Chapter 47
Bryn
It can’t be more than a few seconds before the blackout lifts. There’s no focus when my eyes open again, my mind somewhere between lucidity and a dream. No, not a dream. A nightmare.
I’m dropped onto something firm, but soft, and I fight to blink against the fog in my brain. The massage table. He put me on the massage table. My mind immediately goes to the creep who grabbed my ass. Eddie.
“Good. Didn’t want you to be out for too long,” he says, his voice coming from above my head.
There’s a clink. Something cold tightens around my right wrist, and I lift it to see, but my arm only moves so far before it can’t anymore.
No.
I tug, but it doesn’t move any more than it did before.
“No.” This time the word leaves my lips.
Something cold snaps into place around my left wrist. The world is coming into better focus now, enough that when I pull on my left wrist, I already know it won’t move any further than the right one did.
“No,” I gasp, struggling against the cuffs. “Let me go. Please. Whatever you’re going to do, please, don’t.”
I’m not firing on all cylinders, though, because it takes me too long to realize that I need to scream for help now that his hand isn’t over my mouth.
Sucking in a deep breath, I open my mouth to alert Celeste or the other massage therapist, Susan, that I need help, but something slaps over my mouth before I have a chance.
When the sound leaves my throat half a second too late, it can’t penetrate the thick, sticky tape sealing my scream inside.
The man leans over me, his face coming into view. Unless I’m completely hallucinating, it’s not Eddie. But I do recognize him, the breath leaving my nose so hard I’m sure there’s snot on the tape.
10-42. Blue eyes that chilled me to the bone. Wyatt in his face. All the guys standing behind him. Nate and Liam throwing him out.
The man who shoved his chair into me.
“Ah, you do remember me.”
It pleases him to know this, the smile sliding into place on his face reminding me of a psychopath from the movies. The only place people like this belong. There’s something deranged and unfocused in his eyes, yet he appears sharp, like he knows exactly what he’s doing.
I scream behind the tape, willing someone in one of the other rooms to hear me, pulling at the restraints on my wrists.
When I kick my feet to hit him in the back of the head, my legs only move an inch off the bed.
Something is holding them down, biting into my pants and skin. Something thin and unforgiving.
“Had a feeling you’d try that,” he says, moving towards my feet.
I lift my head and watch him reach over me, dropping something on the opposite side of the bed, then kneel to bring it around under the bed. A second later, he stands again, a wire cable in his hand. He repeats the process, wrapping it around me and the bed, tying me down.
“These beds make it real easy with the metal table legs,” he says nonchalantly, as if he’s making normal conversation on a Monday afternoon.
“When I came for a massage a couple weeks ago, I got your coworker at the other end of the hall—asshole move, by the way, your room used to be down there and this one was hers—”
He pauses to glance at me, head shaking. Susan and I switched rooms after Eddie.
“—I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw how these electric tables are put together. Just a little loop-de-loop through the metal legs with the cable—” He pulls everything tight, and I suck in a sharp breath when the wire digs into my ankles and legs. “—and it makes it harder to get off later.”
Straining my neck to look at the clock, I whimper. There’s still half an hour before Celeste expects me to be up. Half an hour is too much time. The amount of horror he could inflict…
Another loop around my midsection, my attention comes back to my captor as his hand skims over my hip bone with the wire.
“I’d love to take my time with you all tied up on this bed, but this part needs to be quick.” My blood runs cold when his eyes find mine. Cold, dark eyes. “I suppose you’d do it for me in a pinch, but it’s the fire that really makes my dick hard. And it’s about to be a rock.”
Fire.
He gets off on fire.
The arsonist.
We were wrong. It was never Eddie. It was him. This sick fuck.
I buck against my restraints, desperate to be out of them. It’s futile, I know, but I also know that whatever he has in store is going to be worse than bruises from fighting the cuffs and wire.
The man hums as he makes another couple of loops around my body and the bed. “Maybe I was wrong. Watching you thrash like that is hot. Maybe I should have planned for longer in here. Too late now.”
I’m not sure which part makes me stop fighting, but I lie still, my chest heaving with breaths through my nose. It doesn’t feel like any part of my body is getting enough oxygen, every inch of my skin prickling with pins and needles.
When he gets to my chest, he pauses, resting a hip against the bed. Taking a deep, long inhale, he slowly lets it out with a groan of satisfaction. “I can smell it, Bryn. Can you smell it yet? It won’t be long. Fire travels fast once it gets going.”
My eyebrows pull together as I sniff. Then sniff again. Longer the third time. That’s when I catch it. It’s faint, but unmistakable. Like the lingering smoke that hangs in the air at the end of a campfire.
Or the beginning of one.
“You know that vacant space beside the clinic? The one on the other side of the room you should have been in?” he asks, my stomach bottoming out when he scowls at me.
“That space came in real handy for me. Some accelerant on the walls, some fuel on the ground, a well-timed phone call to dispatch from building maintenance to put the building on disregard so when they got notification that the sprinkler system went down, they wouldn’t send anyone to investigate. ”
He chuckles to himself. “Do you know how easy it was to impersonate building maintenance? Too easy. They’re probably going to rewrite some rules after this because of me.”
The laughter morphs into a snarl, and he leans closer to me, his eyes going wild. I want to dissolve into the bed, away from him.
“And they should rewrite the rules. Those stupid fucks didn’t know what they had when they kicked me out of fire academy.
” He spits the words with such violence that spittle hits me in the face, and I cringe, closing my eyes.
“They said I was fucking unhinged. They don’t know unhinged.
They have no idea. But I’m starting to show them. ”
His fist hits the table next to my head, my whole body flinching as my nervous system screams “Danger!” at me.
“They don’t know half the fucking fires I’ve started, that’s how incompetent they are. But Station Nine started to figure it out. I heard them talking that night at the bar. Great place to hang out if you want to be around firefighters. Do you remember me before that night, Bryn?”
My forehead crinkles, eyes squinting at him, trying to place him before the moment his chair backed into me. But he’s not there.
“Doesn’t surprise me,” he says, reading the answer in my eyes. “I have one of those forgettable faces. But you’re not going to forget me now. For however long you survive.”
The drive to fight against the restraints surges through me, but I force the feeling back, trying to remain still so I can think. Think of a way out of this. Think of a way to get him to take the tape off my mouth so I can speak to him. Maybe I could talk him out of this.
Whatever this is.
He drags a hand over his forehead, then through blond hair that falls into his eyes when he bends closer, his face next to mine.
I can hear the way the air fills his nose and lungs as he draws in a breath beside me.
“Can you smell it now? I bet your boyfriend would be able to smell it. That fucking prick.”
The faint smell of smoke is stronger now. Celeste or Susan must smell it. One of them will call 911. Wyatt will come. Wyatt will find me.
Wyatt. The back of my eyes sting when I picture his smiling face staring down at me beneath his cowboy hat. The cheerfulness that dances in every step.
“I was so fucking pissed at you that day. That was my ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, and you made me look like an idiot,” he says, standing back up to resume the rest of what he was doing with the wire, now at my breasts.
“Then your fucking boyfriend had to get in my face, and I decided right then that he had to pay. All of them had to fucking pay.”
He pulls the wire so tight across my chest that I cry out behind the tape, tears over Wyatt mingling together with tears from the pain lancing through me.
A scream rings out in the distance, pulling both our focus in the direction of the door. The man, whose name I don’t even know, gives a heinous smile as he turns back to me.
“Sounds like things are starting to heat up down the hall in the room you were supposed to be in. Aren’t you lucky you weren’t in there?” He tugs at the wire next to my ribs, ensuring it’s secure. “It won’t be long now.”
Tears leak from my eyes as I stare at him, pleading with him to let me go, untie me, stop this madness.
Instead, he grabs a bag from the floor, dropping it on my stomach and stuffing the roll of tape he used over my mouth into it before pulling something else out.
Going to the foot of the bed, he hoists himself up, between my legs, and gets to his feet.
I don’t know what he’s doing, but I know it can’t be anything good, my breath hitching as I struggle to breathe through my nose without panic.
No longer am I hopeless. Only helpless.
Flicking his wrist, a long stick emerges from something in his hand, and he uses it to push a ceiling tile up and then over.
“There could be two reasons for that scream,” he says as he works, pushing another tile. “The fire came through the wall, or it’s in the ceiling and burning hot enough to go through the tiles. But it’s not the fire you should worry about. It’s the smoke. It’ll kill you first.”
The door to the room flings open, Celeste bursting through the doorway. “Bryn! Wake—what the fuck?”
I scream behind the tape, my heart leaping into my throat as hope bursts through me. Someone sees me. Someone sees him. I’m okay. I’m going to survive—
“Reggie? Susan’s client…?” Celeste questions at the same moment the man jumps down.
“You weren’t supposed to see this,” he drawls.
Her eyes go wide, recognizing the danger for what it is. I don’t blame her when she doesn’t look at me again, turning to flee from the room. My hands strain against the cuffs, arms against the wires as I listen to her scream in the hallway, followed by a second scream that doesn’t belong to her.
Tears slide out the corner of my eyes, trailing down my temples and into my hairline. A loud thud has me closing my eyes, wishing I could do anything but sit here and listen to the horror beyond my sight. Another scream follows, a second thud, and then things are silent.
Except they aren’t. The sound of my breath fills the room, but there’s something else along with it. Something far more sinister. Something that has my hair standing up.
A crackle. A hiss. The echoes of destruction barreling forward from above.
The roar is dull, but the longer I listen, the louder it seems to get.
I don’t know whether it’s illusion or truth as my imagination runs away from me, seeing flames violently ripping through the rafters on the other side of the clinic, lighting up the darkness in my mind.
Smoke creeps through the hole in the ceiling like an animal in the night, stalking for the perfect path to find its prey. The ceiling flickers orange. Dim at first, but with every second that passes, it gets brighter. Closer. Heading towards the room I’m in.
Maniacal laughter draws my attention as he—Reggie—walks through the door.
“Oh, this fire might be my best work yet. It’s rollin’ right into a rager.
” He pauses for a moment, and I bring my head up to find him watching something above me.
I look up at the hole he’s created and gasp through the tape as a glowing ember drifts down from the ceiling.
“Mmm, would you look at that. Beautiful. And my cue to leave.”
I scream against the tape, thrashing against all the cable tying me to the bed. I know it’s no use. I know I’m not getting out of this. But my brain is screaming to do something, anything, that might save me from burning alive.
Or suffocating in the smoke.
Another ember filters down, my throat becoming raw as I shriek, desperate for someone to hear me, begging him not to do this.
“That’s it,” he says, coming over to collect his backpack from on top of me. “Panic. Fight. Give it your all.”
He taps the side of my face a few times, smirking. “You’re about to find out how good of a firefighter your boyfriend is. Or maybe you won’t. I’m counting on the latter.”
Then, I’m alone. To roast on the table like a pig on a spit.