by Lucy Auburn
"What do you mean?" I look back and forth between him and Cole, then over at Lukas, who's frowning at Tanner, and Blake, who's basically ignoring all of us in favor of pouring over some book he probably got from the restricted access section of the library. "You guys are going with me tonight, right? I mean, it's off campus and I don't have a car. Or off campus privileges. Or a camera to film any of it with."
"We'll go with you," Lukas reassures me, though he darts a look over at Cole to confirm. "Right? I mean, why wouldn't we?"
"We're needed here, on campus. While Hass is out on his little drug mission, we've got something closer to home to take care of. Something that's none of Brenna's business.”
I stare at him. "You can't be serious. There's no way I can do this alone."
"You can have my car," Cole says casually. "And Lukas's camera. But the four of us have to take care of something. Besides, how hard can it be? He's doing the handoff at a private airport. Just park the car on the shoulder of the road, roll down the window, and aim a telephoto lens at him. I'm sure you'll get enough for a warrant of his place, and once the feds find the girls, that's all they'll need. Just be sure to post pictures and video on your little blog with the most salacious headline you can come up with—the guillotine-lovers and SEO will do the rest." He smirks. "You know how much our generation slathers at the thought of eating the rich and guilty. Give them what they want, and Hass will be viral by tomorrow before classes are even over."
He makes it all sound so easy—too easy. I haven't been off campus alone since the night of the kidnapping, though, and despite myself, I'm afraid of Hass. He has a temper—I've seen that firsthand with Georgia. If he catches me taking pictures of him, whether I'm in a sports car or not, I may not be able to get away before he does something to me.
And I don't think that a little knife will be enough to scare him off a second time.
I find myself looking at the one person here I trust to defend me: Lukas. He's frowning at Cole, and when he meets my eyes, I can tell he's thinking of stepping in and saying something.
Before he can, another voice speaks up. "I'll go with her. You don't need me tonight, Cole, and besides, I could use a little excitement."
I stare at Blake, lips parted, wondering if I really heard what I think I just heard. There's no way that Blake Lee himself, son of Jake Garrison, asshole extraordinaire, the coldest statue around, actually just volunteered to show up and protect me.
But no—he didn't mention anything about protection. He just sounded bored, and more than anything, eager for the conversation to be over.
Still, if he's with me, Hass won't do anything to me. He doesn't want witnesses like Blake, who has the money to protect himself from whatever he's got up his sleeve. That much I'm certain of. Even if all he does is slouch in the passenger seat staring at rare books, having him there is the only insurance policy I need.
"Fine." Cole shrugs. "You're right, we don't need you. The three of us can get this done all by ourselves. Just make sure Wilder doesn't scratch my car—I just paid for a new paint job, and I don't want to have the racing stripes redone."
Now I find myself staring at Cole with an open mouth—this time in disgust, not shock. "You have racing stripes on your car?"
"No, but at least now I know you're listening. Here." Reaching into his blazer pocket, he pulls out a keychain and slides his car keys over to me. "It's the Maserati in the back lot. Blake knows the one. Just wave at the gate guard and he'll let you through—I have off campus privileges anytime I want."
"Must be nice to be rich," I mutter as I take the keys and slip them into my backpack."
"Yeah." Grinning, Cole stretches, his arm muscles rippling as he pulls them exaggeratedly over his head. "It is nice to have money. Maybe one day, Wilder, you'll get a taste of it yourself. Once you do, I guarantee one thing: you won't ever want to go back."
Chapter 13
Cole's car has a manual transmission.
I don't know why this is such a shock to me. It's a European sports car—of course it's a stick shift. The thought of someone like Cole learning how to use a clutch and a transmission breaks my mind a little. He doesn't seem like the type with patience to shift gears.
"You do know how to use a gear shift, right?" Blake aims a droll, raised eyebrow at me. "Because there's no way I'm driving. I have notes to take for an essay due in two weeks, and unlike you I don't phone these things in at the last minute."
"I don't phone things in! And of course I know how to drive a stick. Wally taught me."
"Wally? Nevermind, don't tell me who that is—I'm sure it's just some boyfriend of yours back home who's missing his front teeth."
"You've really got to get new jokes."
"Fine: he's got a birthmark on his face the shape of a cowboy boot, and a twang in his voice you can hear from space. He's so bow-legged you could drive a semi between his knees. The tip of his dick has a little stetson on it. When he—"
"He's gay, and not my boyfriend. Are you done?"
Blake levels a dry, expressionless look at me. "I suppose."
"Good. Because we've got shit to do, and an asshole's life to ruin. So I don't want to waste any time."
Putting my right foot on the brake, and my left foot on the clutch, I turn the engine on. It purrs to life at the push of a button—keyless startup. Wally's truck always took some coaxing to come to life, but not this car. It was born to carry rich boys places in the blink of an eye.
I wonder, idly, if this is the car Cole's parents got him after the DUI. He must have been very good friends with Michael Yates to actually take the fall for him. It seems impossible to believe—out of all the parts of his story, that's the one I doubt the most. He has friends, sure, but he manipulates them, leads them, cajoles them, and enjoys their company. Taking the fall for them? Seems impossible.
So the fact that all my instincts tell me to believe him galls me to my core. Cole Masterson has a golden tongue; he could convince the sun to rise in the west and set in the east if he wanted to, just with a few liquid words. Of course he got a brand new car even after wrecking one and getting arrested. His parents wouldn't have said no to their golden boy—the eldest, inheritor of it all.
Staring down at the gear shift, hand on the leather, I wonder why it feels warm. As if his hand was just here beneath mine. Like our skin is not quite touching.
Blake clears his throat, and I jerk back to the present moment. "I put the address in my phone's GPS, since I know your shitty phone probably doesn't even have apps."
I grit my teeth to keep from snapping back at him, because the truth is that the GPS on my phone is basically useless, especially out on the country roads we're about to drive on.
"Just tell me what turns to take." Moving my foot from the brake to the gas, I rev the engine a little, and enjoy the way it vibrates beneath me like a predator eager to jump to life. "I'll get us there before anything goes down."
The thing about a Maserati is, it's a conspicuous car. Cole didn't lie when he said there would be plenty of space around the Great Falls Municipal Airport to park the car so Hass doesn't know it was here, but the thing about the airport being closed to any traffic except this one plane is, the entire public lot is empty. I can't exactly park this flashy blue Italian sports car in the middle of it and call this whole thing a stakeout.
"There—that dirt road over on the right, opposite the airport." Blake points out his window, and I squint in the direction of his finger, barely able to see the break in the trees. "Drive the car that way. I'm sure no one will spot us under the canopy."
As I pull up towards the little dirt road, though, I start to get antsy. "It's barely wider than the car."
"So?"
"Cole said not to scratch the paint."
"He also said it had racing stripes on it."
Still, I can't seem to put my foot back on the gas. It's absurd—a few months ago I would've given anything to have the chance to wreck Cole Masterson's car. All it wo
uld take is a tap on the gas and a turn of the wheel and I could have this thing in salvage condition like that.
But his parents would just get him a new one.
More importantly, my thinking has shifted in ways I'm uncomfortable examining.
"If you won't do it, I will," Blake says, "and I'm the world's shittiest driver, so this thing will be wrapped around a tree."
"Fine," I snap, temper running hot just in his presence. "I'll have to back into it if we want a good vantage point, though."
Expensive cars, thankfully, come with backup cameras. As I position the wheel and stare at the screen, biting my lower lip, I feel Blake watching me intensely. The whole ride out here he just stared at his book and took notes on his iPad without even glancing my way except to tell me to turn the heat down—like he doesn't have fingers that work. Now he seems to only have eyes for me, and it's unnerving.
So I flick my eyes over to him and catch him staring. "What? Do I have something on my face?"
He looks away, suddenly stiff. "Just your face."
"Wow. How creative of you. Next you'll say you're rubber and I'm glue."
I tap on the gas to pull the car back a little, only to feel Blake's eyes on me again. This time, he's the one who breaks the silence.
"I was just thinking how unfair it is."
"What?" I ask, as I put the car in park.
"Girls like you shouldn't be so beautiful." I freeze, fingers curling over the steering wheel, feeling like a rabbit trapped in a tiny metal cage instead of a girl with an engine at her fingertips. Blake continues, voice nonchalant, "You don't have money to do any of it: get those old highlights fixed, find yourself a dermatologist that does fillers, have your clothing tailored, or even buy clothes worth wearing. I can tell you put no effort into your appearance. But you still look gorgeous. Half the girls at Coleridge would kill you just to use your blood as a vampire facial and find out if any of it rubs off."
"What?" I wrinkle my nose, blinking at him. "That was almost a compliment, until you got weird."
He cocks his head to the side, looking at me with a curious yet distant expression on his face. "I didn't mean it as a compliment. I just meant..." Then he pauses, suddenly silent, his mouth going soft at the edge. "Huh. I guess it was a compliment. I don't know why I said it."
"Uh, okay." I don't know why my heart is racing. "Maybe we should just get the camera out, set it—"
"I do know why," Blake says suddenly, sounding like he just solved an impossible problem and has somehow surprised even himself with the answer. Turning to me, he says with something like awe in his voice, "Brenna, I think I'm falling in love with you."
The sun moves lower in the sky as the awkward silence in the car stretches twenty minutes long.
I can't believe Blake told me he's falling in love with me.
Even more, I can't believe how I responded.
"No you're not."
To which he just made an incredulous noise, pulled one of his books out, and started acting like he was studying it. It's been twenty minutes now, though, and it's obvious that he's not really reading the book. I've seen Blake study; he always takes copious notes, and turns the pages to an exact rhythm, like a robot. He's barely skimmed the pages he's been turning and hasn't scribbled anything down in his notebook.
I don't know why he said what he said.
It can't be true.
Can it?
No, of course it isn't true. It's impossible for Blake Lee to love anybody. He's a cold bastard who feels nothing. If he's telling the truth, he's mistaken about what he feels. Probably he just thought I was a little cute and mistook the feeling for love because he's never had a single affectionate emotion in his life.
Yes, that must be it. He's overreacting to a little tiny bit of attraction. Soon enough he'll realize he was wrong and remember that he loathes me completely. If anything, it makes sense that he'd mistaken his loathing for something like love—the dolt has probably never felt anything as intense as hatred before.
Reassured by my line of reasoning, I return to surveying the airport across the street. The camera the boys sent along with the car is heavy in my hands, a telephoto lens hanging off the end of it, capable of seeing impossibly far into the distance. Raising the screen up a bit, I roll down the window and aim the lens towards the airport hanger door as a figure moves in the distance. With the help of a 600mm lens—the kind of thing that only paparazzi use to take creepy photos of actors—I'm able to zoom in on the figure and see a few details.
It isn't Hass. I snap a few photos anyway, a simple one second hold on the shutter engaging the lens over a dozen times. This camera was made for someone who isn't me—a private detective maybe, or someone with the money to replace it if it's broken. No doubt thousands of dollars worth of equipment is in my hands, and I'm lucky to have it, because otherwise I'd have to use my camera phone and get close enough to wind up caught.
"You know," Blake says, startling me with the suddenness of his voice after so long spent not talking, "the normal response to a confession of feelings is some kind of sentiment in return, positive or negative. At least a 'thank you' if things are awkward. Not a denial followed by complete silence."
I stare at him, open-mouthed. "I thought we weren't going to talk about this."
"Yeah, well, I'm talking about it." He narrows his eyes at me, and I wonder how he's convinced himself that he has feelings for me, given the irritation that flashes across his movie-ready face. "You're an odd girl, you know that, right?"
"Which is exactly why you're wrong about how you feel." I sneak a quick glance at the camera's screen, swinging it out and towards me, but the man in the hanger is just standing there, lighting a cigarette. No crimes afoot—yet. "I mean, we kissed once. We've never even spent any significant time together."
"Except all those lunches. Calculus classes. One-on-one tutoring."
"Yeah, well, that's not... not the same."
"As?"
"Dating," I shoot back. "Even Tanner and I went on a date, even if it was just part of your little games that you played with me."
"Are you saying that you have feelings for Tanner?" There's a cold, aggressive tone in his voice, one that makes me glad the senator's son isn't here right now. Blake sounds like he would stab him if given enough reason—or any reason at all. "I should have known. Every girl falls for that bonehead. Did you know he once drank his own piss on a dare?"
"I do not have feelings for Tanner, and gross." I have to shake my head to get the image Blake just left there out of it. "Can we please just focus on what we're here to do? Because I'm pretty sure that's Hass's plane landing, sex slaves and all."
"Fine, act all business if that's what you want. But this isn't over."
It sounds like a threat more than anything. Lucky me—I've got a suitor with issues. As Blake returns to not-reading his book, I observe him in the rearview mirror, wondering why it is that he's suddenly attached himself to me. Maybe it's guilt. He clearly wants something back from me in exchange for his confession, and I don't know what to say or do about that.
Observing the strong lines of his jaw, the pout of his lips, how his sleek black hair falls into his face in pieces, which he sweeps back with an impatient rake of his fingers every few minutes or so, I'm suddenly struck by how much more alive he looks when he doesn't know anyone is watching. All the statue has drained out of him as he skims the book in his hands, and without the stiffness there, what's left behind is just a boy.
A handsome, complicated, often cold boy who claims he's falling in love with me.
Blake's eyes flick up to meet mine in the rearview mirror, and a butterfly flutters in my stomach. He still has his real, vulnerable face on, and for a moment he looks like the kind of boy whose arms I could fall asleep between, dreaming of safety and security, knowing he'll still be holding me when I wake up.
The moment passes, and the cold statue of Blake Lee returns. Clearing his throat, he observes, "The plane is landing. Y
ou should probably take some photographs."
Startling back into action, I aim the telephoto lens at the airport runway as a small passenger plane drops out of the sky. It puts down its landing gear and skids down the runway, heading towards us with impossible speed, then slowing down bit by bit.
Pulling the camera up, I click photos, unsure if this part will matter to the investigation, but certain enough that the camera has space on its card for anything I want to shoot.
"You know, there's a good chance even this won't take Hass down," Blake says, in a distant yet bitter tone of voice. "Do you know how powerful his family is? They own half the political influence in America."
Gritting my teeth, I point out, "You're not helping. So hush."
He grumbles, but falls silent as I roll the window down further. The door on the side of the little plane is opening, and someone is getting out. I can't get a good angle from just outside the car, so I hang the camera outside the open window, one hand supporting underneath it, the other depressing the trigger.
The door opens, and a large man walks through, tugging a skinny, pale blonde girl behind him.
I depress the shutter, adrenaline coursing through me, tasting victory.
But I put too much enthusiasm into it.
With a sound like my heart breaking in two, the camera falls to the ground, and the lens shatters—ruining all my hopes and dreams in an instant.
Chapter 14
Staring at the broken camera lens, I take a deep, shaky breath. There has to be some way out of this—some alternative. Maybe there were other lenses in the camera bag. Or maybe I can just twist it back together...
"Well, fuck." Blake's voice is mild, despite the deep shit we're in. "You sure do know how to ruin things."
"Shut up." Opening the driver side door, I check to make sure we haven't been spotted and kneel by the shatters camera and lens. "There has to be some way to fix this. The battery pack fell out of the camera body, but it's not actually broken... it still turns on... shit."