“Enough. The high points. I don’t remember my father. I remember my mother in snapshots. I remember that day when we…killed your father…vividly.” She waited to see how Dante reacted to her choice of words.
As far as she could tell, by the dim light of the dashboard, he didn’t.
She said, “You were scarred by the blast.” Across his forehead and cheek, the divot of the wound looked like a shadowy canyon.
“Broken collarbone. Broken wrist. Unconscious under the rubble for hours. Nate found me first, and when he lifted me, that brought me to consciousness.” He grimaced. “While I was screaming, Andere found my mother. He thought she was dead. I looked over and saw him holding her body, and I thought she was dead, too. That was the only thing that could have shut me up.”
Maybe that’s why he had shown no signs of grief over his mother’s death; he’d already suffered through it.
“When she moved ever so slightly—”
She could hear the relief, the joy, in his voice.
“By the time I got stitched together, even if I wasn’t tough, I looked it.”
“You could have had plastic surgery.”
“No.”
“Tough is good, huh? In your business?”
He grunted, which was no answer. But when he turned the dash lights off, plunging the interior of the car into darkness, she looked out the windshield to see—“Those headlights are coming right at us!”
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 hadunder 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.
