Chapter 22
HARVEE
The dripping reaches me first.
Slow, distant, methodical. A faucet somewhere in the dark doing its patient work. I surface toward it like it's the only sound in the world, which it might be, because the rest of the space around me is absolute black.
I bolt upright and something snaps tight around my ankle.
Cold metal. A chain, pulling taut when I move, biting when I twist. I reach down and feel the cuff and my hands start shaking before I've fully understood what I'm touching.
My heart seizes. Bile climbs my throat.
Where am I.
The air is thick and damp, smelling of concrete and rot and something older underneath it. Whatever I'm lying on is rough, and the blanket covering me smells of mildew and years of storage. I yank at the chain. It holds. I yank again, harder, and it rattles loud in the dark and holds.
I scream.
"HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!"
The sound comes back at me off the walls, louder than I sent it, mocking. No doors visible. No windows. Just black in every direction and the distant drip and my own voice breaking itself apart.
"PLEASE!"
I thrash until my nails snap against metal and my wrists burn and the tears are coming fast and hot and I can't stop them and I can't stop screaming and no one comes. Nothing comes. The darkness doesn't shift.
My stomach revolts. I double over and vomit onto the blanket, hot and acidic, the smell hitting immediately. I'm still chained. I can't move away from it. I can't clean it up.
I shove the blanket off and curl onto the couch with my knees to my chest, sobbing until my body runs out of the energy to do even that, and then I close my eyes and let the dark take me back down.
The thunk of a car door pulls me up again.
Light bleeds under the door. Faint gold at first, then the overhead fluorescents snap on with a harsh buzz and I flinch away from it, eyes screaming.
A man stands in the doorway with his back to me. Broad shoulders under a black t-shirt. Dark curls. A small tattoo above his right elbow, a rose in black ink, just visible when he moves.
Something in me responds to the shape of him before my brain catches up, heat pooling low and immediate, which is completely insane given the circumstances, and then he ruffles his hand through his hair and turns slightly and I see his profile and everything crashes back at once.
The mail room. The collision. Tobacco and vanilla. His hand catching my arm.
The bar on Friday. His face near the door, eyes wide, finding mine across the room right before everything went dark.
He's been following me.
"Don't scream," he says, voice flat and low. Not reassuring. Just a warning. "We need to talk. And if you make me regret unchaining you, those won't come off."
My throat closes.
"H-hi," he says.
He stammers it. Actually stammers it, this man who just threatened me in a concrete room, and something hysterical bubbles up before I can stop it.
"Hi?" It comes out sharp and slightly unhinged. His eyes widen.
"How was the couch?"
I look down. Faded paisley print gone grayish-brown, springs visible through the cushions, the specific ugliness of a couch that has been in storage since approximately 1987. "Where am I?"
"Safe. For now."
For now.
"Did you leave the note? Is that what this is?"
"No." His eyes move to my purse on the floor, then back to me. "I know about the note. It wasn't me."
"Then what do you want?"
"I—" A pause, jaw working. "I don't know."
"I don't have money. I'm no use to you."
Something shifts in his expression. "I beg to differ." Low, quiet, and something underneath it that raises every hair on my body for reasons that have nothing to do with fear. Or not only fear.
He steps closer. Unhurried. Patient in a way that is somehow worse than urgency.
"You've seen me before," he says. "The mail room. The bar Friday night. Tell me what you remember."
"Let me go." My voice cracks down the middle. "Please. I won't say anything. Just unlock these, I need to—"
"Tell me what you remember first."
I yank the chain. It bites. "The mail room. You bumped into me. Friday night, the bar, and then I blacked out. That's everything. That's all I have. Please—"
He watches me. No sympathy. Just that cold, steady assessment, like he's weighing something.
Then: "Good girl."
It drops out of him low and quiet, almost gentle, and I hate that my body responds to it before my mind does. My yanking slows. My breath hitches.
"Now listen," he says. "Your boss is dead. The cops think it was you."
The room goes very still.
He reaches into the bag he set down and kneels in front of me.
I flinch back but he just drapes a clean towel across my lap and wipes the mess from my sweats, careful and methodical, hands never lingering.
Almost like tenderness, if tenderness could exist in a place like this. He hands me a paper bag when he's done.
I look inside.
Donuts. Two of them, full and perfect.
"Boston cream," he says, nodding at the bag.
"Why?" I say, before I can stop myself.
"You have to eat."
"I need to go home."
"I can't let that happen. Not right now." He straightens, picks up a canvas tote from the table, and turns for the door.
"Why not?"
He pauses with his hand on the frame. Something dark moves across his face, something that might be amusement and might be something else entirely.
"There's still a killer on the loose."
The door clangs shut. The lock clicks.
"Wait—" I surge forward and the chain snaps me short, ankle screaming. "COME BACK! You can't just—COME BACK!"
I pound the couch frame until my hands ache. The donuts tumble to the floor. My voice shreds itself against the concrete walls and the dark absorbs all of it and gives nothing back.
Killer on the loose.
I sit in the humming quiet of the fluorescent light and turn those four words over and over, pressing them from every angle, and the shape they make doesn't get any better no matter how long I look at it.