back, and a low groan comes from deep in her throat. I shriek in surprise. The fingers of her left hand curl over the broken glass. She’s waking up…

I sag against my seat. I was hoping to avoid this.

I spot my phone lit up on the floor of the passenger side. I wrench my battered door open with my good arm and use my knee to pry it open enough for me to slip out. I stagger into the field, holding my broken arm close to my chest. Out here, freshly kicked-up dust is heavy in the air. The moon is caught behind clouds.

I make my way around the front of the car. One headlight is smashed; the other shoots a beacon of light into the field. The back passenger door is almost folded in half, but Jena’s is mostly intact. I yank it open, and she slides off the dash in a shower of broken glass. She lands on her back in the dirt, her legs still in the car. From this angle, I can see her other eye is really fucked up, and there’s blood pouring from the cuts on her face to her neck, seeping into the halter neck of my jumpsuit.

She probably won’t last very long. Not with all that blood. But I can’t risk her living long enough to whisper anything to the first responders. I’ll have to find a rock or something in case she happens to still have a pulse by the time someone discovers the crash.

I’ll only bash in her head if I have to. I’d much rather let her bleed out than have to do it myself. Despite everything she’s done, Jena was still the best friend I’ve ever had. I just can’t risk her telling anyone what I admitted in the car.

I’m still kicking myself for falling for her stupid plan. If my dad finds out about this, he’s going to disown me. The instructions were clear as day: never speak of what happened at the lake ever again. The truth is what we made it.

Jena groans again, shifting in the dirt.

This time, it’s my turn to clean it up.

I lean over her to snatch my phone off the floor by her feet and then stagger off in search of a rock. The ground is freshly tilled in long horizontal rows of dirt. I sift through the soil, but several mounds later I’ve found exactly zero rocks larger than a golf ball. I keep moving through the rows, listing to the left and right, so my footprints look like I wandered in a shock for a while—in case anyone wonders why I didn’t call for help right away.

After I’ve picked my way through several more rows, I let out a frustrated groan. Still no rocks big enough. A darkened cluster of trees hugs the edges of the field, but I don’t want to walk that far to find a suitable weapon. It’ll take way too long. And I can’t exactly strangle her with my bare hands, or the seatbelt because, one, it’ll look like a murder—if I end her, it has to look like an injury sustained in the crash or I will have totaled the Subaru for nothing—and, two, I’m limited to only one arm.

I sigh, and halfway to the road, I turn back to survey the crash.

Deep grooves are cut into the earth from every one of our flips. I left tire marks on the pavement where we went off the road. The back half of my car is smashed in from our previous rear-end collisions. The police officer from earlier will give a statement about what we said when she stopped us. It’ll look like my stalker crashed into her and then continued on to run us off the road.

And my secrets will die here. With Jena.

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