Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Hello?” My word cracks the silence between us, hope on a string I’m holding out.
Maybe this is all a misunderstanding. Maybe this person—whoever they are—will help me. I turn to check the cameras, watching for movement.
I wait.
And wait.
Then, behind me, the footsteps recede. They get farther and farther away until I hear a door shut in the distance.
My breathing picks up, my skin lined with chips of ice.
And then, I scream.
I open my mouth and scream with everything in me, with everything I have. My screams bounce off the walls and die in the stale, humming air.
This is real. I’m trapped.
I’m fucking trapped.
I pound my fists against the door until they throb, red and raw, but the house swallows every sound. “Help! Somebody—Simon! Open the door! Help! I’m trapped! Simon!”
My voice cracks. Pain lances through my throat.
It’s soundproofed. Or the sound is at least dampened by the loud ventilation. Even now, I can tell my voice isn’t carrying far. Even here, it sounds muffled.
It’s pointless.
I sink to my knees, dizzy. The fluorescent lights flicker above me, unyielding. I force myself up again, stumbling to the monitors and hoping—praying—someone will notice I’m gone.
I wait and I watch with no idea how much time has passed. There are knobs everywhere—buttons and controls with no instruction manual or markings to tell me what they do. The house is quiet, empty, and I suspect it’ll be hours before most people wake up again.
My hope is Simon.
That he’ll have enough awareness, even after drinking as much as he did, to realize I didn’t make it to bed. To come looking for me. Earlier, when I didn’t want him to realize what I was doing, I was sure he would. But now…
Briefly, a terrible thought flickers in my mind.
That it might’ve been Simon on the other side of that door. That he might’ve locked me in. But no. He wouldn’t have.
I know my husband. He loves me. He’d never hurt me.
For what feels like a lifetime, I watch the screens for any sign of movement. Until my eyes burn, my dry contacts reminding me to blink. Until my exhaustion wants me to sleep, to close my eyes for even just a second.
I’m not sure how much time has passed before I notice movement in the hallway. It’s morning, I think. Soft sunlight floods in through the windows on the screens.
Simon.
The relief is instant, a wave of warmth through my blood. I stand, watching. Waiting.
He walks down the hallway, turning his head this way and that as he passes the bedrooms and moves toward the stairs. I switch to another camera as his feet come into view on the staircase, then another as he reaches the bottom floor.
I follow him, moving around behind the screens, rushing to keep my eyes on him without even a second’s break.
Simon searches the kitchen and the living room, his face increasingly worried, as another sign of movement catches my eye on a different screen.
Preston.
Preston is coming downstairs.
I watch in a slow-motion tunnel as my brother-in-law approaches Simon, the two of them launching into conversation. Preston’s hands go to Simon’s shoulders.
I wish I could hear them. I need to hear them.
I take a seat again, studying the various unmarked buttons, and then I take a guess. I hit a button near me and the screens go dark.
No. No. No. No.
They buzz back to life, though this time, the feeds are different. My hand goes to my neck on instinct.
The front door. The dining room. The porch.
The…bedrooms. All of them. Ours. The beds are filled with sleeping bodies, though I can’t stop to make out who they are.
Dread suffocates me. Spiders crawl across my skin with icy footsteps. I’m going to pass out. I’m going to be sick.
No. Focus.
I hit the button again, and this time, the screens go dark for longer.
I jam my finger into the button. Come on.
Static crackles in the air, and I feel the electric current close to my skin like I haven’t felt since I was a little girl.
My hair stands on end, moving toward the screens as they light up once more.
I’m staring at the first set of feeds again.
Simon and Preston are back, just as I left them.
My fingers graze the buttons, moving to the next one. I tap it cautiously, and at once, I hear the sound of a door shutting. A green circle flashes in one of the feeds of the hallway moments before I watch Polly cross in front of it. I can hear her footsteps.
So, there’s sound. I just need to find the right button.
I press the button again to turn that camera’s sound off, but instead, the green circle goes to a new screen.
Light flashes in my skull.
I hit it again. Again.
Over and over, the green circle moves to a new screen, to new sounds. Until finally, I see the circle flash just above Simon’s head.
“—you talking about? She would’ve told me. She wouldn’t just…”
“I assumed she texted you. You were out cold last night when she woke Dad up.”
I hold my breath, waiting. What is he talking about?
“And she said it was her friend? Did she say who? Was there an accident or… She must’ve told you something.”
“Not me, no. She might’ve told Dad more on the way to the airport. Why don’t you just call her?”
“She lost her phone.” Simon presses his fingers to his temple. Then his eyes narrow. “She lost her phone,” he repeats. “How would anyone have gotten ahold of her?”
“How should I know? Maybe she found it. Maybe social media. She brought a laptop, right? Maybe they sent an email.”
Simon shakes his head like he still doesn’t believe it. Don’t believe it, Simon. Please don’t trust him. Why is he lying? “Okay, well, I need to go find her. I’ll call everyone I can think of.”
“What if she’s at the hospital with someone or something?”
“I thought you didn’t know where she was.”
“I don’t, I’m just…thinking out loud, I guess.” Stepping back, he waves Simon forward.
Simon glances toward the back of the house, toward the hallway and the bedroom where I’m hidden, his expression tight with confusion and worry.
Preston places a hand on Simon’s shoulder again, reassuring him. “She’s going to be fine. I’m sure she’ll find a way to call you when she gets a chance.”
I watch as Simon nods slowly. He believes him, I think. It sinks something inside me like a cannonball smashing into a boat.
My breath catches deep in my chest, knees trembling beneath my palms. If I weren’t sitting, I think I’d collapse.
Does Preston really believe what he said? Did Pierce feed him this lie? Or is Preston the one lying?
What do they want from me?
Why are they doing this?
A soft click behind me freezes my spine. The latch.
I check the camera. Simon is walking up the stairs, but where is Preston?
The door opens just a crack.
I whip around, heart beating like mad, ready to throw anything within reach. But when the voice comes, it’s not who I expect.
There’s no one in the doorway, and yet I hear her voice.
“Astrid?”
My heart stops. For a moment—one impossible, disorienting moment—I’m back in that guest house, hearing her for the first time.
My blood chills from somewhere deep in my chest, moving through my veins like ice water.
I’d know that voice anywhere. I’ve heard it through the static for days.
Her frightened pleas. Her trembling words. Her warnings.
She was real. All along, she was real. I was right.
I was right.
“Lia?” I breathe, stepping forward. “You—how—are you okay? What’s happening? Come in here.”
I hear a soft click, then a faint whir. Then, again, “Astrid?”
The room tilts with me inside it, though nothing else moves.
Finally, a figure steps into the doorway, pushing it open the rest of the way.
And I see who’s actually standing in the doorway.
Preston.
And just behind him, Pierce.
It’s just occurring to me. I never saw Pierce move on the cameras. He must’ve been the shadow behind the door earlier. Maybe he never actually left this closet at all.
I’m not breathing as Preston watches me. As if he’s studying me. As if I’m an animal in his cage.
“Funny,” he says, stepping farther inside the room. “How fast you were willing to assume the worst about us.”
My stomach heaves.
Pierce shuts the door with a quiet thud.
So there’s definitely a way to open the door from inside this room.
“It was you,” I whisper as it all clicks into place for me, the missing puzzle piece all this time.
“The radio. Every time I talked to her. Every…cry for help. You knew. You…you set me up. You were watching me.” It all makes sense now.
They knew when to talk. When to stop. Whenever I grabbed my phone or called the police, they went silent because they knew they needed to. It was the perfect setup.
Only…for what?
Preston tilts his head, amused. “Well, technically, it was Ruby.”
My mind flashes back to Ruby’s song at dinner. I’ma mica-phone girl. I’ma mica-phone girl.
I shake my head hard enough my vision blurs, then I grit my teeth at him. “Why? Why would you do this? Was it all a stupid prank?” It seems much more like something Duncan would do, but even he’d never be this extreme, would he?
“We had our reasons,” he says simply.
“And we can forget about all of them,” Pierce jumps in, “if you’ll just help us.”
“Help you?” I repeat the question numbly, my head underwater.
Pierce takes a step closer to me, eyes settling on the metal boxes stacked behind me. I still can’t read him, but I desperately wish I could. It makes it all the more terrifying.
Preston clears his throat. “You remember when you and Simon first started dating, and your laptop crashed?”
I swallow, my heart bottoming out, all thoughts going still. My…laptop? My old one. What could that possibly have to do with anything?
I think back to that time. How do they even know about it? The corrupted files, the unending loop of rebooting. The black screen that I never managed to clear.
It was just after Simon and I had started seeing each other—still very casually. And he came to my rescue when he didn’t have to. Maybe it’s the reason I fell so hard for him. His selflessness. His devotion to making my life easier.