Chapter 16
Kinley lay in the wet mud and stayed as still as she could. She’d turned her head so she could breathe, but she was afraid to move just in case Simon was watching from the road above.
She didn’t remember what happened after he’d choked her the last time, but with the way her body hurt, she knew he must’ve thrown her over the side of the bridge.
She was lying in the cold, squishy mud of a fast-moving stream. By some miracle, she hadn’t landed on the multitude of rocks and debris not four feet from where she was lying. Nor had she been thrown into the actual deep part of the water.
It was pitch black, Kinley could barely see the water she heard rushing nearby.
She assumed that Simon had been in such a hurry, he’d thought the stream was wider than it was.
That it was as wide as the bridge. But, lucky for her, it wasn’t.
Even luckier, Simon hadn’t bothered to make sure she was dead before he’d thrown her body off the side.
He was a shitty hitman, not that she was complaining.
Hell, maybe she had been dead, or at least not breathing, but when she’d hit the ground, her body was somehow shocked into breathing again. She had no idea what happened. All she knew was that, by some miracle, she was alive.
But Kinley knew she wasn’t out of danger. Not by a long shot. Simon could return. There could be a flash flood. She could bleed to death internally—because something was definitely not right inside. She couldn’t take a deep breath, and every inhale felt like someone was stabbing her.
Her head hurt and she felt nauseous, which meant she probably had a concussion. Not to mention, her right ankle was throbbing and was probably broken. The mud had saved her life, but that didn’t mean the fall from the bridge hadn’t done some serious damage.
After what seemed like hours, Kinley knew she had to do something. She couldn’t just lie there and hope someone would happen to look over the bridge when they were driving by at sixty miles an hour…not that she’d heard more than two cars in all the time she’d been lying in the mud.
And each time she’d heard a car, she’d thought that was it. That Simon was coming back to finish what he’d started. But when the cars had passed without slowing, Kinley began to realize she was in deep trouble. She needed help.
And the only way to get it was to get out of this stream and up to the road.
But it might as well be a hundred miles from here to there. Kinley tried to move, and quickly realized she had something tied around her ankles, weighing her down.
Simon truly had planned on her landing in the water, and if she’d somehow managed to survive everything else he’d done to her, she’d have drowned.
Tears leaked out of her eyes, and Kinley felt such despair, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get herself out of this.
Using what seemed like all her energy, she rolled onto her back. She wanted to scream with how the movement made her injuries seem even worse than two seconds before, but then she heard something over the sound of the water rushing nearby.
Cicadas. They were loud, as if they were calling to her. Yelling at her to get a move on. To not just lie there like a useless lump of flesh.
She remembered when she and Gage had heard them while they’d been lying in his bed after one of the most mind-blowing experiences of her life.
Just thinking about Gage gave her the boost she needed.
She wasn’t dead. Simon had failed. She refused to think about the fact that he’d most certainly try again.
Not only because she could still testify against Stryker if she was alive, but because he’d be pissed he’d failed the first time.
And Kinley knew if he had a second chance, he’d make sure he didn’t fail.
She’d have a bullet, or two or twenty, in her head before she knew what was happening.
First things first. She had to get the tape off her body. She couldn’t wiggle up and out of the ravine and stream bed like a worm.
It hurt to move. A lot. She’d never felt pain like this in her entire life. But if she was going to get back to Gage, she had to endure it.
She got lost in her head, wondering if Gage and his friends had ever been hurt while they were on a mission.
Of course they had, they were Delta Force operatives. They didn’t just skip around the desert telling people to “be good.”
She used that humorous image to keep her going. She rubbed the tape around her torso against the few rocks under her, wiggling and contorting her body as best she could. It was excruciating, but she didn’t stop.
It took a while. A long while. The wet mud under her seemed to help loosen the tape, or at least make her slippery enough to move easier.
When she’d gotten the tape pushed down around her waist, it was easier to move her arms, and getting free from the miles of tape around her hands didn’t take as long.
She was about to throw the tape she’d removed as far away from her as she could, when something struck her. It probably had DNA on it. She’d seen Simon use his teeth to tear it off the roll. She had to keep it. Protect it from further contamination.
Her body protesting, she balled up as much of the tape as she could, making sure the end where Simon had used his teeth was on the inside of the ball, protected from the elements.
Now she had to work on the tape around her thighs and legs. She couldn’t sit up, the pain in her ribs was just too great, and breathing was almost impossible, so it was slow going yet again. But eventually, she managed to remove that too.
By now, the tape ball was a pretty good size, and Kinley had second thoughts about taking it with her. But it would give her something to do. She could throw it ahead of her and use it as incentive to crawl forward.
The only thing she had left to remove before she could start the trek up to the road was the cinderblock still tied to her ankles. She couldn’t reach the rope without sitting up, and she could only stand that searing pain for ten seconds at a time before she had to lie back down and take a breath.
“I can’t,” she said out loud after what seemed like the hundredth time she’d sat up to try to unknot the rope. She lay on her back in the mud and cried. Cried for how badly she hurt and how much she needed Gage.
She cried for quite a while…
But then she swore she heard his voice calling to her.
“Gage?” she yelled, but got no answer.
After several more attempts to gain his attention, she realized that she was hallucinating. Gage wasn’t there. No one was. It was just her. And the only person who was going to save her was herself.
You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.
The words ran through her head over and over. She had no choice but to do this. No matter how much it hurt. No matter how long it took. No one was going to see her down here in the mud. She had to save herself.
Hadn’t she survived a shitty childhood?
Hadn’t she survived being a loner?
Hadn’t she survived working in Washington, DC, for as long as she had?
This was a piece of cake compared to all that.
Okay, not really, but she pushed the doubts out of her mind and went back to work on the knot attaching the cinderblock to her body.
It took about twenty more times pulling at it, but finally, finally, the rope fell to the mud on either side of her feet.
Smiling, then moaning at how even that hurt, Kinley lay back once more, but in triumph this time rather than despair. She’d done it! She’d gotten herself out of the tape and removed that fucking rock attached to her ankles.
It was still pitch black outside, but somehow Kinley felt ten times lighter than she had just ten seconds ago. Moving ever so slowly, she rolled onto her stomach—and immediately realized that was immensely painful. She got up on her hands and knees and panted as pain coursed through her body. God.
She went from feeling triumphant to being in the pits of despair once again. How in the hell was she going to climb out of this fucking stream when even thinking about moving hurt? Hell, even the hair on her head felt as if it weighed a ton and was too much to carry.
Blood dripped from a gash in her head and down her face, but because her eyes were so swollen, she barely even noticed.
Gritting her teeth, Kinley reached for the ball of tape she’d removed earlier.
She tossed it with a weak throw toward the bank.
It probably landed only eight feet away, and even that looked way too far for her to go.
But she tentatively moved one hand, then a knee, and shuffled forward.
The mud squished under her fingers and her body sank into the soft ground, but she stayed upright.
She moved her other hand and knee forward, and almost doubled over at the pain that shot through her pelvis at the movement. The tears were falling from her eyes nonstop now, but since she could barely see anyway, she didn’t really notice.
It took her probably fifteen minutes to move the eight feet to the ball of tape—but she’d done it.
Kinley turned and lowered herself down to her back to rest. She could see stars in the sky overhead. She must be in the middle of nowhere, because there was no light pollution to distort the view of the Milky Way.
She stared upward for a long time, before the sound of the cicadas penetrated once more.
It was if they were taunting her. Daring her to keep going.
So Kinley again struggled to her hands and knees and picked up the ball of tape.
She tossed it in front of her once again and slowly and painfully crawled toward it.
She did this again and again. And when the ravine got too steep to throw the ball of tape upward, she kept nudging it with her head.
It felt as if she were climbing Mount Everest. There were times she thought for sure she wasn’t going to make it.
She couldn’t breathe very well at all now, and every inhale felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest.