Victor gets out and hauls his ass up to the roof, rifle held loosely by his side. Oscar stays on the ground, circling the car and keeping his eye out for anyone else that might be creeping around in the bushes.

I stay with Hael’s phone, listening as Aaron whoops and curses his way around the track.

“Are you there, Bernie?” he asks, panting heavily.

“I’m here,” I say, sitting inside the Mercedes with the doors closed, so nobody can hear us talking. “You’re kicking ass out there.” I lift my head up from the phone’s screen to watch the cherry-red car outpace the others under the white glow of the lights when a text from Callum comes in.

Hael is working on Mitch’s car. Give us a warning if we need to retreat early.

I exhale, but I don’t text him back. Responses are for vital messages, not just to say okay.

“Hael is tinkering,” I tell Aaron, listening to the rapid pace of his breathing.

“Fuck yeah,” he purrs, clearly enjoying the rush of adrenaline. My nerves are fraught with tension, but I try to stay relaxed. If I got freaked-out during every risky activity we did, I would be an anxious mess. “Looks like my funereal gift to Mitch and his friends is a serious case of crushed and shattered pride.” Aaron’s laugh echoes through the phone as I watch him own the track, beating the Charter Crew at their own game.

They must be furious.

During the next lap, this little zippy Porsche comes to a screeching halt, spraying mud in the air like a fireworks display.

“What the fuck?” I murmur as I watch it back up toward the center of the track. There’s a wall of tires all the way around the inner ring but for one spot that looks like it was hit recently and just hasn’t been repaired yet. The driver uses that spot to back his car in. “Hey, Aaron, watch the white Porsche,” I say at the same time that Oscar opens my door, gray eyes cold.

“I’ve just told Hael and Callum we’re done. Aaron,” Oscar leans in toward the speaker, “get off the track now and head for the campground.”

“Roger that,” Aaron says, heading for that same road we took before, to escape from Officer Young and her ridiculous Subaru.

Our boys up the hill are telling me there are more cars coming down the campground road; tell Aaron to head for the woods instead. Cal’s text comes in at about the same time as Oscar curses under his breath, looking down at his own phone. Vic remains on the roof, rifle at the ready, watching and waiting.

“Scratch that,” I say before Oscar even gets a chance to. My heart is racing like crazy, and I feel like I can’t breathe. I’m so fucking scared right now, but I can’t let that fear control me. The situation is immediate, and dire. “Go for the woods, Aaron.”

“I hear ya, Bernie,” he grinds out, turning the Camaro so sharply that it fishtails for a moment before he regains control. “Son of a bitch.” Aaron guns the throttle and heads for a small patch of open space between the trees. It’s a tight fit, and if anyone else were driving, I’d probably be worried. But like I said, I saw Aaron navigate up the hill to Vaughn’s cabin in the pitch-black without scraping the paint of the minivan. He can do this.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t make it that far. While we’ve been barking out instructions and checking our phones, the white Porsche has reversed all the way to the other side of the center circle, turning around and then plowing through the wall of tires to get back to the track.

“Aaron, the Porsche,” I call out, but there isn’t much he can do. He’s going too fast to slow down, and the road is surrounded by fencing on the left side for a good quarter of the track before it opens to the woods. With the Porsche waiting on the right, and the other cars behind him, Aaron’s only choice is to go forward.

He guns it, but whoever’s driving the white Porsche is ready. They shoot onto the track and clip the front of the Camaro, causing it to spin in the mud, tires churning uselessly.

“Aaron!” I scream, even though I know I can’t help him from here. I watch in horror as the rear end of the Camaro slams into the fence, and the other cars swarm around it like flies to a corpse. Shit, shit, shit. I shove my way out of the car, but Victor is already cursing and hopping down from the roof. He takes off running with his rifle by his side.

“Stay here!” he commands me, but I’m not about to let Aaron be curb-stomped by Mitch’s crew.

“Bernadette,” Oscar warns when he sees that I’m about to make a break for it. I ignore him, taking off after Vic with the phone clenched in my hand, my gun bouncing against my back. I can hear Oscar’s footsteps as he curses and follows after me, grabbing onto my arm just as the window on the driver’s side of the Camaro is smashed in.

The Charter Crew converges as Aaron is yanked out of the broken window and thrown to the ground in a sea of angry fists and boots. Even from here, I can see blood.

“Let go of me, Oscar!” I snarl, trying and failing to pull from his grip. He jerks me back, wrapping an arm around my neck and effectively trapping me against him.

“Just wait,” he snaps back at me, his own heart thundering like crazy against my back. That terrifies me, feeling Oscar’s pulse race like that. He’s acting like everything’s under control, but his heart and his breathing say otherwise.

Callum appears like a specter on top of the fence. Likely he’s just climbed it. He doesn’t hesitate before rising to his feet atop the narrow metal pole. Without a second of hesitation, he lifts his rifle up and shoots one of the boys in the back of the head.

Blood spatters everywhere, showering the rest of the crew in crimson.

That gives them pause.

“What the fuck?” one of the guys growls out, whipping a semi-auto out from his waistband. For a split second, I have a straight view to Aaron, lying in the mud and bleeding. As I watch, he struggles to his feet, taking advantage of the confusion as he pushes up to a standing position and takes off like a shot.

He’s clearly injured but running off adrenaline as he sprints for a rusted hole in the fence and dives underneath, scrambling to his feet and continuing on without a hitch. I breathe a small sigh of relief as Oscar releases me, but this isn’t over yet, and we both know it.

Victor is now standing next to the fence on our side, waiting to see if it’s worth it for him to start running over there. But Cal just adjusts the barrel of his rifle and shoots the boy with the gun directly in the face. It’s fucking brutal; he is fucking brutal. He starts to pick them off one by one as they shout and scatter, deciding it’s better to flee than to try to shoot him.

As soon as he has an opening, Callum hops down, yanks open the door to the Camaro and climbs in. Off he goes, heading into the woods after Aaron.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Victor snarls as pandemonium breaks out on the racetrack. He turns back around and comes jogging toward us, clearly furious at me for even having made it this far. “Where is Hael?” he snaps, just before our redheaded friend appears from the direction of the snack bar area.

“Man, what a clusterfuck. I got one car done. One.” Hael grits his teeth, but there’s no time for us to sit here and lament the failure of our plan. Instead, we haul ass back to the Mercedes, climb in, and book it the fuck out of there.

Our front tires have just barely hit the road before we hear the explosion.

“You think we actually managed to get anyone with that?” Hael asks, but nobody answers him. I’m too busy calling Aaron and Callum, one after another. I think Oscar and Victor are doing the same.

Cal is the first to respond, and I immediately put him on speakerphone.

“I’m at the convenience store,” he says, reminding me that Aaron pointed it out as a rendezvous point the night we went mudding. “I don’t see Aaron yet; I didn’t see him in the woods either.”

“He could be hiding, or playing it safe,” Victor muses, glancing back at me, as if he can see Callum by looking at Hael’s phone in my hands. “What about Aaron’s phone? Do you see it in the car?”

There’s a minute of what sounds like Cal rummaging around inside the Camaro, and then a curse.

“Yep. Here it is. Fuck.” Cal sighs, like he’s frustrated by the whole situation. “I found it.”

My heart feels like it’s being stabbed with thousands of tiny needles; I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.

“Cal, take the Camaro to the garage and park it. We’ll wait at the convenience store for as long as I feel it’s safe, and then we’ll get you. If Aaron isn’t back by then, we’ll start canvassing the woods once their crew clears out.” Victor exhales sharply and digs his fingers into his hair. In this moment, I both love him fiercely and respect the hell out of him. His job sucks.

“Got it,” Callum says, hanging up shortly after.

The car remains silent as we drive to the convenience store and park around back, waiting in the parking lot for a while before Vic slips out to head inside. He comes back in just a few minutes, shaking his head and cursing.

For nearly forty minutes, we wait, but Aaron doesn’t show up.

After that, Hael takes us around the immediate area, checking all sorts of strange places that I wouldn’t expect to look—a public restroom, a treehouse in the backyard of a foreclosure, the old movie theater that’s been closed for years, but whose ticket booth is unlocked and probably makes for an awesome hiding spot.

Nothing.

“Vic,” I start, breaking out into a cold sweat. If something happens to Aaron, I will fucking die. It will break all the last happy, pretty parts of me, and I will become nothing. I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. “Where the fuck is he?”

“I don’t know, Bernie,” Vic says, glancing over his shoulder at me as Oscar texts various crew members on his iPad. “But we’ll find him. Or die trying. That much, at least, I promise you.”

We head to the garage to grab Callum, but instead of just picking him up, the boys boot me out of the car.