[COMPLETED]
❝Death is inevitable. It's a promise made to us at birth.❞
Arielle is a studious young woman striving to be a chef. Her life is full of going to class, reading textbooks, and hanging out with her friends, until she meets Zayn. Zayn's an...
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➳ ARIELLE'S POV
I cross my arms across my chest nervously. I'm standing in a parking lot near the beach, impatiently waiting for Langley's arrival. After messaging him yesterday and telling him that we needed to meet, we ended up agreeing to meet somewhere local. Frankly, I didn't want to meet anywhere private with him, in a fear that he'd kill me if he had the chance, and I'm sure he didn't want to risk meeting in private either for his own reasons.
I watch a woman play with her young daughter in the sand. They're building a sandcastle together, with the mother teaching her little girl how to pack the sand into the pail. It makes my heart ache. It's horrible for me to see such love when I've never experienced it. It's almost like a slap in the face. I'm jealous of a five-year-old.
I tear my gaze away from the family.
My stomach is twisted in tight, uncomfortable knots and I know it's because of how nervous I am to meet with Langley. Truly, I don't know anything about him other than his name and the fact that he works with Zayn, for a man who goes by the name of Sullivan. As it is, when I first met him, he lied and said his name was Ryder in an attempt to hide his own identity, so who's to say that Langley is even his true name? Maybe it's just some nickname that's stuck over the years he's worked with criminals.
I don't know what Langley's done in his criminal career. I've been running scenarios in my head of him killing people or harming people to get further ahead in the hierarchy of people he works with and just the thought of it has me wanting to vomit.
Why am I even here? Why am I risking my life by meeting with this dangerous stranger? I know that I'm doing it all in the hopes that I'll learn something about Zayn's attacker. There's absolutely no guarantee that Langley will tell me anything. Hell, he could say nothing to me when he gets here. And if that happens, it'll all be a waste. I'll have wasted both of our time for absolutely nothing.
I hope it doesn't come to that.
The thought runs through my mind that maybe this entire venture is a waste of time. I know that finding Zayn's attacker will be difficult—seeing as how we both have enemies firing at us from every angle—but what if it wasn't Sullivan that ordered the attack on Zayn? What if someone else hurt him? It could literally be anyone and in all honesty, I haven't a clue where to begin looking, but knowing that he worked both with and for such dangerous people has me looking at the most obvious suspects first.
But the obvious suspects aren't always the correct ones.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but when I see an old looking muscle car pulling into the parking lot, I begin to panic. My heart rate increases tenfold, my palms instantly become sweaty, and my breathing begins to stagger.
I realize that I don't even have any sort of means to escape. I took a cab here, and when I want to leave, I'll have to call a cab and wait for it to come. There's no rushing out of here in a hurry for me and that's scary as shit.
