A text from Ryan: Hey beautiful, just finished up at work early. Heading home now. I bought your favorite takeout to cheer you up. Love you.
A wave of nausea washed over me. I didn’t reply. Instead, I put the car in drive and headed straight toward the central police station.
As I drove, the sky above began to darken, heavy gray clouds rolling in, mimicking the exact weather of my wedding day one week ago. Rain began to pelt the windshield, the wipers slapping rhythmically against the glass. Slap. Slap. Slap. It sounded like a countdown.
I turned a corner, just three blocks away from the police station, when my phone rang. It was an unknown number.
Normally, I would ignore it, but in my hyper-vigilant state, I answered. “Hello?”
“Alice,” a voice whispered.
The breath caught in my lungs. It wasn’t Ryan. It was a woman’s voice. A voice I knew better than my own. A voice that belonged to someone who was supposed to be at the bottom of a river.
“Claire?!” I screamed into the Bluetooth speaker. “Claire, oh my god, you’re alive?! Where are you?!”
“Alice, listen to me very carefully,” Claire’s voice gasped, sounding weak, muffled, and terrified. “He knows. He knows I survived the crash. I’ve been hiding, but he found me. He’s—”
The line went dead.
A Deadly Trajectory
“Claire! Claire!” I screamed at the dashboard, but the call had disconnected.
My mind exploded into a panic. If Claire was alive, where was she? And if Ryan knew…
Before I could process anything, a massive black SUV pulled out from a side street, cutting directly into my lane. It didn’t slow down. It accelerated, heading straight for my front bumper.
I slammed on the brakes, my tires screeching against the wet asphalt. My car spun violently, skidding across the slick road before violently mounting the curb and slamming into a concrete pillar beneath a highway overpass.
The airbag deployed with a deafening bang, blinding me with white smoke and a searing pain in my chest.
For a few seconds, there was only the sound of the pouring rain and the hiss of my broken radiator. I groaned, my vision blurry, fighting to stay conscious. My purse had flown onto the passenger floorboard. The burner phone, containing the only copy of Claire’s video, was thrown somewhere into the shadows of the car.
Footsteps approached. Slow, deliberate splashes in the puddles outside my shattered driver’s side window.
I struggled to lift my head. Through the cracked glass and the pouring rain, a figure loomed over my car. He was holding a heavy crowbar in one hand, and in the other, a cell phone.
The door handle clicked. The door was ripped open, letting the freezing rain pour inside.
Ryan looked down at me, his face completely devoid of emotion. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a second cell phone—Claire’s actual personal phone, the one the police said had been lost in the river. He dropped it into my lap. It was covered in fresh blood.
He leaned in close, his breath hot against my face, and whispered:
“You should have listened to your sister, Alice. Now, where is the copy she left you?”
