Page 72 of Skid Spiral

A tiny smile tugged at my lips. Keeping my head down, I wove between the trees, determined to put more distance between me and the storage building before I let down my guard.

I veered around a steep section of earth jutting up from the ground—and found myself face to face with the flabby guy named Barry who I’d watched berate the high school kid by the lake.

He jerked to a halt, one hand clutching the strap of the bag he had slung over his back. He must have been returning from some illicit business of his own. Shit.

“Who the fuck are you, and what are you—?” he spat out.

I didn’t wait around to hear the rest of his question. I just flung myself in the opposite direction.

My feet pounded across the fallen autumn leaves and crackling twigs. I swerved left and then right, until I found myself coming up on the road on the edge of town.

I paused, my chest heaving for breath, my ears pricked. No sounds of pursuit reached my ears.

Was it possible he hadn’t bothered to run after me? I was probably in better shape than most of those pricks anyway. Or maybe I’d simply lost him in the woods, and he’d given up.

With a sigh of relief, I tugged off my ski mask and looked down at myself. My stomach lurched.

My star-dappled Henley and distressed jeans were dusted with a fine layer of cocaine. There was no missing it against the black fabric of my shirt especially.

Hell, it was dappled all across the front of the mask too.

Barry might not have been able to identify me specifically with the mask covering my face, but with one glance at my figure in the fitted clothes, he wouldn’t have had any doubt that I was a woman. Or that I was the one who’d created the mess he’d find when he returned to his base of operations.

I hadn’t been sure whether the gang was targeting me because they knew I’d been making their lives harder or because I was new in town and different. Now they’d definitely be able to narrow down their list of suspects when it came to the assaults on their property.

I swiped the evidence of my crime off my clothes as well as I could with the help of some strips of moss and then trudged across the street, apprehension settling over me like a cloud.

Now that the goons would be that much surer who’d been targetingthem, how would the assholes come down on me next after I’d screwed up their business so thoroughly?

And how the hell was I going to make sure that confrontation went in my favor—without ruining not just my life but those of the two men who’d lifted that life into something out of a dream?

TWENTY-ONE

Luciana

I knew betterby now than to assume any of my problems had been solved even when it felt like I’d made progress, off or on the rink. No matter how well things appeared to be going, it seemed like a monkey wrench would inevitably lodge itself directly into the turning gears of my good day.

Today, that monkey wrench was tall, broad, and Jasper-shaped.

My partner had been relatively chill with me—you know, as chill as Mr. Grouchy ever got. He actually smiled when I showed up at the rink and managed to laugh rather than grumble after our first collective stumble during a lift.

Maybe because the subsequent fall in which he’d cushioned me had reminded us both of how enjoyably we’d ended our last training session together.

But as we moved into the sections of the routine that were more about synchronization than directly working together, a different sort of tension seeped in. And not between him and me.

“I think if you just loosen up your stance a little more, you’ll land that much better,” Niko said to Jasper after his fourth shaky finish in a row. “Why don’t you try this form again a little slower to see if you can feel where you’re going wrong?”

Jasper scowled. “A little slower. Right. Like that’s going to fix all my problems.”

A new storm cloud seemed to have descended over him since Niko had started focusing on his most difficult individual spin, and it was only getting darker. I paused, my stomach knotting as I watched the two of them together.

I’d seen prickly moments between the two men before—well, prickly on Jasper’s side—but I’d thought that was just Jasper being himself. It didn’t make sense for him to get all snarky with our coach when he was in a good enough mood to brighten up with me.

Unless there’d been more than prickliness underlying their dynamic all along, and I hadn’t noticed because our own tensions had overshadowed the trouble until now.

Niko shook his head with a twinkle in his eyes, but I thought I could make out a strain in his attempt at a typically lighthearted tone. “I’m not saying it’ll fixeverything. We’ve got to start somewhere, right? I know you can hit the mark perfectly if you just get your head in the right place.”

“Oh, so now I’m only just starting?” Jasper rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be building off what I could already do, not sending me back to square one?”

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