Consciousness came slowly. The pain came all at once. The entire right side of my face was white-hot agony: throbbing, aching,
needles jabbing down to the bone. My left eyelid fluttered, but my right eye was swollen shut. Bits and pieces of the world came into focus—rotted floorboards, heavy rope encircling my body, the post I was tied to.
“You’re awake.”
My good eye searched for the source of the voice and found Agent Sterling. There was blood crusted to her temple.
“Where are we?” I asked. My arms were bound behind my back. I twisted my neck, trying to catch a glimpse of them. The zip ties digging into my flesh looked uncomfortably tight, but I couldn’t feel anything beyond the blinding pain radiating out from my cheekbone.
“He hit you with his gun, knocked you out. How’s your head?”
The fact that she’d ignored my question did not go unnoticed. A moan escaped my lips, but I covered it as best I could. “How’s yours?”
Her dry lips parted into a tiny, broken smile. “I woke up in the trunk of his car,” she said after a few seconds. “He didn’t get as good a hit in on me. I pretended I was unconscious when he brought us in here. As best I can tell, we’re in an abandoned cabin of some type. The surrounding area is completely wooded.”
I wet my lips. “How long ago did he leave?”
“Not long.” Sterling’s hair hung in her face. She was bound the same way I was: hands behind her back, tied to a wooden post that stretched from ceiling to floor. “Long enough for me to know I can’t get out of these knots. Long enough for me to know that you won’t be able to, either. Why, Cassie?” Her voice broke, but she didn’t stop talking. “Why couldn’t you just do what I asked? Why did you make him bring you, too?”
The anger drained out of her voice from one sentence to the next until all that was left was a terrible, hollow hopelessness.
“Because,” I said, nodding toward my right foot and wincing when my head protested, “I’m wearing a GPS tracking anklet.”
Sterling’s head was bowed, but her eyes found their way to mine. “The minute I left the property, Briggs got a text message,” I said. “It
won’t take him long to realize that you’re missing, too. He’ll pull up the data from my tracker. He’ll find us. If I’d let you go alone…” I didn’t finish that sentence. “Briggs will find us.”
Sterling lifted her head to the ceiling. At first, I thought she was smiling, but then I realized she was crying, her mouth stretched tight enough to clamp down on any sounds trying to escape her mouth.
Those don’t look like tears of relief.
Sterling’s lips parted, and an odd, dry laugh escaped. “Oh, God. Cassie.”
How long had we been here? Why hadn’t Briggs already come bursting through that door?
“I never activated the tracker. I thought wearing it was deterrent enough.”
The tracker was supposed to go off. It was supposed to lead Briggs right to us.
It had never occurred to me that she might have lied to me. I’d known I was taking a risk, but I’d thought I was putting my life on the line to help save hers.
The tracker was supposed to go off. It was supposed to lead Briggs straight to us.
“You were right about Emerson’s killer.” Those were the only words my lips would make, all there was left to say. The killer would be back. No one was coming to save us.
“How so?”
I could tell by the look in Sterling’s eyes that she was keeping the conversation up for my benefit, not hers. Mentally, she was probably berating herself—for not finding the killer, for agreeing to live in our house and dealing us in on this case, for letting me in when I’d knocked on her door.
For not activating the tracker. For letting me believe that she had. “You said that Emerson’s killer was between the ages of twenty-three
and twenty-eight, above average intelligence, but not necessarily educated.” I paused. “Though if he stuffed us in his trunk, that seems to suggest that he doesn’t drive a truck or SUV.”
Sterling managed a wry grin. “Ten bucks says that wasn’t his car.” My lips tilted slightly upward on one side, and I winced.
“Try not to move,” Sterling told me. “You’re going to need to conserve your energy, because when he gets back here, I’m going to distract him, and you’re going to run.”
“My hands are bound, and I’m tied to a post. I’m not going anywhere.” “I’ll get him to untie you, to untie me. I’ll distract him.” There was a
thread of quiet determination in her voice, but there was also desperation—a desperate need to believe that what she was saying could happen. “Once he’s distracted, you run,” she said fiercely.
I nodded, even though I knew he had a gun, knew I wouldn’t even make it out the front door. I lied to her, and she accepted the lie, even though she knew as well as I did that a distraction wasn’t going to be enough.
There was no enough.
There was nothing but him and us and the certainty that we were going to die in this damp, rotting cabin, screaming with no one but each other to hear.
Oh, God.
“He broke from Redding’s pattern.” Now Sterling was the one trying to distract me. “He’s broken away from him altogether.”
So maybe we wouldn’t die the way Emerson Cole had, the way the dozen women Daniel Redding had murdered before being caught had.
This isn’t Redding’s fantasy anymore. It’s yours. You enjoyed squeezing the life out of me. Did you enjoy hitting me with that gun? Are you going to beat us to death? I forced myself to keep breathing—quick, shallow breaths. Will you display our broken bodies in public, the way you laid Emerson out on the hood of her car? Will we be trophies, testaments to your control, your power?
“Cassie.”
Sterling’s voice brought me back.
“Is it sick if I wish I was normal?” I asked. “Not because I wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t trade my life for the lives that I’ve helped save—but because if I were normal, I wouldn’t be sitting here climbing into his head, seeing us the way he sees us, knowing how this is going to end.”
“It ends with you running,” Sterling reminded me. “You get away. You escape, because you’re a survivor. Because someone else thought you were worth saving.”
I closed my eyes. Now she was just telling me a story—a fairy tale, with a happily ever after.
“I knew a girl growing up who used to plot her escapes from all kinds of nasty situations. She was a living, breathing guide to surviving the most unlikely worst-case scenarios you could possibly think of.”
I let Sterling’s voice wash over me. I let her words banish all the things I didn’t want to think.
“‘You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest. Oxygen is running out. If you try to break the coffin, you’ll wake the cobra. What do you do?’”
I opened my good eye. “What do you do?”
“I don’t even remember, but she always had an answer. She always had a way out, and she was so darn cheerful about it all.” Sterling shook her head. “Sloane reminds me of her sometimes. When we grew up, she worked in the FBI laboratory. She always was better with facts than with people. Most second graders don’t appreciate a classmate who’s constantly putting their lives in theoretical peril.”
“But you did,” I said. Sterling nodded. “Her name was Scarlett, wasn’t it?” I asked. “She was Judd’s daughter. Your best friend. I’m not sure what she was to Briggs.”
Sterling stared at me for a few seconds. “You’re eerie,” she said. “You know that, right?”
I shrugged as well as I could under the circumstances.
“She was Briggs’s best friend, too. They met in college. I’d known her since kindergarten. She introduced us. We all joined the FBI together.”
“She died.” I said it so that Sterling didn’t have to, but she repeated the words anyway.
“She died.”
The sound of a door opening ended our conversation. Ancient hinges creaked in protest. I fought the urge to turn toward the door. It wouldn’t be worth the bolts of pain the movement would send through my face and neck.
You’re standing there. You’re looking at us.
Heavy footsteps told me he was coming close. Soon, the man who’d killed the professor and Emerson, Clark, and—in all likelihood—
Christopher, was standing directly between Sterling and me.
He was holding a hunting rifle.
YOU
Guns and neat little bullet holes and the glory of being the one to pull the trigger.
They’re yours. This time, you’re doing it your way.
The little red-haired one who practically begged you to take her isn’t looking so good. She’ll be the first to fall. Her face is already a mottle of bruises. You did that. You. The FBI agent’s face is marred with obvious tear tracks. You rest the rifle to one side and reach out and drag your thumb over her face.
She jerks back, but she can’t fight you. Neither of them can.
“I’m going to untie you,” you say, just to watch the surprise flicker through their eyes. “You’re going to run. I’ll even give you a two-minute head start.”
Take them. Free them. Track them. Kill them.
“Now…” You draw the word out and tap the butt of the rifle thoughtfully against the ground. “Who’s first?”
Adrenaline is already starting to pump through your body. You are powerful. You are the hunter. They are the prey.
“Me.” The FBI agent is the one who speaks. Doesn’t she realize she’s nothing but a deer in your target?
You’re the hunter. She’s the prey.
You grab the younger one by the elbow. “You.” You breathe the word directly into her face. Let her shrink back from it, from you. “You’re first.” The smell of fear is tantalizing. You smile. “I hope you can run.”
