Chapter 78
FINLEY
There’s a sweet dryness at the back of my throat, and with every jolt of the truck, it burns as the curdled coffee in my stomach lurches up my esophagus.
My hands grip the edges of the seat tighter when we hit another hole in the mountain road. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and the last sign I recall was for Malibu, maybe twenty minutes ago?
“Where are you taking me?” The question pushes out of my mouth with another sharp jolt that stabs through my brain.
Dark eyes turn on me. Narrowing when thin-set lips curl with a scowl.
“Ry-Ryker, please…” I don’t know where we are, but I know that if I buy us enough time, Eli and Jayden will realize that I’m gone and they’ll find me.
They will, I assure myself, squirming deeper into the seat until the AirTag in the hidden pocket on the waistband of my leggings digs into my side.
With a tug at the rope looped around my waist and elbows, I try to loosen the knots.
“I told you to stop,” he snaps, his hand darting toward me so fast that I instinctively cower away. Ryker holds it over my thigh, hovering for a second before he grips the steering wheel again with a grunt. “I’m not going to fucking hurt you. Alright?”
My pointed side glance is met with a roll of his eyes.
“I gain nothing from hurting you.”
“Then why?” God, the cottonmouth is so bad, I’m sucking the old spit off my tongue to lubricate my throat. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I owe your family a favor, and they want you back… he wants you back.”
He… Presley. Because only a sociopath would think another human being belongs to them. Only a psychopath would have their sidekick snatch a person who wants nothing to do with them.
“Presley’s not my family,” I say, translating the scream in my chest into a level statement. “My family is—”
“Argue that out with him.” The chuff that escapes him taunts me with how pointless and stupid that would be.
There’s no reasoning with a madman.
“Why are you helping him?”
“Told you, I owe him.”
Nodding, I force myself to visibly relax, even though my pulse is battering my ribs. I’m aching all over, and when we hit another pothole, a wave of nausea hits me so hard, I can’t swallow down my vomit.
“Fuck!” Ryker slams the truck to a stop.
He’s out and at my side in seconds. Yanking me by the collar of my sweater to the brush lining the dirt road.
I don’t hold back. Even when the retching stops, I continue forcing it until I make myself sick.
The blood rushing in my veins pounds in my ears. A frantic gallop that has my brain throbbing into the back of my eyes. Streaming tears down my face with my silent pleas, my mute prayer for mercy.
Please. Please, let them find me. God, please.
“Here.” Ryker holds out a bottle of water to me. When I shake my head, he mutters through gritted teeth, “I already told you I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Suit yourself.” Ryker shrugs, taking a few steps back when white-hot pain stabs through my side and this time I retch involuntarily.
“If you don’t flush the chloroform out of your system, it’ll poison your kidneys and your liver.
Before you know it, your body is shutting down.
By then, you’ll be in so much pain, you’ll be begging for anyone to put you out of your misery. ”
I don’t want to die. That’s the first thought that fills my mind. Followed by the suffocating panic of never seeing Eli and Jayden again. This can’t be it. We have a future. We… we…
I snatch the bottle of water from him and drink it down greedily. So fast that I choke on it several times, and when I’m done, I vomit it all out again.
“You’re a liar,” is what spews out of my mouth when I collapse into the tree trunk in front of me. My nails clawing at the bark so I don’t fall to my knees.
“We’re all fucking liars, Sweetheart.” His sneer is bitter and jeering. “Even sweet, innocent Eli.”
My bleary gaze flashes to his. The sudden dryness of my mouth makes it hard to speak.“Eli. Is he why you’re… you’re doing this?”
“For a smart girl, you don’t listen all that well.”
With a scoff, Ryker grips my arm and hauls me back to the truck. Before I can speak back, he slams the door, not bothering to put my seatbelt back on.
He’s back in the driver’s seat all too quickly. A blank expression on his face when he starts the engine and continues down the tree-tunneled road.
“You don’t have to take me to Presley. You don’t owe him anything. You… you… What has he actually done for you?”
I’m grasping at every straw I can, because the farther up the mountain he takes us, the narrower the road becomes, making it obvious we’re reaching the end.
“Please, please, Ryker… let me go.”
“No can do, doll,” he says with the roll of his eyes when he pauses the truck to fix a small camera to the back of his rearview mirror and then connects it to his phone via an app. Focusing back on the road, he says, “He gave me my life back.”
“What do you think will happen when he kills me and the police get the footage of you snatching me from the cameras at the office? You’ll go back to jail.”
Ryker’s hands grip the steering wheel tight, showing he doesn’t believe a single word he speaks next. “He’s not going to kill you.”
“Really? You believe that?” The clench of his jaw pops as hard as his white knuckles. “He already tried once. If it weren’t for Eli, he would’ve drowned me. If it weren’t for Eli, how many times would he have hurt you because of your sexuality?”
“People shouldn’t talk about things they don’t know,” he barks down at the steering wheel, covering it in his enraged spittle.
“I know Eli was your friend, and you let Presley hurt him.”
The sudden blanch of his face drags the lines of his mouth down, contorting it into a grimace. “It was a mistake, and I paid for it.”
“Did you?” I ask, glancing at the clock.
With the time we stopped before and how long we’ve been stationary now, I’ve bought myself at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes. In a lifetime of minutes, it doesn’t seem like much, but my life was snatched in seconds. Seconds. In that timeframe, ten minutes could be a lifetime.
A lifetime I get to spend with Jayden and Eli. An eternity of happiness.
“I—I didn’t know what he was going to do.
” Tear-logged eyes find mine when Ryker rests his head on his hands, still gripping the steering wheel.
“It was a mistake. Stupid… selfish, maybe? I was drunk and I was hurt, and when I went back to the party, they were all looking at me like I was a disease…”
Ryker’s deathly quiet for a beat, giving my brain the silence it needs to compute his words.
“When you went back to the party?” That same sick churn that roiled in my gut when Eli confided in me stirs frantically in the pit of my stomach now.
Ryker went back to the party.
“There was nowhere else for me to go.” He swallows hard, and it’s the first glimpse of contrition I’ve seen from him since that night at the bar.
“Presley started talking to me, and we carried on drinking. He told me he was going to apologize to Eli… to bring him back to the party, so I gave him my room key.”
The final piece of the puzzle fits so sickeningly perfectly.
The full picture is as soul-crushing as it is enraging.
My nails dig deep into my thighs, muting the roar in my chest just enough that I don’t throw myself at the bastard looking at me for understanding and tear him to pieces with my teeth.
“I didn’t… I didn’t know… I…”
“I think you knew Presley was going to hurt Eli. I think you knew, and you enabled him to do it to ease your bruised ego. Presley doesn’t do apologies. Sociopaths don’t know the meaning of sorry.”
At least he doesn’t try to deny it. At least…
“I was drunk and—”
“You sold your friend out!” The scream slushes the frozen blood in my veins. “Twice. You betrayed Eli twice, and now you’re doing it again.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“No, no, he’s not. Because a friend would intervene instead of recording it and then using it to their advantage.”
“You have no idea what your family did to me,” Ryker bellows, getting right in my face so that his spittle coats my cheek when he adds, “They ruined my life. Your family petitioned to get me dropped from the team because I was making the rest of the guys uncomfortable. Eli’s parents did the same.
Every fucking family complained, threatened to get Coach sacked… ”
Pulling away, he grabs his phone from his lap and shoves it in the front pocket of his hoodie before he continues up a narrow dirt path arched over with thick trees that eat up all the light.
“So, at which point did Presley give you your life back? At which point did you decide that out of everyone who’s wronged you, he was worth colluding with?”
“After I was dropped from the team because I’m gay, my parents washed their hands of me. I had just turned eighteen, and I was on my own. I was living in my car and working at a shitty bar on the crappy side of town.”
How my heart bleeds for him.
Ryker ruined his own life, and in the process, he almost ruined Eli, too.
There isn’t a scripture in this universe that could convince me to be godly enough to forgive him.
There certainly isn’t a single threat he could pose to me that would make me pretend to understand his twisted reasoning behind all of this mess.
“I was in jail and—”
“You used Eli as your get out of jail free card.” The physical and emotional pain he suffered—the tears he cried, the hurt he bled—was nothing more than a bartering chip to him.
If that’s not cruel, I don’t know what it is. And I am sick with it. To my stomach. My heart, my head, my soul—they’re all wretched with it.
“Actually, I used your father, and I got a kick out of every second he had to represent me… The gay kid he had cast out like garbage. I gave him the recording, and he got me out of jail. That’s it.”
What a load of horseshit.
My throat tightens when a barren clearing comes into sight. As we approach it, there’s nothing but an old, crumbling house in the middle of the land with a truck parked out front of it.
“That’s not it, is it?” Desperation and fear are sinking in fast with every bruising pang of my heart. Tears cloud my eyes, and the sting of their glare burns all the way down the back of my nose and throat when Presley gets out of the truck by the house. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“You brought this on yourself.” His words are so blasé that my skin crawls with the indifference on his face. When he leans closer, a treacherous tear escapes me. Even worse, when he whispers in my ear, a sob tears out of my chest. “This is all on you. All your fault.”
“No.” It doesn’t matter how hard I shake my head, the voice inside tells me it’s true.
“What he did to Eli was because of you.” Ryker’s dark stare flits ahead of us to Presley’s fast-approaching form. “He brought me here because of you. To remind Eli of what he did to him. The messages, the calls… they were meant to drive you away.”
“Except, I’m not a coward.” The words are a choked gurgle when Ryker reaches for the glovebox and pulls out a pocket knife.
My pulse roars, spreading a bone-deep chill down my spine when he brings it to my stomach and holds it there.
“Bravery is a synonym for stupidity,” is all he says before he slices through the rope at my waist as my door is yanked open and a loud bang ricochets through the cabin.
Jarring, the ringing in my ears deafens me. Everything is spinning. And my chest… so tight. It hurts so bad.
So bad.
And I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I. Can’t. Breathe.