Britney’s silver two-door tore down the slick winter road of the highway she’d swerved onto a mile away from the house, with one trembling hand on the steering wheel and one in a softened fist around Ian, hovering over the center cup holder.  Her eyes darted back and forth like those of a startled housecat, reading every screeching wheel and every flung fleck of snow as a potential threat.  The outdated heater was roaring with life, but doing little to bring down the chill.

            No more than a quarter mile behind her was the Meyer family’s van in pursuit, slipping in between other Christmas Eve commuters to catch up.  Ross slammed on the gas pedal, with Lauren anxiously clutching his shoulder in the passenger seat, and Millie in the back.

            “Faster, Dad.  Please.  Faster,” Lauren mumbled as she gave her father’s arm another shake.  She’d been numbly repeating the same three words in sequence for the last five minutes, too shell-shocked and emotionally ravaged by this whole unfurling nightmare to manage anything else.

            “I am, honey.  We won’t lose them,” he promised.  “Millie, is that seatbelt on?”

            “Yes, yes.  Please come quickly.  Yes, the interstate, we just passed Mile 41.  That’s the right model.  It’s silver,” Millie said into her phone with pauses between statements, sniffling with the effort to hold back further anguished sobs, then leaned up toward the front.  “Dad, what’s Britney’s license again?”

            “GT58M3,” Ross repeated back resolutely, which his youngest daughter spoke again into the receiver.

            The mood was just as tense in the other racing vehicle, though no words had yet been spoken by either the stone-faced Alpha or pain-wracked Beta prisoner.

            “You… you’ve…” Ian sputtered at last, having hugged his broken arm to his body at an angle that helped slightly with the pain, though Britney’s thumb pressed harder into his shoulder blades at the sound of his voice.

            “Don’t fucking talk to me, insect,” came the droll reply.

            “S-Sorry, it’s… just that…”

            “I know perfectly goddamned well that they’re coming, if that’s what you’re trying to tell me.  I see them.  And I’m not worried,” Britney snapped as she overtook a snow plow to pull ahead.  A bemused horn squawked from behind them.

            “No, no that’s… not it,” her tiny captive managed with a hard swallow as he gazed blearily up at the face of his fiancé’s older sister, her short dark locks framing a face hardened with bitter resolve.

            “Then just spit it out already if you’re so sure you don’t care about getting more arms snapped.”

            “You’ve… held Betas.”

            “What?” she scowled.  She switched lanes again, feeling the rattle of the anti-locking breaks as she went over a small patch of ice.

            “I said I can tell you’ve had a Beta in your hand before.  Your mom… um, not so much.  But you, definitely.”

            “So what?”

            “It just surprised me.  I mean, you look scared out of your mind right now.  You’re driving like a maniac in the snow.  You say you don’t care what happens to me.  But…”

            “You’ve got that right,” Britney responded, giving Ian an extra squeeze.  He grunted, but nodded again at her when the pressure of her fingers relented.

            “…but you’re still not crushing me.  Even when you’re trying to make a point,” he said, voice nearly hoarse, but steady given his focus.

            “And just what about that is so important that you think it’s worth it to risk saying anything to me about it?” Britney demanded.

            “Well, from… from what I know about you, it’s just…”

            “Okay, you can go ahead and shut the fuck up again before you even try to tell me what you think you know about me,” she snarled with renewed fury.  “You and the rest of your disgusting race know bullshit.”

            “I know we’ve… never met, but I’ve known Lauren for a while now.  She’s told me…”

            “What?” Britney interrupted, and suddenly her fist was rising up from the cup holder to a position even with her nose.  The rage was still present in spades, but at such close range, Ian could easily recognize the fear in her eyes as well.  “What did she tell you?”

            “Don’t worry.  Nothing super personal,” Ian grunted at the change in elevation.  “But I do know how much you hate people like me.”

            “Yeah, great detective work there, you little shit,” Britney said with a roll of her eyes as she lowered her fist back down, though this time she kept Ian at chest level.  “If you couldn’t figure out that part on your own, your head’s even emptier than I thought.”

            “Not just that.  I know you hated us so much you were actually afraid to be near any of us, back in grade school.  I know you cried about it and your mom had to come get you.”

            “Can you blame me?  What if I’d caught something from one of you?” Britney said with a disgusted sneer.

            “I also know you never got near another one after that time.  Lauren said your mom made sure you never had to.  But…”

            “You know, I hope you’re going somewhere with all this, because it would be a huge waste of the last words you ever said to anyone if Dad and Lauren catch up with us and I’m forced to toss you out the window.”

            “…but I heard about the thing in high school, too.  Ten years ago, right?  That… jock guy everybody thought you were gonna get together with.  Would’ve been your first boyfriend, Lauren said.  You were so picky that nobody was ever good enough for you, and even him, you barely talked to.  And then that other girl…”

            Britney flinched, biting her lip, but kept her eyes locked to the road as she zoomed around another cluster of cars.  Her gaze flashed to the rearview mirror, and over the rows of snow-swept vehicles, she could make out her father’s van gaining ground.  She stamped harder on the gas, lurching them forward even faster.  The woman’s eyes glowed with some mutated jumble of passionate ire, and her lips parted to answer, but no sound escaped.

            “…that other girl.  The Beta.  Lorelai,” Ian continued cautiously, his voice lowered to a tone that bordered on soothing.  “You heard they hooked up, so you showed up at her cheer practice and…”

            “Gave her what she deserved,” Britney growled with white-hot fury under her breath.

            “Y-Yeah.  But… see, when Lauren… described that to me, it just made me think…” Ian mumbled, clearly eager to move on, but not letting himself become frantic in her grasp.  “There’s always an Alpha on Beta campuses, so nothing like that ever happens.  You have to have a reason to be let in, but it sounded like you just walked on, no problem.  And for someone who supposedly hates us as much as you do, well…”

            “It wasn’t hard.  I know how to talk my way into things.  How do you think I got where I am today?” Britney answered quickly, having obviously swallowed the rage that had momentarily bubbled to the surface, and there was something defensive in her tone now.  As though she felt threatened.

            “You’re lying,” Ian boldly uttered, shivering now from the increasing cold, despite the heat provided by Britney’s coiled palm.

            “Did you honestly just say that to me?”

            “Yes, I did.  Someone had to,” he continued with the courage of someone who was well aware that he had very little left to lose.  “And if you’re really the last face I’m ever going to see, I’d like to at least go out knowing I spoke the truth.”

            “So what are you trying to say?  You think I just snuck into a school made for things I’ve spent my whole life avoiding?”

            “No.  I think you didn’t have to prove you had a reason, because you’d been there before.  Probably more than once,” Ian retorted.

            “And I think delirium is starting to settle in because of that busted arm of yours.”

            “Sounds made up, right?  After Lauren told me all that, it just… didn’t sound right.  So I thought I’d look into it a little.  Took some digging, but I had time,” Ian said.  “I found a couple off-hand comments from the guard that everybody seemed to ignore after Lorelai didn’t want to press charges.  Said he’d seen you before because you were there to pick up your sister.  Obviously, that was just a mix-up, because you don’t have a sister who’s a Beta.”

            “Obviously.”

            “But maybe there wasn’t really a mix-up.  Maybe you did have someone else there to pick up.  Just not a sister.”

            “You’re kidding me, right?” Britney whipped back through gritted teeth as she nearly sideswiped a blaring sports car while switching lanes.  By now, the rest of the family was only a few cars behind her.

            “The only one kidding anyone now is you, Britney,” Ian said, and he felt a tremor run through her fingers all around him to have her name mentioned aloud.  “I didn’t think anything of it after that.  But… now I think I kind of get it.”

            “Oh, really?” Britney challenged sarcastically, eyes narrowed briefly before snapping back to the road.  “Well, thank God I have you to counsel me.  I guess being with an Alpha has made you into some little fucked up shaman, hmm?”

            “No.  But it does give me some perspective.”

            “As if that qualifies you to-”

            “It doesn’t qualify anything,” Ian cut in sharply, eliciting another wince from Britney.  “It just means I understand.”

            “You understand, do you?  So tell me this, then.  Do you understand what it’s like to have everything you thought you knew turned on its head?  To have somebody you can start to be yourself with for once in your life?  To have that somebody make you feel something… important, and then tear it away the next moment like nothing ever existed?” Britney hissed with a quavering voice, a nerve obviously having been violently struck that hadn’t been disturbed in a long time.

            “She made you feel safe, didn’t she?” Ian offered without missing a beat.

            “It was more than that.  She-” Britney began before realizing she had been trapped, and suddenly it was as though the words had been sucked into the ether.  Her mouth hung open.

            Neither party spoke for a solid sixty seconds.  The roar of the tires filled in the space with a nearly deafening hum of spattered sleet.  Britney’s grip loosened enough on Ian that he could freely wrap his free arm around the snapped limb, though she kept him secure with the kind of expert positioning only someone with experience would be able to pull off.  Now, her fingers were doing more cradling than clenching.

            “What did Lorelai do?” Ian pressed at last, his voice gentle and free of judgment, as though he was speaking to Lauren instead of her tightly wound sibling.

            “She made me love her,” Britney whispered, as though fearful of someone else hearing.  Her lips trembled, and her eyes were going red from refusal to blink.  Her hand tightened on the wheel until it looked like she could rend the leather protrusion away from the dashboard with a good enough yank.

            “Britney, I don’t believe a single person has ever made you do a thing in your life.  And do you expect me to think some Beta could convince you to believe something that wasn’t real?”

            “She tricked me.  She was a worm, just like the rest of you.  It was all to humiliate me.  I can see that now.  Every move, every word, every k-” the woman spat hatefully, stopping herself short before another incriminating item could be let loose, though she clearly was already in the utterly indifferent throes of hysterical abandon.

            “For something so fake, she certainly went to a lot of trouble to make sure you stayed out of it.  And you know she didn’t have to, given how far down the track you flung her,” Ian pointed out casually, and in an odd gamble, leaned his chin against Britney’s curled thumb.  “People don’t throw themselves completely on the line for other people unless they really do mean something to them.  I know that personally.”

            “Right, because it’s all exactly the same, you and your little fucking fairy tale ending with my sister.  You and your kind, all running around on the ground down there, and thinking when someone lifts you up that suddenly you can understand everything and everybody.”

            “I’m sorry you had to go through that.  I am.  Look, though, we’re… we’re really not so different.  Betas, I mean.  We’re just as capable of seeing our own fallibility and working to do something about it.”

            “And I guess you think that makes you all a bunch of little saints, right?” Britney blurted, for an instant drowning the whirring cacophony outside the car.

            “I never said we were saints, big or little,” Ian said genuinely.  “We spill milk, we don’t leave a tip, we sleep with strangers.  We fuck up.  We’re… people.  Like you.”

            Britney, ignoring the tears that were now glistening on her rosy cheeks, looked down and aggressively locked eyes with the occupant of her nearly-opened fist, as if to confirm she wasn’t being swindled.  Ian stared back with the same bona fide intent, and for a flash he witnessed the same acceptance and humanity he normally saw in a face slightly different than Britney’s.

            It was at this moment that the back left tire of the car struck a patch of black ice concealed beneath a rolling snow drift and began shifting toward the demarcated painted center.

            Even in her surprise, Britney’s hand was restrained from hurting Ian further as she returned her eyes to the road all too late and watched as her vehicle settled into a tail spin.  Her hand was thrust back into the cup holder, bracing her fist against the rim for support to keep from jarring the Beta.  A mad flurry of honked horns, erupting snow piles, and swerving cars melded into one chaotic second that seemed to last forever as the car slid diagonally across the lanes and into the path of a black semi-truck dragging a thirty-ton payload behind it.

            Slamming onto the brakes with all her might, Britney heard the grinding impact as the side of her car made screeching contact with the truck, the spooked driver of which was already in the process of swerving himself without warning to avert further damage.

            The window of Britney’s car shattered on impact, leaving the Alpha at the mercy of a hail of shattered glass.  In a burst of packed snow, the car went off the road and began rolling down the slope toward the ravine below.