Page 33

CHAPTER 33

“Yes.” Dante flipped his headlights to high beam.

“Don’t! That driver—” Maarja’s remonstration disintegrated as with a twist of the steering wheel, Dante threw the SUV into a skid.

Tires shrieked.

At full speed, the other car slammed into their right rear fender.

Metal crumpled. Glass broke.

Maarja’s seat belt yanked her so tightly against the seat she couldn’t breathe, but that didn’t seem to matter because she still managed to shout, “No! What the—?”

Dante twisted the wheel again, headed them north on the wrong side of the road, then one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and they were behind the other car. His headlights flashed into the rear window of the low fast black car right before he smashed into the tiny trunk and blasted the window to pieces.

Maarja could smell scorched tires and flop sweat.

The sweat was hers.

The black car hit the accelerator and leaped ahead.

Dante hit the accelerator and the SUV leaped after it.

This was no ordinary soccer-mom vehicle. Whatever he had under the hood kept them gaining on the sports car—on the straight stretch.

She was an idiot. When she’d seen those headlights flash on and come at them, she thought the other driver was drunk, on drugs, had a heart attack and lost control.

But no. It had been a murder attempt.

Now it was a duel.

In a conversational tone, Dante said, “There are sunglasses in the console. Get them for me, please, Maarja.”

Why sunglasses? There wasn’t a hint of light except from their headlights and… Oh. The other guy. She nodded, not that Dante could see her, found the glasses, hesitated, then wiggled around to place them over his nose and around his ears.

“Thank you, darling. In case of emergency, you do a marvelous job of keeping your head.” He sounded so composed, so pleased she responded to help him. “In the right circumstances, light can be a weapon. Something for you to remember in the future.”

Maybe some of his other relatives would scream their heads off. Maybe they all weren’t dangerous and scary. Maybe a fair number of them were like Béatrice the Shrieker. In its way, knowing she managed to stay poised was a comforting thought. Although…if this continued for too long, calm might dissolve and hysteria take its place.

“You’re doing well.” Again it seemed Dante read her mind.

The highway started up and into a series of hairpin turns. He hit those curves hard, but here the low-slung sports car showed off its advantages. It full-throttle hugged the corners, getting farther and farther ahead of the high-profile SUV. At some point, the lights disappeared…

Had the sports car topped the cliff? Had it pulled off and lain in wait? Or did Maarja remember correctly and—“Dante, on the way north, did we pass a turnout at the summit? Because if that driver—”

“Yes. And I know.”

He sounded as if he were ticking a box in his mind.

Turnout? Check.

Chance for sabotage? Check.

Dante reshaping destiny? Most certainly.

At the turnout, even before the sports car’s headlights flashed on, blinding Maarja, Dante turned the wheel toward the guardrail that hung over the ocean.

Dante had not been blinded. Dante was wearing sunglasses.

The sports car ripped onto the road, missing them by inches, and recovered immediately, skidding around to get on their tailpipes. The SUV’s tires spit gravel. The sports car followed. Dante drove the perimeter of the turnout so fast and so close to the guardrail she should hear metal shrieking against metal. But he never made a wrong move. Not until that spot on the far edge where the guardrail hung right on the edge of the cliff. Then he turned the SUV to the right, toward the drop-off, toward the ocean, toward the long fall and inevitable death.

At the moment the SUV crumpled the guardrail, he smoothly moved the shift into Reverse. Maarja’s head jerked back and forward on her neck as the tires spun, then caught, reversing them and giving the attack car clear access to the place where they’d been.

In the sports car’s headlights, she saw the newly broken guardrail dangling in midair, the ground still attached to the post. The driver of the black car slammed on their brakes, but too late—Dante’s maneuver had put weight and strain on an already stressed and faulted cliff. With a deep groan from the earth, the massive boulder that supported the turnout broke away. The attack car almost seemed to show a human personality as it fought to hang on, but more and more ground gave way until gravity won, taking the car—and its driver—bouncing down the cliff. The car exploded. The blast shook the ground. Light flared across the Pacific Ocean.

Maarja gasped in relief. Dante had saved them from the assassin.

Dante said, “Fuck!” in such a tone of conviction she looked again.

The already-dangerously broken cliff had been hit, shaken, broken, and it was crumpling, falling, eating away at the turnout and the road.

“Dante. Dante…” she chanted as he maneuvered the car in a fast three-point turn while the edge came closer and closer to their front wheels. “Faster. Faster!”

They weren’t going to make it. What the assassin had not been able to accomplish, Mother Earth would complete.

Maarja took her last breath on this earth—and Dante whipped the car around facing toward San Francisco and drove like a bat out of hell.

Her eyes hurt she held them so wide. Sweat rolled down her spine, wet the back of her hair, coated her palms where they gripped the seat. Her heart pounded in her ears, yet she heard Dante call Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, to report a rockslide that had taken part of the Pacific Coast Highway, give the milepost, and hang up. “Road crews are on the way.” He made conversation as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

In a broken whisper, she asked, “What happened back there…? What was that?”

“Sabotage.” Dante sounded calm, as if those four dangerous, horrifying minutes were nothing out of the ordinary, as if behind them the car blaze didn’t light up the waves, as if he hadn’t just won a vicious battle against an assassin sent to kill them. “Are you hurt?”

Her knee had made contact with something: the dash, the console, the door, who knew? Her head ached, but in the bigger scheme of things… “I’m fine.”

“Good girl.” He patted her as if she were a faithful dog. “This put us behind schedule. Try to get some sleep.”

She disregarded that with the scorn it deserved. “Where did you learn to drive like that?”

“Defensive driving school. When this is over, you’ll enroll.”

“Why?”

“Because if I hadn’t trained, we’d be the ones over the edge of the cliff burning to death. You’re obviously a target because you’re a Daire, and double because you’re mine now.”

Sound reasoning…

A brief spurt of fury caught her by surprise. “Damn it! Why did you drag me into this?”

He only snorted, yet said so much.

Hostile and perturbed, she snapped, “I suppose you’d say I dragged myself into it?”

“No one dragged you. You took every step without hesitation.”

“Blindly! Without knowing the consequences!”

“Unless you know more than you’re telling me, unless you can see the future, too, we all walk blindly. The best we can do is watch where we step.” Humor lightened his tone. “As my mother used to tell me, you have a choice between a pile of dog poo and a land mine… Take the dog poo.”

“What a helluva philosophy.”