Page 279 of Depraved Boys

The landscape at our sides turned into a blur of green as we accelerated toward Prakash’s car. I curled my fingers around the Aston Martin’s passenger seat door handle and pulled, but the door jammed. The red Audi took up the middle of the road, trying to force Cormac to stop.

“S-slow down!” I screamed.

Cormac revved the engine and increased his speed. The wind rushed through my ears, causing every hair on my body to stand on end. Beads of sweat on my skin turned to ice. He was just as suicidal as his sister and wasn’t planning to die alone. We were less than thirty seconds away from a head-on collision, and every muscle in my body—including my heart—seized.

“I won’t slow until you promise to stay with me forever,” he shouted over the roar of the wind.

“A-all right, I will!”

He chuckled. “Liar.”

“Give me time, for fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “You can’t expect me to be calm after hearing you were behind every shitty thing that happened in the academy.”

“I didn’t molest Bianca.” He stopped accelerating but still maintained a breakneck pace through the bends in the road. “That was her father’s doing. And I might have been responsible for Garraway’s little accident with the Porsche, but I didn’t get Miss Claymore to sneak into his room at night. She was just depraved.”

The road bent toward a straight stretch of about two-hundred feet in length. At the speed Cormac and the red Audi drove, we would take a second to collide.

“Stop,” I screeched.

He flared his nostrils and drove toward Leopold, who swerved into the shrubs at the roadside. I twisted around in my seat to find him in a cloud of dust.

“Ha!” Cormac slammed his palm on the steering wheel, sounding the horn. He slowed to a less hair-raising speed and continued around the track.

The road narrowed even further as it twisted around the mountain. On our left was an immeasurable drop. On our right, a grass-covered slope. A shudder ran down my spine. One careless twist of the steering wheel and we would hurtle down the valley.

I lowered my head and sucked in huge gulps of air. Nothing seemed to reach my lungs, making my surroundings spin. Sweat dripped onto the skirt of my pink dress, and spasms squeezed my stomach.

I raised my head one more time to beg him to think things through, but as we rounded a sharp bend, I caught sight of three police cars blocking the road about a quarter of a mile ahead.

My breath froze in my lungs. How the hell would Cormac react?

He turned to me, his eyes cold. “This is your doing.”

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t lie to me!” he roared.

Hopeless, desperate tears ran down my cheeks. “If you explain everything to the police, they’ll understand. There’s a defense called diminished responsibility, and—”

“I’m not mental,” he snapped.

“Corrine’s obsession with Prakash affected you more than you realize.”

He put his foot on the accelerator, lurching the Aston Martin forward. “Did you ever watch Thelma and Louise?”

My heart stopped.

My stomach plummeted.

My fingers unhooked the seatbelt.

This was the end.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

What happened next was difficult to describe, but if I imagined my mental state as a clock face, twelve o’clock would be calm, six would be fear, nine would be terror, and eleven would be blind, useless panic.

Cormac sped toward a hairpin turn, bellowing something about meeting Corrine. With each accelerating second, the wind roared louder in my ears to the point where Cormac’s rantings became a dull roar.