“God, please,” she whimpered, stamping her foot with frustration as she continued to wrench the ignition, her fingers aching with the effort, her heart pounding so hard and so fast that it made her head spin and her vision blur.
Finally, the engine rumbled into life, startling her in the process. An involuntary squeal of shock erupted from her lips just before she began to hurriedly scrabble about for the unfamiliar controls, her clothes sticking uncomfortably to her cold, sweat-saturated skin.
“It’s okay… it's okay…” she muttered under her breath, at last pressing down onto the accelerator. As the vehicle slowly crept forward, she let out a triumphant cry of relief and punched the air. “YES!” she shrieked manically, stepping down harder. The RV lurched violently forward a few metres whilst omitting a painfully ear-splitting shriek from the engine.
Driven by her fear and partial insanity, Sienna kept the pedal pressed down all the way, cackling as the expensive tyres caught speed, and she sensed her captors trailing behind.
“Fuck you!” she snarled as she glanced out of the window to see the running figures become smaller again. “FUCK YOU! FUCK Y-“
With an almighty screech, the RV halted abruptly, interrupting her high-pitched screams of triumph.
There was a horrific thud, and the engine died.
In the back of the vehicle, Jared face-planted the ground, his limbs as heavy as dead weights with his paralysis.
“SIENNA!” he croaked as loudly as he could, though his voice was hopelessly muffled against the mud-soaked floor.
A single tear dribbled down one of his cheeks.
There was no reply.
Chapter Nineteen
Summer, 1999
Minnie didn’t have to go far to find Ronnie. She turned at the bottom of her quiet, suburban road, and found him walking towards her, his hands in his ripped jeans, a sombre expression on his handsome face.
“Min-“ he began, his eyes lighting up as he caught sight of her.
But his delight was quickly interrupted as she slapped him hard across his cheek, leaving an angry red mark in the shape of her hand.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Minnie demanded, her brow furrowing with fury, long blonde hair messy and askew around her face. “What the hell did you tell the police?”
Ronnie quickly looked all around them. They appeared to be deserted, but there was no mistaking the wave of concern that crossed his features. It was a sad sight to see him looking so worried and so afraid. He reminded Minnie of some poor, furry little animal caught in headlights.
“Why did you incriminate yourself like that?” she asked, her voice faltering. “You idiot…” she murmured, propelling herself into his chest and breathing in his familiar scent. For the briefest of moments, she allowed his heat and the comforting feeling of his limbs curled around hers to transport her back to that night when she’d felt so content and so hopeful for the future.
“I did it for you,” he whispered.
Minnie shook her head and sighed. “This… this is all wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
He held her at arm’s length and stared deeply into her eyes. His pupils fixed intently on hers. “This isn’t the end of the world. I’ll get banged up in some correctional facility for kids for a few years, and that’ll be that. My record will get cleared as well, probably.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, “yes. Maybe if we were talking about a robbery or assault. This is murder, Ronnie,” she hissed.
“Self-defence,” he corrected her, although he sounded worryingly uncertain.
Quiet fell upon them as a million unspoken sentences fluttered in the atmosphere between them.
Self-defence.
It went without saying that a dead guy with almost one hundred stab wounds, then burned, did not look like self-defence.
“What’s the other alternative, Min?” Ronnie asked, finally. “There isn’t one. Life served us up a shit deal, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Minnie shook her head and stared back at him with defiance. Inside her cool blue iris, he saw a blazing fire reflected that he had never seen in her before. Her forehead creased with determination, and she chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip.
“What?” he asked, slightly alarmed at the hardening of her expression.
His girlfriend cleared her throat.
“I’ve got a plan,” she said.
Chapter Twenty
2019
Darkness. The pleasant kind Flo was happy to realise.
Her eyes opened, and the child blinked. She could feel the soft weight of a blanket draped around her in a comforting cocoon. Any disorientation she felt was immediately soothed by the familiar scent of her mother’s musky perfume.
“Mummy…” she whispered in a small croak, her heavy eyelids fluttering as her pupils strained to recognise the dimmed shapes that surrounded her.
“I’m here, sweetheart,” Minnie replied instantly.
Flo turned round to face her mother, who was sandwiched behind her beneath the sheets of a double bed. The girl breathed a sigh of relief before scrambling to get up out of the bedsheets.
“Ugh, Mum!” she groaned in disgust, “I’m not a kid anymore! I don’t need to be cuddled to sleep, for fuck’s sake!”
Minnie chuckled and sat up. She leaned to her left and flicked a switch, which activated the wooden blinds. As the shutters turned, brilliant white light from outside poured in through the slats and illuminated every inch of the impressive double bed.
“Shit!” gasped Flo, crawling over to the foot of the bed to stare out the window. “Oh, shit!” she repeated, her eyes wide as she gazed down from the top deck of the RV and looked out on the vast, muddy plains.
It all came back to her then.
Whilst Flo’s family were regularly part of various criminal activity and highly dangerous misdemeanours, she had never before been threatened. Especially not at knifepoint. She’d been so frightened; it
