Page 123 of Secret Vendettay

Now, I could only hope that the Audi wouldn’t give up chase.

But my relief was short-lived, because to keep the Audi at a safe distance behind us, we had to keep increasing our speed. First forty miles an hour. Then fifty. Then sixty. Downtown Chicago streets were not set up for these kinds of speeds. Even in the lighter morning traffic, there were still too many cars on the roads to support it with no shoulders to leverage. Instead, massive buildings encased us from all sides. Not to mention, there were lights and crosswalks.

Crosswalks peppered with pedestrians—including mothers holding the hands of their small children, who could be out having breakfast before the start of school.

We might not make it to Chicago Police Headquarters. Not without killing someone first.

The piercing sound of screeching tires pinched my eardrums every time the vehicle swerved and dodged through the traffic.

A block ahead of us, a traffic light turned from green to yellow, warning it would be red before we arrived.

“Red light!” I shouted.

But Leo gunned the engine. I held on to the seat, my fingers digging into the leather. With my heart racing, I watched in horror as a young mother holding her son’s hand stepped closer to the crosswalk, oblivious to the danger approaching.

“Stop!” I screamed.

But Leo continued to dart around vehicles and plunged through that crosswalk and through that intersection, narrowly missing the mother and child. I turned around in a panic, but thankfully, the mother had yanked her little boy back, terror filling her eyes, as the Audi mirrored our movements, nearly hitting them.

“This is too dangerous!” I snapped. “We’re going to kill someone!”

“Police are ready,” Gabriel said to Leo, ignoring my pleas.

I refused to let this trail of devastation infect the city and endanger the people in it. These innocent bystanders didn’t deserve to lose their lives just to try to save mine.

“Slow down,” I begged.

But suddenly, a new danger appeared before us.

Construction. Orange cones sectioned off the street ahead of us, a construction worker standing in front of a dump truck with a sign that saidStop. It was one of those construction setups where only one lane of traffic could go in and out at a time, but right now, both lanes needed to stop.

Because behind the man, a blue-and-white cement truck was lurching through the intersection—currently blocking more than half of it and closing the distance to block it all. It might as well have been a brick wall in front of us, because with buildings on both sides and a wall of traffic to our left, there was nowhere to turn around.

“Hold on,” Leo snarled.

He did not slow down. The construction worker started waving his hands, but when he realized we weren’t going to slow or stop, he jumped out of the way and onto the sidewalk just in the nick of time. Our sedan jerked to the left, around the dump truck, and careened through the intersection so close to the still-advancing cement truck that our right-side mirror clipped off with a pop.

Behind us, the Audi tried to follow our path, but they were two seconds too late. The cement truck was blocking the intersection now; there was no way around it.

I swear, my heart had never beaten so fast in my life.

“That was too close,” Leo finally said,finallyslowing down. He kept his eyes trained on the rearview and left-side mirrors, looking for any hint of that Audi.

“No shit,” Carl agreed. “When do you think they made us?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think they randomly saw us on the streets of the city,” Leo said.

“You think they followed us from Lockwood’s estate?” Carl asked.

Leo was silent for a minute, as if mentally retracing our steps. We had left the estate from the sanctuary of the garage, and surely, we would have noticed any vehicles in the long driveway to the road. Theoretically, we would’ve noticed someone parked along that road, too. But somehow, they’d found us, and I agreed with the driver: I didn’t think they randomly found us in downtown Chicago.

“If they were following us all the way from Mr. Lockwood’s place, why wouldn’t they have intercepted us sooner?” Carl asked, his voice tight with worry.

“I don’t know. Maybe they assumed we could outrun them on the highway.”

“So, why not intercept us on the side streets near the Lockwood estate? Be a lot easier to pull it off there than on the streets of the city.”

Leo licked his lips. “It’s possible they’d seen how heavily secured the Lockwood estate was. Might assume an army of guards would come after them there, but here, it would just be us.”