Mina and Mark chapter 2

chapter 2.

Mina and Mark. Chapter 2

Blood on his hands

Rain drummed on the roof like impatient fingers.He sat in the passenger seat as if he’d never left it, shoulders hunched, water slipping from his hair onto Mina’s upholstery. The heater pushed out lukewarm breath. The windscreen wipers worked like frantic metronomes, clearing a view and losing it again.Mina kept both hands on the wheel, knuckles pale. She didn’t look at him for more than a flicker, as if eye contact might turn into something she couldn’t stop.“You can’t just…” Her voice snagged. “You can’t just appear in the middle of the road.”He gave a short laugh that sounded more like a cough. “Trust me. It wasn’t on my to-do list.”The car idled. The beams caught the slick verge, the hedge, the empty bend behind them. Nothing else moved. Still, Mina felt watched, the way you do when you leave a shop and swear you’re being followed even though you can’t prove it.“Where are you even going?” she asked.He turned his head slightly, studying her profile like it was a photograph he’d carried for years and was only now brave enough to look at. “You still hate questions.”“I hate surprises,” Mina snapped. “And you’ve always been one.”That landed. He looked down at his hands. They were shaking, but not with cold. He tried to hide it by lacing his fingers together. Mina saw anyway. She always saw. That had been the problem.She swallowed. “Are you drunk?”“No.” His answer was too quick.Mina’s jaw tightened. “Are you high?”He exhaled through his nose, annoyed, almost amused. “Still doing your little checklist, aren’t you.”The old rhythm tried to return. The banter. The sparring. The version of them that felt safer because it was familiar. Mina didn’t let it.She leaned forward, squinting into the storm. “What were you doing out here?”He hesitated. In that hesitation, Mina’s stomach dropped. It wasn’t guilt she saw on his face. It was calculation, as if he was weighing how much truth she could handle without slamming the door and leaving him in the rain.“Mina,” he said quietly.The way he said her name made it worse. Soft. Precise. Like he’d been practising it.She flinched. “Don’t.”He did anyway, a small smile ghosting across his mouth. “You still do that. Like my voice is a match and you’re made of paper.”Mina’s throat tightened. She remembered his voice in her kitchen. His voice in her ear. His voice on the phone at midnight when he used to say sorry like it was a charm that could undo everything.“You should get out,” she said, and even she could hear how thin it sounded.Instead of moving, he leaned closer to the dashboard light. The glow caught a smear on his sleeve, darker than the rain.Mina’s eyes snagged on it. “Is that blood?”“It’s nothing,” he said, too smooth.Mina’s pulse kicked. She reached without thinking, caught his wrist. Warm. Not just from the heater. Warm like a wound.He jerked back. “Don’t touch me.”The sharpness in his voice made her freeze. Not fear exactly. More like a memory of fear. The kind you keep folded away in your body.Mina released him slowly, as if he was a dangerous animal that might bolt.“Who did that?” she asked.Silence.Outside, the rain thickened, turning the hedgerows into black watercolours.A vehicle appeared in her rear mirror, far back at first, then closer, a pale smear of light on the wet road. Mina’s spine tightened. It was odd to see anyone out here in weather like this, on this bend, at this hour.The approaching headlights dimmed. Not slowed. Dimmed.Mina’s mouth went dry. “Is that… are they turning their lights off?”Her ex lifted his head, and for the first time his expression emptied of charm entirely. Whatever mask he wore around people, whatever jokes he used to soften things, it slipped clean away.“Drive,” he said.Mina stared at him. “What?”“Drive, Mina.” His voice was flat now. Certain. “If you stop here, they’ll come close enough to see me.”Cold spread through her chest. “Who?”He didn’t answer, because he couldn’t, or because giving it a name would make it real.The headlights behind them got closer. Close enough now that Mina could see the shape of the car reflected in the rain-slick shine of her boot, but not the make. Not the plate. Just the suggestion of a dark body and a hungry intention.Mina’s hands tightened on the wheel. Every sensible part of her screamed to get away from this. To drop him back into the storm and drive home and lock every door and pretend she’d never seen him.But there was that other part. The old part. The part that had loved him, or at least tried to. The part that still responded to danger with loyalty before logic.She shifted into gear.The car lurched forward.Behind them, the other car matched it.Mina’s breath came shallow. “Tell me what’s happening.”He looked at her then, properly. No smile. No teasing. No nostalgia.“I made a mistake,” he said. “And it didn’t just land on me.”Mina’s laugh was sharp, disbelieving. “You always did have a talent for bringing the weather in with you.”His gaze flicked to the mirror again. “They know your car.”Mina felt her stomach drop as if the road had vanished under the tyres.“They know me?” she whispered.He didn’t say yes.He didn’t say no.The silence was answer enough.The road bent again, slick and narrow and shining, and Mina drove into it with a stranger beside her who wore her ex’s face, while a dark car followed with its lights off, patient as a confession.