Page 160 of Dark Little Game

“We have to leave,” Kai says to Briar, over and over, as he realizes that the sirens are coming for us.

She doesn’t listen.

She wants to kill me just for fun, now.

She never did like letting me win a fight.

I’m losing consciousness when the sirens become louder.

And a little glimmer of hope burns inside me when I finally start to pass out.

I see a team of police, running toward Wes and Rayne.

“Godfucking damn it,” Briar curses.

And she finally drops me hard onto the ground.

Briar’s hand leaves my neck as she and Kai try to make a run for it, but my head drops to the grassy ground as my vision becomes spotty and I gasp for air.

Rayne and Wes are safe.

And we’re not alone at all.

27

Rayne

Something becomes so obvious when you’re faced with death.

And it isn’t complicated or confusing at all.

When I thought it might be over…

The only thing that remained was love.

“We were walking backonto Red Row when we heard a gunshot,” Ollie explains, his eyes wide. “We didn’t feel safe going toward it, but we called the police immediately.”

“You saved our lives,” I tell him.

I’m bone-tired and weary, and everything feels like a morbid dream.

We’ve just spent the last four hours with the police, explaining everything.

And it turns out that the FBI had been looking for Briar and Kai already. But right at the end of our questioning, before the police let us go, they let us know another thing that had happened, just an hour after we were kidnapped.

Howard Zhang, Briar’s father, had found Barrett Knox.

He’d gotten to him as he was in the back of a black car, being driven to Crimson College.

There had been a gun fight.

Howard Zhang and Barrett Knox had both been killed.

I feel like I’ve been through hell and back today, but I can’t begin to imagine how Wes and Hunter feel.

Learning their father was using them as a bargaining chip for his business deals.

That he didn’t even value Hunter’s fuckinglife.