Viola kept her eyes fixed on the road as she pushed the car to its limit, and despite the burning in her back and the sticky wetness of blood she could feel soaking through her dress, she didn’t slow down.

She was determined to reach Kasa Land and hold onto the hope that Sebastian’s men had already arrived there. There was a fear sitting at the back of her mind that she might get there and find nothing but empty land, but she held onto the smallest possibility that his jet had landed and pushed it forward like a lifeline.

Before she bled herself to exhaustion or worse, Viola pressed harder on the accelerator, but it was then she sensed the shift in the air and caught movement from the corner of her eye coming from the tree line along the side of the road.

She turned her head and saw the dark silhouette of a black wolf keeping pace with the car in the trees, and before she could process what she was seeing a loud and heavy thud came from the roof of the car, caving the metal inward and sending the steering wheel jerking hard in her hands. She corrected it fast, her knuckles going white.

There was a werewolf on top of the car. And another one running alongside it at full speed. She barely had time to register both before the howling started and she understood it wasn’t just two but many of them closing in from every direction.

Viola let out an involuntary scream when the wolf on the roof sank its claws into the metal and began tearing at it like it intended to peel the top of the car open and reach down to her. She wrenched the steering wheel hard to try to throw it off but its claws held it in place against the force of the movement.

Her heart nearly fell out of her chest when another wolf launched itself onto her front bumper as if to make her stop. Without a single moment of hesitation she floored the accelerator and felt the bump and the horrible sound beneath the wheels as she drove over it, and then she hit the brakes hard and sudden, the force of it throwing the wolf tearing at the roof forward and off the car.

She ran over that one too and heard the sound it made when she did.

With her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth and every limb in her body shaking, Viola slammed her foot back down and drove. When she cleared the Nightshade roads and the path ahead became clean and tarred she checked the rear camera and saw the wolves were still giving chase, spread out behind her in a dark and moving mass.

Good. She needed them to keep chasing her.

If they figured out that Sebastian wasn’t in the car with her they would stop, turn around, and go back to find him in the orphanage where he lay unconscious and completely unable to defend himself.

The best thing she could do was keep them following her all the way to Kasa Land and pray with everything she had that his warriors were waiting there, because if they weren’t she had no plan beyond that and no way to fight off a pack of werewolves alone.

Blood kept dripping from her back onto the seat beneath her and with every passing minute she could feel her body losing its grip on itself. Her vision was beginning to split and double, the road ahead of her fracturing into two versions of itself that swam and merged and separated again. She blinked hard and gripped the wheel tighter, willing herself to stay focused.

The Blue Bridge came into view ahead of her and immediately Viola felt her insides drop.

She had forgotten about the bridge entirely in the desperate urgency of her decision to drive for Kasa Land. And now here it was, stretching out ahead of her with no railings on either side and the vast dark water far below it, and her head was spinning and her vision was doubling and the wolves were still behind her.

Viola slowed the car slightly as she approached and her pulse began hammering in every part of her body at once, in her ears, in her throat, behind her eyes. Her palms went clammy against the steering wheel and her mouth went completely dry.

"You can do this, Viola." She whispered to herself, staring ahead at the bridge with her jaw set and her whole body trembling. "You have to do this. His life depends on it." She told herself even as the whimpering sound that escaped her throat made a liar of her composure.

Oh, goddess, she was terrified!

The closer the car got to the bridge the worse the anxiety became, rising fast and uncontrollable from somewhere deep in her chest.

The memory of being dragged beneath the water came back to her with full force, the darkness below, the burning lungs, the helplessness of being pulled somewhere she couldn’t fight.

What if the water below reached up for her again? What if she went over the side before she could get Sebastian help and find her sister?

Viola hit the brakes before the car reached the bridge and sat there with her hands pressed to the steering wheel and her eyes fixed on the long stretch of concrete ahead of her and the dark glinting water visible on either side of it.

She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand and bit down hard on her bottom lip. "I can’t..." She whispered. "I can’t go over it."

She wanted to. She needed to. But her body was refusing to cooperate with what her mind was telling it and the fear was bigger than her determination right now.

She ran the options through her spinning head. If she turned back and took the longer road it would be seven hours before she reached anywhere useful, seven hours of blood loss on an already emptying tank, and she would either bleed out behind the wheel or run out of fuel long before she got there. The bridge was thirty minutes to Kasa Land. Thirty minutes between Sebastian living or dying in the hands of his assassins.

She was still sitting there staring at the bridge with her vision tilting when the howling reached her and she snapped her eyes to the rear camera.

The wolves had caught up! They were coming at full speed and they were close, much closer than they should have been, and the panic that detonated in her chest at the sight of them made the decision for her.

There was no longer a choice to make. It was either she faced her worst nightmare and saved Sebastian, or she sat here and let the wolves find out he wasn’t in the car and go back to finish him in the orphanage while he lay there unable to lift a hand to stop them.

Viola’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel until her knuckles ached. She pulled in a long and shaking breath, held it, and then pressed her foot down and drove the car onto the bridge just as the wolves behind her hit the road at their full speed. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"Don’t let her get over that bridge!" The leader of the group ordered as they saw the red car accelerating onto it. "She gets over that bridge and we lose them into packless territory and nobody will help us touch her there!"

"Knock her off it if you have to! We need the man dead before he leaves Nightshade!"

"We have orders to keep the girl alive, Gab." Another wolf argued. "Won’t knocking her off the bridge kill her along with him?"

"She won’t die from a fall like that! Werewolves don’t go down that easily, she will swim her way out! Knock her off the bridge!" Gab snarled, having had more than enough of the chase this woman had taken them on through half of Nightshade.

Viola was whimpering under her breath and singing fragments of something tuneless to herself at the same time, anything to keep her eyes on the road and her mind from looking down at the water on either side of her.

She drove fast but carefully, threading the line between speed and control, and when she began to see the other side of the bridge drawing closer and the solid ground of Kasa Land beyond it she felt the first flicker of relief beginning to rise in her chest.

Until she saw them too late.

Two wolves came running along the side of the bridge from behind, faster than the others, and she only had a split second to understand what they intended before they hit the side of the car together with the full combined force of their supernatural strength.

The car jerked to the side with a force that knocked the breath from her.

Viola’s heart left her body at the exact same moment the car lost its balance and began to go over the side, and the dark water far below rushed up to meet her.

"No!" she let out a scream.