Blood on the Highway

Prologue

Blood on the Highway

The world outside the windshield is bleeding. The crimson streaks across the glass, bathed in the fading light of dusk, smear into something unholy. The road stretches on like a vein through the wilderness, its black ribbon endless, as if it might carry us straight into the belly of the underworld. Dorian is driving—his knuckles white on the steering wheel, eyes fixed ahead like he's staring into a void only he can see. There's a wildness to his silence now, something I've come to understand too well.

We've been running for what feels like an eternity. The taste of metal and adrenaline still clings to my tongue, mingling with the sharp scent of gasoline and gunpowder. The air in the car is thick with it—our violence. Our crime. It clings to our skin like sin, heavy and dark, something we'll never wash off. I know that now.

I turn my head slightly to look at him, but he doesn't notice. His mind is somewhere else—far away from me, from us. He's gone to that place again, that unreachable part of him where nothing lives but madness. And death. I think he's been there for a while now, even if I tried to pretend otherwise. The Dorian I knew, the one I fell in love with, isn't here anymore. There's only this... stranger beside me, a phantom with his name, driving us deeper into the abyss.

The blood on the windshield isn't ours, but it might as well be. It might as well be the blood of every person we've crossed, every life we've ruined. The blood of the people we were before all this. The road hums beneath the tires, an endless lullaby, but it doesn't soothe. It whispers of endings, of inevitability, of the kind of fate you can't outrun.

We've tried, though. We've run from everything, even ourselves. But no matter how far we go, I feel it catching up. It's always been there—right behind us, breathing down our necks. I can feel it now, crawling up my spine, tightening its grip around my throat. I don't know how much longer I can keep pretending we'll make it out of this alive.

We aren't Bonnie and Clyde. We aren't untouchable. We never were.

The weight of it all presses down on me, and I lean my head back against the seat, eyes half-closed as I watch the sky turn from gold to bruised purple. The world feels like it's dying, like it's slipping into some eternal night, and we're the last two people left in it. Alone. Together.

I used to think that's all we needed—just the two of us against the world. Dorian made me believe that. He always had a way of pulling me in, of making me forget everything but him. His touch, his smile, the way he'd whisper that we were different, special. That no one could understand us, and we didn't need them to. He said the world was ours for the taking.

But we didn't take it, did we? No, it took us. Piece by piece, it carved us out until there was nothing left but this. Blood. Guilt. A love that feels more like a curse.

I press my hand to my stomach, feeling the dull ache there, the bruises beneath my skin, souvenirs of the life we've lived. Dorian hasn't touched me like that in a while—not in a way that felt real. I think even our love is dying. No, I know it is. I felt it the night he put a gun in someone's face and didn't blink when they begged for their life. I felt it when he looked at me afterward, eyes glazed over like he wasn't really there anymore.

There's a darkness in Dorian now that I can't reach. I don't know if I want to.

The car jolts suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts, and I realize we've left the highway. The road narrows, winding through a stretch of woods that looks like it's been forgotten by time. The trees loom overhead like skeletal hands, reaching for us, casting long shadows that stretch across the hood of the car.

"We're almost there," Dorian mutters, his voice rough, distant.

"Where are we going?" I ask, though I'm not sure I care anymore.

He doesn't answer, but I didn't expect him to. I don't think he knows either. There's no destination, not really. We're just heading deeper into the dark, into whatever comes next.

I reach out and touch his arm, my fingers trembling as they brush against his skin. For a second, I think I feel something—some flicker of warmth, of the boy I once knew. But then he pulls away, his jaw tightening, and the moment is gone. Lost.

I turn my gaze back to the road, to the blood on the glass, and I wonder how it all went so wrong. Maybe it was always going to end this way. Maybe we were doomed from the start.

"We're not going to make it, are we?" I whisper, more to myself than to him.

Dorian says nothing. The road stretches on, black and endless, swallowing us whole.

And somewhere, deep in the pit of my stomach, I already know the answer.