Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
STERLING
“ F orrest?” I asked into the dark. I knew he was standing right next to me, but in the inky blackness, I felt completely alone. There was a thin blade of light from my phone, another from his, but I hadn’t appreciated how much light the open door had let into the root cellar.
“Someone followed us. Or maybe they were already here? I don’t know,” he said, using the light from his phone to make his way back to the steep stone steps. He climbed a few feet up and shoved at the door. It rose half an inch before it stopped. He shoved again, the muscles of his shoulders bunching under his shirt as he threw his weight into his hands, pushing up.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said when he let out a growl and tried to shove at the door with his shoulder.
“I won’t,” he said. “But there aren’t any windows down here. The door is the only way out.”
That was very bad. I didn’t need him to explain it to me. And it was my fault. I’d rushed Forrest out of the house, not wanting to stop for Griffen and Hawk, knowing they’d just slow us down. Hawk would want to send one of his people with us, which meant shuffling the schedule around. Griffen would want to research the property. While all of that was probably useful and smart, I hadn’t wanted to wait.
Typical me, rushing headlong into disaster. And this time, I’d dragged Forrest with me. I was going to have to call for help. My pride hated it, but not as much as I hated the dark, dank cellar we were trapped in.
I stared down at my phone screen, stymied. No bars—not even a hint of a bar—just three dots where the bars should be. Shit.
“No signal,” I said. “Do you have a signal?”
Glancing at his phone screen, I felt more than saw Forrest shake his head. “Nothing.”
“Fuck.” As our options fell away, a sickening thought occurred to me. “Can Hawk track my phone if there’s no cellular connection?”
Forrest shook his head. “I don’t know. Fuck. There’s got to be a way to get through those doors.”
I wanted to believe him, but root cellars were designed for storage and keeping animals out. There was no reason anyone would put a safeguard on the inside to prevent what had just happened to us. It wasn’t what these were used for. I glanced at the door at the top of the steps. Even if it hadn’t been bolted shut, it wasn’t light—it had taken two of us to lift the door we’d opened. But maybe there was a way we hadn’t thought of yet.
“Who would do this? The Learys?” I asked, thinking out loud.
Forrest let out a huff of breath. “Could be. Maybe they’re trying to scare you.”
I rolled that thought around in my head, but it didn’t fit. Locking me in a root cellar didn’t seem like Callum Leary’s style. But then again, it wasn’t like I knew the guy. Maybe Forrest was right. Maybe Callum Leary thought I’d be easier to deal with if I was scared.
I wasn’t scared—not yet. Even so, I could admit this had not been one of my better decisions.
“We should have talked to Hawk and Griffen before we left,” I said.
Forrest just nodded his head, a shadow in the dark.
I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t stopped me, why he hadn’t made me do the sensible thing instead of rushing off after the clue. But I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t Forrest’s responsibility to stop me from being a dumbass. And more than that, I knew why Forrest hadn’t stopped me—because he wanted me back. The last thing he’d want to do was piss me off. Yet again, this fuckup was all on me.
“I’m sorry,” I said into the cold, dark room. “I’m so sorry. We should have told them what we were doing.”
“You don’t owe me an apology, Sterling,” Forrest responded. “I could have said something, but I wanted to get here, too. I didn’t want to wait. Now we just have to figure out how to open that door.”
We worked on the door for what felt like hours, shoving and banging. I tried gouging at the hinges, but all the parts that mattered were on the outside. If anyone heard, they didn’t come to our rescue. I thought about whoever had locked us in here. Were they waiting to see if we escaped? Would they meet us out there with a gun? Was this a prank or something far more insidious?
With a sigh, my palms bleeding and hands aching, I said, “I don’t think we’re going to get out of here.”
A spike of fear went down my spine, the implications of my words became clear. No one knew where we were. We had no way to communicate with anyone. Our car was hidden in the trees, and we were locked in an empty, cold root cellar deep in the woods.
My impatience had gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years, but this might be my worst, and last, mistake. It didn’t seem right that my story would end here. I had so much more I wanted to do.
I ran through how things would go at Heartstone when they realized I was gone. They’d try to track my phone, and they’d see the last known signal ping somewhere nearby. That gave me hope. Griffen and his team would find us. I was sure of it.
The question was how long that would be. A day? Two? And when they arrived, would this mystery person who’d locked us in here be waiting for them?
And further to that, who would want me and Forrest dead? The only person who knew where we were was the one who’d locked us in. If it was the Learys—and I wanted to hope that it was—they’d come back to let us out. I was no good to them dead.
The Learys needed us alive to finish solving the clues, so killing us simply didn’t make sense. Plus, the clue very clearly led us here. Why would they lock us in instead of waiting for us to solve it and then come after us?
My thoughts whirling, I watched Forrest step resignedly away from the steep stone staircase leading to the door and sweep his flashlight around the room. The edge of the beam caught on something in the corner beneath the staircase.
“Wait,” I said, “what’s that by the stairs?”
The beam of light swung back, stopping to illuminate the edge of a box just barely sticking out from under the stairs. Moving closer, we saw a shallow storage area that had been dug into the dirt. The plain brown box inside was free of dust, the cardboard firm instead of soggy from the damp.
“This hasn’t been here long,” Forrest said, reaching for the box. He slid it out into the center of the room.
It didn’t seem too heavy, but it wasn’t light either. I went to open it. Forrest nudged me aside.
“Wait,” he said. “We don’t know what this is or who put it here.”
“Oh, good point.” Now, I was thinking of every nasty surprise that could be hidden in that box. A bomb? Snakes? Spiders? When Forrest reached for the flap, I grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?” I asked. “If it’s not safe for me to open it, then why is it safe enough for you?”
I thought it was a reasonable question, but Forrest didn’t answer. He shifted to move between me and the box, holding his phone at one end and poking at the flap with the other. It lifted and fell open, revealing a dark corner of the interior. I couldn’t see anything inside, but at least nothing jumped out, and it didn’t explode. Forrest did the same with the next flap of the box and the next until we could see inside. I wasn’t expecting two plastic gallons of spring water and a family-size box of granola bars.
“Why—?” I started to ask when potential answers flooded my brain.
As if he was reading my mind, Forrest put my scrambled thoughts into words. “Whoever locked us in here doesn’t want us to starve to death. Maybe that means they plan to come back and let us out. Now we know this wasn’t a random prank.” He pulled out one of the gallons of water, studying the cap at the top. “It’s not sealed. They could have added something or refilled used bottles.”
I eyed the granola bars. “All of it could be tainted.”
Forrest nodded, frowning down at the box. After a long moment, he shoved it back into the corner beneath the stairs and stood. Letting out a short, sharp breath, he headed to the back corner of the room and began poking methodically at the stones that made up the wall.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“I’m looking,” he replied. “I don’t know if the clue is part of why we’re locked in here, or it was just convenient for whoever wanted us out of the way. But at the moment, we’re not getting out. We might as well search and make sure there isn’t anything to find.”
I joined him, starting in the opposite corner, going over every square inch of the wall, watching the battery on my phone drain lower and lower. Should I stop and conserve it? But what was the point when conserving the light would just drag out the inevitable? A dark voice whispered inside my head, If you can’t get out, you’ll be stuck down here forever.
As time stretched on and the chill settled in, my clothes saturated with damp and smelling of the musty cellar, the walls revealing nothing of their secrets, I began to doubt.
I didn’t think it had been the Learys who locked us in. I couldn’t figure out why they wanted to scare me, but if that was the goal, then by now, they would have let us out. It had been hours. It was cold, and I was hungry.
With every second that passed, the root cellar felt more and more like a dead end.