fear the worst
Here’s an example of a C2 phrase in the English Vocabulary Profile that means: worry that something very bad will happen or that something very bad has happened We fear the worst. TED A search for collocates of ‘fear the worst‘ in the NOW corpus: 1 COME 126 2 YET 114 3 BEGAN 59 4 EXPERTS 31 Experts initially feared the worst. […]