Chapter 30
The bright flash of light in the dimly lit room blinded me.
Blinking rapidly, I turned my head and tried to refocus, searching for answers in my surroundings. My thoughts were foggy, like a distant dream. The memories returned only in pieces that didn’t make any sense.
Driving away from home.
Pulling into the dark parking lot of the storage facility.
A duffel bag full of cash sitting on the seat next to me while I waited.
Getting out to look around.
Hearing footsteps.
And then I felt the brush of soft cloth against my face.
And now, this.
This musty smell of earth. The thin layer of dust covering every surface. Old boxes stacked in the corner. Besides the twin sized cot where I was tied up, only a small sink against the wall stood out.
My hands were tied together behind my back. I tried to cry out as I struggled against the restraints but could only manage a muffled sound around the cloth stuffed in my mouth.
There was sound in the darkness, and suddenly my eyes landed on someone towering menacingly over me. They wore jeans and a blue hoodie, with a black mask over their face, blocking out the rest of their features.
The figure spoke. “You’re heavier than you look, Everleigh. On screen, you’re a wisp of a girl. Is that some kind of special effects thing?”
It was a woman. Her voice was low, but laced with anger.
I shook my head, struggling harder to get loose. Nothing budged.
“I needed a wheelbarrow to drag your ass down here,” she went on. “It was hard enough getting you in my trunk. Good thing I’m strong, though.” The woman walked around the space but never took her eyes off of me. “You don’t look so adorable now. That’s what the Hollywood Reporter calls you, right? The ‘most adorable actress of our generation’. Adorable is such an infantile word, though, don’t you think? Like, you should be wearing pastels and have braids or something.”
Her voice filled the space now as she grew louder, her pacing becoming faster.
“I mean, really, you’re an adult. You’ve been an adult for a good long while now. I think maybe even before you graduated high school, you were acting like one, weren’t you? All that shit that went down with your dad. What an asshole, huh? And then…well….you know what happened next, don’t you? I don’t have to tell you. You were there. You lived it. Poor, pitiful Everleigh. Always the victim, right?”
Her words cut through me. Who the fuck was she? How did she know all of this? My body trembled in fear.
She stopped in front of me, and I searched the parts of her face that were visible. But she wasn’t familiar to me at all. Her eyes were calm and blank, her hands steady as they gestured while she spoke. She was a stranger. A perfectly calm, but very angry, stranger.
Fear gripped my heart as she kept talking.
“I gotta say, though. That took balls. And you pulled it off, too. All these years and no one suspected you at all. Impressive. Seriously.”
I tried to talk again, but it just came out a mumbled mess of moans.
“Oh, relax.” She laughed as she stared down at me with her icy gaze. “You’re finally getting what you deserve, Everleigh. Might as well lean into it.”
I thought of Theo, how angry he would be when he found out that I’d come to meet this freak alone. I was angry with myself now. What an idiot I was. Like some dumb character in a low-grade slasher film that makes a move so stupid that it has the whole theater shouting and throwing things.
I’d done the shouting a million times myself.
Now, I was the idiot making the dumb moves.
But I wasn’t about to let this be my final scene.