Page 272 of Fearless

She leaned forward and kissed his shoulder, wrapped her arms tight around his waist. “I’m with you,” she whispered. “All the way.”

Her first thought, when she saw the white van, wasAidan. Aidan was coming, meeting them. Backup. Salvation.

She felt herself relaxing, the awful tension leaving her arms so she could grip Mercy’s waist without shaking. She touched his shoulder.Look.

His head shifted as he turned to regard the white van, sitting up ahead at the cross street, the only vehicle in sight on this long stretch of bayou road.

He slowed the bike as they neared the van. Closer, closer…

Close enough for Ava to realize she didn’t recognize the driver. Or the passenger.

Not Aidan.

She saw the driver window roll down.

She clutched Mercy’s shoulder.

He cranked the throttle the same moment she saw the gun emerge from the window.

She couldn’t hear the shot. Shefeltit, as it ripped into Mercy, the reverberation moving through him, and then her. The hard shudder of his large body within her arms.

It was like he got slapped. The bike wobbled, dipped. He wrestled for control of it.

And then he got hit again, another shock wave passing through the both of them.

The bike slowed, slowed, slowed…

There was the van, looming up on the left. Then veering over into them.

Ava felt Mercy’s hand covering both of hers where they were linked over his stomach. In one fast move, he pried her fingers loose from one another, and shoved her backward, throwing his shoulders into the movement, heaving her from the bike.

It all unfolded in slow motion after that.

Ava closed her hands on empty air. She felt her body break away from everything solid: no strong back for her chest, no waist for her arms, no seat for her backside. No bike, no Mercy. Just the empty sapphire sky yawning above her, welcoming her, the sun beating down on her. She floated. She flew. Suspended in the sultry Louisiana morning, staring up at heaven, she felt the tiny beads of sweat rolling down her back, trickling between her breasts, gathering at her temples beneath the helmet.

He’d thrown her free of the bike. He wouldn’t take her with him, as he went the final distance. He wouldn’t accept her embrace, here at the end.

You’re falling, stupid!a voice screamed inside her head. Falling. Yes, falling…like the title of the story she’d written. Falling. She was a club girl, born and raised. She knew how to fall off a bike properly.

She closed her eyes and twisted, her body torqueing through the empty air as she pulled up into a ball, and presented the pavement with her left shoulder.

The impact was unlike anything she’d ever felt. She heard her helmet crack against the asphalt. It was like her shoulder exploded, shattering into a thousand fractured bits, and its echoes passed through her in waves that pushed her to the edge of consciousness, the black flickering through her head, her closed eyes. Her lungs and stomach contracted. She made an awful sound that hurt her ears.

She forced her eyes open as she felt herself turn over. She was rolling. Blue sky, black pavement, sky and then pavement again. Her arms and legs tossed limply. She felt like a toy in the hand of a giant, chucked across the street.

And then she stopped, face-down, still awake, unable to breathe.

She heard the squealing tires and the crunching metal and the thumping of car doors.

Mercy.

With a desperate gasp for breath, she heaved herself up, not stopping to interpret the damage to herself. Her left hand refused to move, so she rolled onto her side with the aid of the right, and blinked to clear her fuzzy eyes, struggling to interpret the scene before her.

The van had cut the bike off, and the Dyna lay on its side next to the van. Mercy was on his back, sprawled across the pavement. He wasn’t moving.

Three men had exited the van, and were walking toward him. One had sunlight in his golden, wind-tossed hair.

Larsen. It was Jasper Larsen, getting his revenge at last.

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