Page 88 of Twisted Elites

Cormac continued down the highway at a steady pace and whistled as though all was right with the world. I glowered at the side of his face. Of all the people I’d suspected of causing shit at the academy, I had never imagined the prefect I had befriended.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I just can’t believe how much you fooled us all.”

“Nothing about my feelings for you were fabricated. You love me, I see it in your eyes.” He chuckled. “Even though right now, you look like you want to wring my neck.”

“Very perceptive,” I muttered.

“One day, we’ll laugh about this.”

We may as well have been disagreeing about his tea-making skills. “Do you think so?”

“It will take a while for you to adjust, but there’s a study that says it takes a captive ten weeks to warm to their captor. Once Stockholm Syndrome kicks in, we’ll both start a new life in America.”

The part of me who imagined escaping him on the ship died a slow, painful death. “I suppose you’ve got somewhere to keep me until then?”

“You’ve seen it,” he replied.

I shook my head. “If you mean my cottage—”

“My tent. I’ve stashed enough supplies for three months. Longer if we catch fish in the lakes.”

“Cormac,” I said with as much compassion as I could muster. “Right now, no-one thinks you’ve done anything wrong. You can stop the car near the academy and let me walk the rest of the way back. I won’t say a word to anyone, and I’ll tell them I went out on a hike.”

Not answering my question, Cormac turned into another highway, taking the corner way too fast for me to jump out without breaking my neck. I didn’t press him to answer because it would mean having to admit what he had done to Geraldine. Right now, I needed to focus on not becoming his next victim.

The road’s incline steepened, indicating the start of the mountains. Soon, it would narrow to a single track and become too dangerous to negotiate at speed. I rubbed my throat and gulped. If I got the chance, I would have to jump.

We sped past craggy shrubs, which offered a soft landing, and thin strips of pastureland occupied by slumbering cows and sheep. At places, there was nowhere for me to jump—just a sharp drop down the mountainside and into the river. With the occasional stone walls and the bends and twists of the road, timing my escape was near impossible.

“Damn!” Cormac snarled.

“What’s wrong?”

“Is that Garraway’s jeep behind us?”

I twisted around in my seat to find the familiar vehicle, complete with an outline of Sebastian in the front seat. My heart surged with hope, but I forced my face into a neutral expression. “It looks similar.”

“Do you not know the registration number of the twat you’re screwing?”

Channeling my inner Ashley, I focussed on the least important part of the sentence. “Do you have to be so rude?”

Cormac snarled and sped down a sharp incline. My stomach lurched, and I clutched a handle on the dashboard. These old cars didn’t have airbags. If we crashed, there would be no buffer between us and a messy, painful death. He slammed on the brakes and turned around a bend in the road, making the tires screech.

My phone slid off my lap. I shot forward, grabbed the handset, and stuffed it down the bodice of my dress. Eventually, I would escape Cormac, and my recording contained all the information I needed to free Prakash.

“You don’t know what they were like before Corrine died,” he snapped. “A bunch of bastards who used to mock me for being a scholar.”

“Cormac.” I held back a sob. “Slow down.”

“So Garraway can whisk you off into the sunset and break your heart?” He laughed. It was a shrill, blood-curdling sound. “No.”

“He’s not like that. Stop the car. The boys won’t stop looking if you take me away.”

He shifted down to a lower gear as he drove the Aston Martin up the steep incline of a foothill. The engine revved, sounding like it was being pushed to its limit. I glanced into the rearview mirror to find the jeep keeping up. At the top of the hill, the road made several downward curves along the valley before it twisted out of sight. Cormac shifted back into gear and raced down the track.

Hair blew in my eyes, and my heart jumped into the back of my throat. I jerked from side to side as Cormac negotiated the road at high speed. All plans of jumping fell away, along with my hopes of getting through this car chase alive.