"Cole!" Dawn shouted, "Stay still," she said and pressed on the accelerator. "Stay still? Something just collided with the car and the way you are driving, I will end flying through the window," Cole shouted back.
Within a few minutes, Dawn had sped away from that place. She checked in the rear mirror signs of anyone following them, but there was no one. She continued to drive for eternity until she felt she was safe and then took the next exit to the village that was shown on the signage a few hundred meters later. She couldn"t believe that the nameless man had left her in his car. She was scared about his safety, her safety and of course Cole"s. She wondered if he was killed. She conjectured whether he was part of some gang.
Well, whatever he was on to, she thought that this was the best time to abandon the car and run away from the lurking danger.
She brought the car to a stop and turned to Cole. "Let"s get down."
"Why Dawn?" he asked, shaking nervously.
"We cannot afford to leave trails. Just do as I say," she insisted as she opened her seatbelt. She was sure that the man she had just met might launch a manhunt after seeing her photographs on the TV. He looked so dangerous that she shuddered for a moment.
Cole unclasped his seatbelt with shaky hands. Dawn opened his door and helped him out. She grabbed the suitcase near him, and the siblings took off from there.
It had stopped raining. In the middle of the night, the two of them stepped on the lonely road with vast corn fields on both the sides. It was windy and her hair tousled violently around her face. Her body was beginning to become hot and she knew that her vision would become blurry. She could sense that her mind would be tossed into an uncontrolled state soon. She had to find a place to stay for the night. She took out two more Advil pills and popped them in her mouth.
"I am tired Dawn," said Cole. He was crying silently, hoping not to disturb his sister who had undergone a lot over the past few days. His father had asked him to protect his sister, the last time he saw him. After that, he was killed. Cole had shrieked and cried alone in the hospital room. He had curled in a fetal position beside an unconscious Dawn and sobbed. She was the only one left for him in this world. He didn"t know as to why his father asked them to stay holed in that room, but he had no choice.
But now, his body was quivering. He wanted to rest.
Dawn bit her lip. She had to soon find a place to rest. They walked for the next half an hour when Dawn saw a flicker of lights in distance. "There," she pointed. "Let"s go there."
The two of them were so excited that they sprinted. Their happiness knew no bounds when they saw a neat line of small cottages. Without thinking twice, Dawn approached the first house and knocked on the door. Minutes later, there were heavy footsteps behind the door. It opened with a creak, and a middle-aged man showed up with a gun in his hands pointing at them. "Who are you?" he asked the scaredy kids, looking messy as h.e.l.l yet naïve as cute kittens.
Dawn was rooted to the spot. "Could you please take us in for the night? We have lost our way. I can pay you."
Fifteen minutes of begging and four hundred dollars later, the brother and sister were given a small room that faced the backyard. The farmer"s wife gave them clean sheets and showed them the bathroom. Once she left, Cole rushed to the bathroom to take a shower. The moment he hit the bed, he slept. Upon seeing him sleep so peacefully, Dawn smiled. Then she picked up her clothes and went to take a shower. It had been an eventful day. She decided to go to the next town early morning, from where she would flee the country. After taking a hot bath for a long time, Dawn came out and went off to sleep. She placed her medicine near her bed, just in case her temperature increased during the night.
When she woke up the next morning, she saw that the sun had risen in the sky. The sunlight shone through the mullioned window as it created a checkerboard of white light onto the dark mahogany floor. She blinked a few times, in an attempt to adjust her vision to the illuminated room. She turned her gaze and found Cole still sleeping soundlessly. A smile wormed on her lips. She got up from the bed and noticed that it was already 10AM. Time to leave.
She planned on leaving the country, in order to take Cole to a safer place, away from Helena, her father"s mistress, aged twenty-nine—who she believed to be the mastermind behind all this. Dawn had the hunch that Helena was trying to kill all of them. It"s just that she could never prove it. She might have killed her father too.
Dawn could never understand as to why her grandmother, her father"s sister, and her husband never contradicted Helena. In fact, they seemed to like her more than Clare.
---
Helena had come in their life when her mother was gravely ill. Dawn knew about her father"s various affairs that were reported on the TV channels every other day, and she was fed up with them, but she never had the guts to fight with him about them. She wanted her mother to divorce her father. In fact, her mother had left her father and taken away the two kids to her ancestral home, but Luke had gone after her and brought her back, promising that he would end his flirtatious habits. The promise was broken soon after.
But there was one thing—even though he had a string of affairs, he loved his children. His strained relations.h.i.+p with Clare continued, and in the end, she gave up. She compromised. He would get besotted by some of the other actresses who would try to wreck his marriage, which incidentally never happened. Luke had drawn a line between his family and his affairs. No matter what, he didn"t let his family ever come in his tumultuous kinky life.
Luke Wyatt was a gifted genius. He had achieved numerous successes in business, against many odds and opponents. His was a rags to riches story. He was a financial a.n.a.lyst, and a brilliant one at that. He sold all his stocks in a certain company and made a huge fortune. But the timing was wrong. The stock market crashed immediately after. This was because a war was waged upon his country, and it led to the crash of the market. This led to a domino effect—other stocks started crumbling. The market fell by 15%. And this was a big loss in a day.