This girl is everything they ever said about her. She is lethal. She snapped the biker’s neck like she was tearing a chicken leg off a roast. Her breathing is labored, but not fast. Which means she’s not working off adrenaline. She’s working off experience. Only people who’ve been trained to react first and think later can avoid an adrenaline rush. Hell, my heart is about to jack itself out of my chest this very moment and I didn’t even do anything.

But I sure the f**k saw something.

I saw a sweet girl just take the life of…

I rub my face with my hands to hide from her for a moment.

“Sasha?” When I look up Harper is crawling over to the Smurf. Who is f**ked up. I snap out of my shock and go over to help get the bike off of her. “She’s still alive!” Harper says with hope in her voice as she checks for a pulse. “It’s… not strong.”

Her elation deflates and I bend down and pick the kid up. “Sasha?” I take her to the Hummer and Harper follows, opening the door so I can sit her ass in the back seat. “Sasha?” I ask, louder this time. I lift up an eyelid and find her pupils unresponsive and contracted down into pinpoints. “Drugged. She’s been drugged with opiates.” I put my ear to her chest and listen for a few moments. “Slow. She might’ve been given too much.”

“What do we do?”

“I have a med kit in the cargo area. Watch her for a moment.”

You know there’s something wrong with your profession of choice when naloxone is standard in your first-aid kit. I open the kit and search for the rescue pen. It’s dosed for a full-grown man, so administration to a hundred-pound kid is more of an art than a science. But considering the alternative might be dying from opiate overdose, it will have to do. I uncap it and thrust it into the meaty part of Smurfette’s arm, then depress the plunger.

There’s only two real possibilities for pinpoint pupils. Opiate overdose or pons dislocation, a fancy name for a deep-brain injury. If it’s drugs, the naloxone will reverse the opiates and she’ll come out of it with sand rash and thorn scratches. If it’s the other… then she’s brain-dead.

Harper scoots into the backseat with Sasha and positions herself on the table-sized partition that separates the two bucket seats. Harper lifts her head and then I pick up the feet, and we drag Sasha’s body onto the flat surface so she can recover. Harper talks softly into her ear and then the Smurf starts to wince. I walk back over to the biker, trying my best not to notice how his neck is bent at the wrong angle.

How does this bother me? After all the killing I’ve done? How can one dead body bother me so bad?

I don’t answer that. I can’t think about it now. I just want to get the f**k out of here before Harper starts asking questions. I reach into his leather jacket and pull out a gun and a phone.

“She’s getting better!” Harper says excitedly from the Hummer.

“That’s great, Harp,” I say automatically. But one hundred percent of my concentration is on the phone in my hand. Because it’s vibrating.

I press the home button and it lights up an alert. Scheduled message sent.

A second later I hear another vibration. Only this time it does not come from the phone in my hand. I get up and walk to the truck to find Harper staring down at a phone that is not hers. One of the two she was stuffing in her pockets when we left the house.

“A message,” she says as she stares down at it.

“What’s it say, Harper?” If my heart was beating fast before, then it’s about to explode right now. “Tell me what it says.”

“It says…” She hesitates and then seems to change her mind, because she holds the phone up. “Yesterday I got a message from… well, I thought it was Nick.”

“What’s this f**king message say, Harper?”

She stares down at it for several seconds and I’m so impatient, I almost rip it out of her hand. But then she looks up at me, scared and pale. “‘Tock. Tock..’ What’s that mean, James?”

“I dunno,” I sorta lie. I might know, but…

“There’s a mushroom—” She stares at the message again and squints.

“What?” My heart rate increases as I scan the area. “What about a mushroom?” But when I look back to her, she’s scowling down at the phone in my hand.

A phone that looks exactly like the one she’s holding. “Is that your phone?”

I shake my head.

“Whose phone—”

But she jumps to a conclusion before she finishes.

And then the lethal girl launches herself at me. No, not at me. Through me. She hits me square in the chest and knocks me over, scrambling to her feet in a rush. I grab her ankle and she falls on her hands, kicking and screaming. But I hold tight.

No f**king way is she taking that helmet off.

No f**king way. Because if that message as from Nick, then that dead guy on the ground might be her brother.

Chapter Fourteen - Harper

“Let go of me,” I cry. My heart hurts. Oh, my God, does my heart hurt. Please, please, please tell me I did not just kill my brother! Please God! I slam my bare foot into James’ chest and he stumbles backwards just enough for me to slip away, scramble to my feet and run over to the body. “Nick, Nick, Nick…” I just keep saying his name as I try to pry the helmet off his head. James is on me again, pulling me away, wrapping his arms around me as he talks calmly in my ear.

“Calm down,” he says. “Calm down and I’ll let you go and we’ll check it out together, OK?”

“No, no, no!” I wail. “No!”

“Harper,” James says as he pins me down to the ground, straddles my hips, and then wraps his lower legs around mine so I can’t get him off me easily. He’s learning. “I need you to calm down.” He leans all of his weight on my chest now, and he’s very heavy. Heavy enough to make me stop talking because there’s not enough breath in my lungs.

“Enough,” I beg. “I can’t breathe!”

He eases up slightly, not enough to let me breathe comfortably, but it takes the crushing pressure off. “Now listen to me. You will calm the f**k down or I swear to God, Harper, I’ll tie you up until you do as you’re told. You are out of control.” He leans into me again to make his point, and I whine in response. “Do you understand?”