Chapter 20 Harper
Harper
The man’s smile lingered, sharp as broken glass. He stood, motioning for the others to leave the water bottle on the ground before turning back to the door.
“Be a good girl,” he said. “Keep your hands busy with them.”
The door slammed, lock grinding home.
The two women sagged beside me, one sobbing quietly, the other barely clinging to consciousness. I grabbed the bottle, twisted the cap off with my teeth, and coaxed a few sips into the weaker one’s mouth.
“Slow,” I whispered. “Don’t choke. Just let it sit.”
She obeyed, throat working, eyes fluttering. The other woman drank greedily, water spilling down her chin. I caught it with what was left of my torn sleeve and pressed it against a gash near her temple.
My training wasn’t much without supplies, but it was something. Something human.
Still, my mind wasn’t on the injuries. It was on him.
The scar through his eyebrow, the way his mouth curved when he looked at me—it clawed at the edges of my memory. Not from a hospital. Not from the night in the ER. Older than that.
College?
A patient’s family member?
Someone I passed in the halls too many times to forget?
The harder I pushed, the slipperier it became. All I knew was that the recognition wasn’t one-sided. He’d known me.
Which meant I wasn’t just leverage. I was personal.
My pulse thundered. I forced my face into calm, for the women’s sake. “We’re going to get out,” I told them, steady, certain. “I don’t know how yet. But we will.”
One of them—eyes swollen, lip split—whispered, “How can you be sure?”
I thought of Carter. His voice in the stairwell, the way he’d fought like the devil himself for me. The way he’d said my name like it was a vow.
“Because someone out there won’t stop until he finds me,” I said quietly.
And in that dark, with blood on my hands and fear in my throat, it wasn’t bravado. It was the only truth I had left.