Home > Scammed

Scammed
Author: Kristen Simmons

CHAPTER 1

 


My grip tightens around the leather-padded wheel. My calf flexes as I press my foot down on the brake. Carefully, I check my mirrors and the windows for any sign someone might be watching.

In the passenger seat, Caleb Matsuki tightens the belt across his chest. His black hair is sticking out on the side from where he keeps scrubbing a hand through it, and the dark plastic rims of his glasses only frame the concern in his deep brown eyes.

“Five minutes,” he says.

Anxiety wraps hot tendrils around my lungs.

It’s not enough time.

I eye the last parking spot at the end of the row. We need to get the black SUV back there before anyone notices it’s gone. It’s not far, less than the length of a city block, but our path is impeded by a dozen cars sliding in and out of spots, and pedestrians carrying shopping bags.

Five minutes.

I ease off the brake, but the SUV lurches forward, and with a squeak, I slam my foot down again. Caleb rocks forward for the seventh—eighth?—time, and braces a locked arm against the dashboard.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He ratchets the seat belt strap tighter across his waist. “I actually love whiplash. It’s right up there with bamboo shoots under my fingernails and people who eat tarantulas on nature survival shows.”

I bite my lip. “You see him?”

Caleb squints out the passenger window, through the autumn-kissed trees, toward the corner of the brick-and-mortar strip mall. On the opposite side of the building, Hugh Moore is in a coffee shop, removing the foam from his latte, or doing whatever stiff private school security guards do for fun, while our classmate Henry finishes his SAT at the testing site next door.

“No.” Caleb checks his phone. “He said he’d call when Henry was done.”

After we finished our tests, Moore gave us free rein of the shops, as long as we agreed to check in. He also gave me the keys to the SUV so I could stash my sweatshirt inside.

That was probably a mistake.

“Take your foot off the brake,” Caleb says. “Slowly this time.”

I check the side mirrors, hyperaware of the cars scattered around the lot. If I hit one of them, Moore won’t be pleased.

Then again, it’s not like he doesn’t have a whole garage of shiny sedans and SUVs to choose from.

I settle into my seat. My days of scamming for pennies are over. Devon Park is in my rearview; I’m high-class now. If I want a car, I’ll have my pick of them.

I just need to learn to drive first.

Gently this time, I ease off the brake, and the car rolls forward at a non-life-threatening speed.

“See? Pro,” I tell Caleb, grinning. “This driving thing is cake, like I—”

A car pulls out of the parking spot five spaces away and I slam on the brakes, sending Caleb hands first into the dashboard again.

“That was close,” I say under my breath.

“If forty feet away is close, then yes.”

“What are all these people doing out in the middle of the day? Don’t they have jobs?” I blow out a tense breath. “Who taught you to drive anyway?” The second the words are out, I regret them. Caleb’s mother takes the bus, and his dad’s laid out in a hospital bed in White Bank, his spine held together by pins and the gracious monetary donations of our school’s director.

“The one and only Dr. David Odin,” he says, all emotion hidden behind his careful con-artist mask.

I cock a brow his direction. “Aren’t you special.”

Caleb gives a one-shouldered shrug.

Vale Hall’s director doesn’t generally spend a lot of one-on-one time mentoring his students, even ones who’ve been enrolled as long as Caleb, in anything but lying. It’s career building and financial aid all wrapped up in a pretty package—we con his marks into spilling their deepest, darkest secrets, and in exchange Dr. O gives us free room and board, and a nice little scholarship to the university of our choice.

And, in Caleb’s case, medical care for his father.

Which all goes away the second we screw up.

Caleb points ahead to the bend in the lane. “Circle around the blue truck and go back to where we started.”

I mean to, but just as I’m taking my foot off the brake, a car from behind zips past on my left, close enough that it would take off my arm if I reached out the window. The driver shouts something I can’t make out, and though I only catch a glimpse of his sunglasses and raised middle finger, the familiarity is enough to cram my lungs up my throat.

Grayson Sterling.

On a gasp, I’m sucked into a memory I don’t fully own, one I’ve constructed lying in bed on sleepless nights.

The senator’s son, hunched over the wheel, chasing Susan Griffin’s car down Route 17.

I was just trying to get her to slow down. She wouldn’t pull over, so I tried to get in front of her.

I didn’t see the turn until it was too late.

The day he drove me to the crash site may have been three months ago, but I still remember every detail. The sweat staining the collar of his shirt. The way he kept taking his hand off the steering wheel while he told the story. He’d just wanted to talk to her, he said. He wanted to convince her to end the affair with his father.

He never meant to drive her off the road.

Still, I can hear him yelling through the window for her to pull over, his voice sharp as shattered glass and louder than the growl of his engine. I can see how he would’ve sliced his hand through the air to get her attention. How, frightened, she would have sped around the turn to get away.

I can picture her swerving off the road, losing control, the gravel potholes jostling her around the seat before she crashes head-on into a tree and snaps her neck.

“Brynn?”

Jumping in my seat, I blink at Caleb’s face, warped in concern. My gaze drops to his hand, resting on my thigh. Another searing breath, and the clutch of that vision is ripped away.

We’re not on Route 17. I’m not with Grayson. Susan is gone.

Those things are in the past, and I need to forget them.

Heat floods my collar.

“You all right?”

The edge in Caleb’s voice grinds what’s left of my composure, and I squeeze the wheel so he doesn’t see my hands shake.

“Yeah.”

“That guy almost took off your mirror.” I follow Caleb’s gaze to the edge of the parking lot and the beat-up black sedan pulling out onto the main street. It’s nothing like Grayson would drive. Now that I think about it, that guy didn’t even look like the hard-edged boy Dr. O assigned me to con last summer.

“I’m fine. It’s not a big deal.” But these are lies. I’m not fine. I can’t stop thinking about Grayson, and haven’t been able to sleep since he took me to the crash site. But I can’t tell Caleb this, because if I do, the rest of it might slip out—the truth, that no one knows but Grayson and me.

That I’m the reason he’s missing.

If I hadn’t told him to run that day, his father would’ve punished him for leaking the truth they’d worked so hard to cover up. Dr. O may have offered to help Grayson, but he would have taken that back once he realized who really ran his sister off the road that night.

Best-case scenario, Grayson would have been charged with vehicular manslaughter. Worst case, his father would have made him disappear to save his own political career. I set Grayson free to save him, and in doing so, I banished him from his own life. Now I have no idea where he is, or if he’s even alive.

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