“Shit!”

Cassandra’s heart thudded in her chest as she slammed on the brakes. She felt as though someone were trying to drive a spike into her brain, spasms of pain flickering behind her eyes every few moments.

By the time they’d left Riley’s house, the sun had come up fully. Now, as she struggled to navigate according to Jack’s terse instructions, Cassandra wished that half the population of the state would have taken the bus. She took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure whether the surface streets would be worse than the highway; the suburban roads around Riley’s house had been just as congested as the Interstate in front of her now was.

“I can’t keep this up much longer, Jack,” she said, glancing at the muscular form in her backseat. When did I start calling him Jack?

“What’s going on?” Jack’s head rose slightly, not quite clearing the tops of the seats.

“Traffic is a nightmare. It’s rush hour.”

Cassandra took one hand off of the steering wheel and held it where Jack could see it; she felt her whole body trembling, but her hands were the worst.

“Stay on the highway a little longer,” Jack said, sinking back down. “There should be somewhere secluded along the way where we can get off. We’ll find a spot in the woods and you can get some sleep.”

“Gee, thanks,” Cassandra said, grimacing. She yawned, tilting her head back against the headrest to try and ease the ache in her neck.

“There’s no point in staying on the road anyway, if we can’t go more than fifteen miles an hour,” Jack pointed out, ignoring her sarcasm. “You haven’t noticed anyone following us, have you?”

“It’s not like I could tell,” Cassandra told him. “Traffic is so packed out there that someone could be right next to me, watching us, and I wouldn’t have a clue.”

“Find a decent place to get off the road,” Jack said, shifting in the back seat. “Where are we at?”

Her irritation rising up inside of her, Cassandra glanced at one of the highway signs as she came within sight of it. She read off the next three exits to Jack, slowing to a stop once more as the traffic in front of her inexplicably ground to a halt.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow, stifling another yawn as she listened for Jack’s idea.

“We’re about four exits away from an exit that leads off into a nature preserve. I’ll tell you where to go from there.”

Cassandra shrugged. “If I can stay awake that long,” she said, uncaring that the resentment was palpable in her voice. She had a right to be resentful, didn’t she? Jack had kidnapped her; he had nearly forced her to watch him torture an innocent man, something that would have given her nightmares for years to come.

She still felt a certain undercurrent of fear and distrust of the man in her backseat, but something in the fact that he had relented when it became clear that Riley bore him no ill will had lessened her certainty that Jack was guilty. If Riley had wanted Jack to meet his kids, surely Riley didn’t think that Jack was guilty of the murder.

“Stay awake another twenty minutes or so, and you’ll be able to get some shut-eye,” Jack told her. “We just need cover.”

Cassandra nodded numbly. Her eyelids felt unbearably heavy, her hands like wooden blocks at the ends of her tingling arms.

She battled the ebb and flow of traffic, watching the signs as they passed until she saw the exit that Jack had mentioned. Cassandra inched her way to the exit lane, shivering with relief once she was able to drive a little more evenly as she came off of the highway.

“Keep straight. The road feeds into the entrance of the preserve.”

Cassandra followed the signs and Jack’s instructions, continuing along the road as it petered out from a surface street to a glorified two-lane path through the thickening woods. Ramshackle houses disappeared, replaced by scrubby pine trees; the grass became steadily taller as oaks and other big, broad trees replaced the pines.

“Turn right on the little side road up here,” Jack said.

Cassandra made the right-hand turn onto a dirt road; glancing in her rearview mirror she saw that they were alone.

The early morning sunlight dimmed around her, dappled by the dense foliage, and Cassandra winced slightly at how bumpy the dirt road was under her tires. Sighing, she thought to herself that at least she would get some rest soon.

“Keep going until the road dead-ends,” Jack told her.

The road steadily became rougher, the bumping under her tires more pronounced, and Cassandra fought to keep her grip on the steering wheel. Arriving at the dead end, she came to a stop, glancing into the back seat.

“There’s a little path, right there,” Jack told her, sitting up and pointing over the front passenger seat. “Your car should just fit.”

Cassandra groaned. “If this fucks up my tires, we’re not going to get very far,” she said. She could hear the whining note of fatigue in her voice and hated it.

“It won’t,” Jack told her firmly. “We need to be as concealed as possible.”

Cassandra had to admit to herself that his logic was sound. She crept onto the path and followed it until they were completely obscured by the trees, the car so far away from any road that they would be nearly impossible to find, even if someone decided to search for them in the preserve. Cassandra shifted the car into park and turned the key in the ignition, shutting down the engine.

“You can put the seat back,” Jack told her, his voice surprisingly gentle.

Cassandra didn’t reply; she reached down along the side of the seat and found the lever, before reclining the seat as much as possible.

Exhausted as she was, Cassandra wasn’t certain that she would be able to fall asleep. She was keenly aware of Jack’s presence only a few feet away from her, and her memories of the coroner’s reports, and the storage unit she had been in just an hour before, made her heart beat faster with an instinctive dread.

Within a few moments, though, she felt her body beginning to relax. Almost against her will, the tightness in her neck, her back, and her legs began to loosen, and her eyelids became unbearably heavy. Her heart began to slow down, and before Cassandra could realize it, she slipped down into the comforting, velvety darkness.