He was her own damn fault, the culmination of her sins and her weaknesses, the reckoning she had never thought would come for every snotty thing she had ever done.

He was going to run her off the road, and he had a gun in that car of his—he had told her just a week ago that he kept it under the front seat because he had to drive around at night in that Bentley of his.

Richard was going to shoot her and maybe himself and that was how all this was going to end.

How she was going to end—

Thump!

As he rammed her car one last time, the Mercedes began to lose traction, and that was when everything slowed down. She steered hard away from the river to counter the drift, and the car corrected for a moment. But then the hood ornament over-swung to the marshes and the trees on the right.

The guardrail popped the front two wheels off the ground and she had a brief moment of weightlessness . . . and then the slam on the far side clapped her teeth together and made her head ring—oh, she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. She’d hit the ceiling.

There was no time to think. Airbags exploded in her face, powder going everywhere as she was punched in the chest.

And the ride didn’t end there.

Her foot hit the accelerator again after she landed, giving that powerful engine a huge boost that propelled her further off the road and into the marshes. Trees hit the front of the car, scratched down the side, clawed at the undercarriage.

As the airbags had already begun to deflate, she caught sight of the huge swamp maple directly in her path—and there was no stopping any of it, no changing her course, no altering the inevitable crash.

Rather like destiny.

The impact was like an explosion, and her forehead hit the windshield. Then the rebound threw her back into her seat, and she ping-ponged in between the steering wheel and the headrest.

Until she finally fell back against the seat.

Dizzy, confused, and in pain, she heard a subtle hiss in front of her from the engine and tried to focus, but her vision wasn’t working right—

Bright light. Very bright light.

Had she died and this was the afterlife that people talked about?

Except no, she had stayed in her body. Hadn’t she? She thought she had—

Click. Click. Clickclickclick.

She lolled her head toward the sound. And then jumped back from her door.

Richard was trying to open things, trying to get at her, pulling and yanking at the handle, getting nowhere because of the locking mechanism.

As something blurred her eyes, she pushed her hands across her face and prayed that the sunroof hadn’t broken—and thus provided him with another way at her. But it wasn’t rain. It was blood.

“Let me in!” Richard screamed as he pounded on the glass with his fists. “You let me in, Virginia!”

Lightning flashed and the rain fell, plastering his dark hair to his head, his face like a Halloween mask, slick and pale and horrible.

“Let me in, Virginia!”

Bam! Bam! Bam—

Scrambling across the seat, she put her back to the other door and tucked her knees up to her chest. As she linked her arms around herself and shivered, blood dripping down onto her dress, she thought it was just like being under that bed. Waiting to see if her father would come after her or stick to beating her brothers.

Bang, bang, bang—

As the sound changed, it was because Richard was hitting the window with something else. Something metal . . . the butt of a gun—

The safety glass spidered first—and then broke free in a chunk that fell where she had been sitting behind the wheel.

Richard put his head through the hole, his eyes and smile all Jack Nicholson from The Shining. “No more running, Virginia . . . now be a good girl, and open this door.”

TWENTY-FIVE

As Richard ordered her to let him in, something made a connection in Gin’s brain. Unhinging her right arm, she patted at the glove compartment without taking her eyes off Richard. The latch evaded her fingers—and when she did find it, she fumbled with pushing it.

“You don’t want to make me madder, Virginia.”

Rain was running down Richard’s face, but he didn’t seem to notice, and as lightning flashed again, she glanced up through the closed sunroof.

“Looking for God?” he said. “I’m going to help you meet Him, Virginia—”

“That’s not my name,” she choked out.

“What was that? Not your name? Should I call you ‘whore,’ then? Is that what Lodge calls you when he’s fucking you?”

Finally, the glove compartment fell open, and she shoved her hand in, pain registering in her knuckles as she clawed through its contents, praying that—

As her hand locked on the butt of a nine millimeter, she closed her eyes and tried to remember what her brother Edward had taught her about how to shoot. Where was the safety? How did she disengage it?

Oh, God, if there were no bullets, she was a dead woman.

She was probably dead, anyway.

“I’m so sorry, Richard,” she said quickly to distract him. “I didn’t mean it, I was wrong. I’m sorry, I was wrong—”

As Richard frowned, she sat forward and reached out to him with her free hand. “Please forgive me, please don’t leave me—”

Lightning flashed, illuminating the inside of the Mercedes, and she knew the instant he saw what she was doing with her other hand. Just as she flicked the gun’s safety off and started to swing the muzzle up and around, he shifted back and double-palmed his own weapon, pointing it through the hole in the glass.

“Don’t call me Virginia!” she shouted at the top of her lungs as they both pulled the triggers.

Loud popping, multiple shots, the ringing sound of at least one bullet hitting metal. And as Gin kept shooting, she closed her eyes and twisted toward the dash, trying to get her major organs out of the way. Ears hurting, eyes stinging, something wrong with her leg, she just kept that forefinger down on that fucking trigger, the autoloader doing what it was supposed to do until there was nothing left in the clip.

And still she kept her arm up and that grip hard, even though she was shaking so badly that the back of her skull was repeatedly banging into something.

What was that sound?

There was some kind of rhythmic—

It was her. She was panting. And there was still a hiss, coming out of the front of the car. And rain, softer rain now, pattering on the hood, the roof, the windshield, like cats with quiet paws.

Staring sightlessly ahead, every time she blinked, she saw Richard’s face. And then her father’s. And then Richard’s . . . until the two men became as one, an amalgam of each other—

“Gin.”

At the sound of the disembodied voice, she jerked to attention and once again looked up through the sunroof’s transparent cover.

“Put down the gun, Gin,” it said.

Opening her mouth, she gave voice to her confusion: “God?”

As Samuel T. lay on top of Pford in the mud about six feet past the Mercedes’s driver’s-side door, he thought, Well, he’d been called a lot of things in his life. Never God, though.

He’d also never saved someone from being riddled with bullets on a flying tackle, either.

So it was a night for firsts.

“Stay down, motherfucker,” he bit out.

While he spoke into Richard Pford’s ear, he kept his voice low, but just to make sure he got his point across, he palmed the back of the man’s skull and shoved the bastard’s face into the marsh.

Although maybe that was more on principle than to ensure comprehension.

“I have your gun,” he said to the man roughly. “If you move, I will shoot you—and I’ve killed deer bigger than you. Gutted them, too—and I have no problem revisiting that skill. Nod if you understand me.”

When the nod came, Samuel T. spoke more loudly. “Gin, I need you to put down the gun, okay? You’re safe. Do you hear me? Gin. Say something.”

There was a long, long period of silence. And he prayed that it wasn’t because she was reloading and about to stick the gun out of that broken window and fill him full of lead.

Or because she was dead from a bad-luck lead slug to the head.

“Samuel T. . . . ?”