Page 64 of The Girl and the Cobra

I hop out of the car, pushing out into the brisk night air, and I head straight for The Drip’s large windows. I peer inside. No source of light greets me; everything is off inside the shop. No lights, no movement, no people. Just to be certain, I try the door and find it’s locked.

I step back, an uneasy feeling settling deep within my gut. I’ve been in enough precarious situations to know something isn’t right here. Turning toward Wolf’s car, I find he’s still in the driver’s seat, acting like everything is fine.

But everything is not fine. The fucking house is burning around us. Mabel would never just leave. Why isn’t he freaking out? Why isn’t he—

That uneasy feeling turns into a nagging one, and I storm over to the front passenger seat and get in the car, slamming the door behind me. I whip my head in his direction after making a point of glancing at the time on the dashboard.

“We’re ten minutes late,” I say, having not quite realized just how late we were until now.

“It seems we are.”

“Mabel’s not here.”

“No, it seems she isn’t.”

My teeth grind. It’s taking every ounce of self-restraint inside me to not strangle the full truth out of him. “You’re a man who doesn’t tolerate tardiness. What’s going on? Where is she? What have you done with her?”

Wolf appears uninterested. “The real question is: are you willing to become the Cobra once more to save her?”

The breath that comes out of me after that is hard. “Save her from what?”

And then I find out that my girl, the love of my life, is in the hands of a man who wants to kill her.

Chapter Twenty-Eight – Mabel

My head pounds when I come to, and I groan as I slowly sit up. The moonlight overhead is the only bit of light around; my eyes are already adjusted to the darkness, so when I see that I’m faced with a grove of old trees, I realize I’m nowhere near The Drip. I try to remember what happened, how I got here, why my head hurts so much, but everything is fuzzy.

A hard voice speaks behind me, “Get up.” A man’s voice, one I don’t recognize, but the way he says the words lets me know that I don’t have a choice in the matter. Whoever he is, he knocked me out and brought me here—and you don’t bring a girl to the woods alone to be nice to her.

The opposite, really.

I work on standing, preparing myself for the worst. When I turn around, through the darkness I lay eyes on a man I saw earlier, in The Drip. Right after my dad came, he was in line. Another middle-aged man that did not have Penny’s stamp of hotness. I remember he ordered a large black coffee and went to sit in the corner… and he stayed there for over an hour, slowly sipping that coffee like he had nowhere else to be.

Not out of the norm for people in The Drip, I’ve learned over the past two weeks, so I didn’t think anything of it. But now… now I know this man didn’t come to The Drip for its coffee.

He came for me.

The sky above us has not a single cloud, an abnormally clear night, and it allows me enough light to study the stranger’s face. I don’t know him. He doesn’t look familiar in the least, but the way he glares at me, with such hatred, makes me think he knows who I am.

And I don’t mean he knows my name. Anyone who walks into The Drip knows I’m Mabel. I have a stupid name tag andeverything. No, with his glaring and the unforgiving expression on his face, he has to know who I really am.

We stare at each other for a minute, maybe two. If eyes could be knives, I’d be long dead. I know I should run, but my feet are rooted in place. I’m not tied up, but I might as well be; I’m frozen.

The one who breaks the silence of the night is the stranger, and his voice drips venom with each word: “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

I don’t say a word, but I do manage to shake my head once. Inside my chest, my heart pounds rapidly. My blood warms me even though the night is cold and dark, but I am a deer frozen in the headlights of this stranger’s powerful hatred.

“Robert Hayes.”

The air is practically knocked out of my lungs when he says his name, and I nearly fall backwards; I barely resist the pull of gravity.

Robert Hayes. I don’t know him, but I know his son. Knew, I guess I should say. Robbie Hayes was named after his father, apparently, and now that I know who this man is, I can see some familial resemblance.

Robbie was my top tormentor for years. It was unrelenting, but he was charming enough to never earn the ire of teachers or other school faculty. He was the first name I told Jordan when we made our list.

My list.

Robbie Hayes. When everything was still fresh, when I blamed myself for it all, in the darkest parts of the night, I was glad Robbie was dead—and those moments only amplified the guilt I felt in the daylight.

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