Chapter Fifty-Five
Maggie
Maggie came awake slowly. Head pounding. Body aching. Mouth tasting like pennies and bad decisions. For a moment, she just
lay there, shaking from the cold or the shock or maybe both.
Who was she kidding? It was totally both.
She couldn’t quite remember where she was or why her mattress felt like cold concrete. But then she realized... that’s
because she was lying on cold concrete.
She needed to get up, but the room was spinning slightly, a swirl of grays and blues that kept coming in and out of focus.
It looked like the galaxy through a high-powered telescope. Like the universe, big and mysterious and all around you—and also
incredibly far away. She wanted to tell Ethan about it. She wanted to...
Ethan.
Another picture filled her mind then: Ethan’s face in black and white, making Eleanor laugh before handing her a tray full
of poison. Ethan smirking and glaring as he turned and walked away from the scene of the crime. Ethan staring down at the
nanny cam in Maggie’s arms like it was a land mine, like it was going to blow his life to smithereens.
Ethan.
That one word was enough to make the world stop spinning, rooting Maggie to the spot as her head cleared and the room came
into focus. Concrete floor. Long tables. Dead plants. And the eerie silver shadows of moonlight shining through frosty glass.
Maggie had to get out of here. She had to get warm and stop shaking. She had to... Well, she actually didn’t know everything
she had to do, but step one seemed pretty obvious, so she tried to push herself upright and look around the greenhouse—she
tried to scoot away—but her hands were bound behind her back. And that was the fact that broke her.
Even Maggie couldn’t convince herself that this was her fault. She hadn’t had an accident or gone sleepwalking or gotten blackout
drunk. She hadn’t tied her own hands behind her back because Maggie couldn’t even zip her own dresses. So she couldn’t blame
herself for this one. She could only blame—
She saw Ethan’s face on the laptop’s screen and closed her eyes, forcing out a single tear even though crying wouldn’t help.
She’d cried in the wine cellar. She’d screamed and clawed and no one had heard her. No one had cared because Maggie had picked
the wrong friend and the wrong guy and...
Some things never change. But Maggie had.
She was going to get out of here. She was going to get help. And she was going to start by rolling over because her arms were
killing her and something sharp was piercing into her backside and...
Maggie stopped wiggling. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out something hard and plastic. She flicked a switch,
then watched as a bright, white beam swept across glass and snow and plants made out of poison.
Well, Maggie had to say this for Ethan Freaking Wyatt: at least he’d given her a flashlight.