Chapter 15
I’ve never blacked out this quickly.
No one has ever treated me this brutally before, not with such total indifference to whether I lived or died.
Honestly, it would’ve been a perfectly normal outcome if I’d suffered a brain hemorrhage and dropped dead right there on the spot.
But either I got lucky… or it’s my strange nature as a Grim Reaper.
I didn’t die.
I open my eyes.
When I do, I’m somewhere completely unfamiliar. It’s nothing like the parking lot at all.
For a second my brain just stutters, trying to make sense of shadows and cramped space, trying to stitch reality back together. It takes me a moment to realize where I am, but when it clicks, a sharp, sick dread slides straight down my spine.
It’s the back of the fucking van.
I lunge upright like my body is spring-loaded. My shoulder slams into the side panel, pain sparking hot along the joint, but I barely register it. My fingers scrabble blindly for a handle, a latch, anything.
But a guillotine drops behind my eyes.
Pain detonates at my temples. My vision fractures into shards of light and dark, splitting, swimming, refusing to hold steady. My knees buckle before I can catch myself. I hit the floor hard enough that my teeth click, the impact rattling through my skull like it’s hollow.
And then there’s nothing.
For a while, I see and hear absolutely nothing. I don’t know if it’s seconds or minutes. Eventually, I try to move my fingers, but I can’t even tell if I do.
“Hey,” someone whispers close by. “Hey, hey… are you okay?”
My throat works before my vision does.
“I…” I can barely feel my tongue. “Yeah.”
“Shh. Don’t talk so loud.”
My eyes finally manage to focus on something: a smear of darkness pressed into a human shape. I swallow, and the motion scrapes all the way down.
“Who are you?” I ask.
If I could come to my senses, I’d know. But in this moment, whatever understanding I had has been knocked clean out of my head. It’s only when I hear the answer that adrenaline finally punches through the haze, flooding my bloodstream and dragging my focus back into place.
“Hailey,” the whisper says.
She’s still a pale blur in the dark.
“Hailey,” I repeat. “Okay. Okay, Hailey.”
Chills ripple over my skin. “It’s going to be okay, Hailey,” I tell her anyway, even though I don’t know if I’m in any position to reassure anyone. Because fuck me, I’m a captive.
When my eyes finally cooperate, I see more than just Hailey’s outline. We’re in the back of a van, a tin can boxed in by metal and shadow, with nowhere to go.
And it isn’t just the two of us.
There’s another girl in here. She’s limp, slumped at an angle that looks wrong, completely unmoving. A cold, sharp line of fear cuts through what’s left of the fog in my skull.
“That’s Lila, isn’t it?” I whisper.
Both girls are bound with plastic zip ties at their wrists and ankles. The restraints bite deep enough that the flesh bulges around them. My stomach rolls hard.
The van hits a seam in the road and everything shudders. The jolt sends a spike of pain through my head, a pulse so deep and nauseating it feels like my skull is trying to split from the inside. I clamp my jaw and breathe through my nose, because if I open my mouth, I’m going to throw up.
“How do you know?” Hailey asks, her eyes widening.
The panic in her voice is immediate, and I realize I’ve just scared her even more.
“I… I want to help you two,” I say quickly. “I know about you. I came here to free you.”
It sounds ridiculous out loud, like the kind of lie someone would invent when they’re out of options. Unfortunately for both of us, it’s the truth.
Hailey doesn’t answer right away. In the dark I can’t read her expression, but I hear the shift in her breathing, the way it turns cautious.
“Free us,” she repeats.
Another bump jars the van. My vision tilts and my skull throbs in response, a sickening, heavy pulse that makes me swallow bile.
“I know how it sounds,” I whisper. “But I’m not with them.”
“With who?”
“The people driving. The ones who took you.”
Hailey’s eyes catch a smear of light from somewhere, just enough to show the fear still clinging to her expression.
“Well, you’re in here,” she says. “So how are you going to help?”
I shift carefully, inching my weight onto my knees.
“I came with… other people,” I say. “We were outside. We tried to stop them.”
The moment I say it out loud, the memory punches straight through the fog. Cassian shot. Nathaniel tranquilized. My pulse stutters. Where the hell are they now? What happened to them?
Hailey’s gaze flicks to Lila. “Good thing she cannot hear you right now,” she whispers. “Or else she’d burst into tears.”
“It’s true,” I whisper back, and my eyes drift to the girl.
Lila is folded wrong, head tipped forward, hair stuck to her cheek. Her chest rises, but only shallowly, like her body is doing the bare minimum to keep going. I reach out before I can talk myself out of it and brush her hair away with my fingertips.
Her skin is damp.
“Lila,” I whisper. “Hey. Wake up.”
Nothing happens.
Hailey makes a small sound, almost a warning. “Don’t,” she whispers. “She won’t. Not yet. I always wake up first and have to wait for her.”
My attention drops to the zip ties. I brace myself, then slide closer to Hailey’s hands.
“Let me see,” I murmur.
Hailey hesitates like she expects a trick. Then she inches her wrists forward. I hook a fingernail under the tie and try to create space, even a sliver I can work with.
There’s nothing. It sits flush to her skin.
Fucking hell.
I force my breathing to steady and drag my gaze around the room, trying to make my brain cooperate.
“Okay,” I whisper. “I can’t loosen these with my nails, so I need something. A sharp edge. A piece of metal. Something broken.”
“Nothing breaks in here,” Hailey murmurs.
I swallow, then drag my fingertips along the floor where it meets the wall.
I’m expecting rubber. Cheap matting. Grit.
Anything.
Instead my nails scrape over cold, unforgiving texture. It’s hard as steel and grainy like sandpaper that’s been painted over. My stomach drops.
I press harder, searching for the seam. There should be a seam. There’s always a seam.
But nope.
Not in this tin can.
The floor is one continuous plate, and where it meets the wall the corners curve smoothly, rounded like a bathtub.
I sit back on my heels.
“Told you,” Hailey says.
Uh-uh. Kind of wish she didn’t.
Above us, a grid of metal bars has been welded between the roof’s support beams. The whole place is basically a cage, hidden under cheap fabric lining that’s been stapled in place. There’s no light inside except a slanted slice of daylight cutting through the small rear window.
My mind flashes back to that conversation I had with Nathaniel.
He told me nobody knows everything going into a kill, and that same truth has come back to bite me in the ass.
Why the hell did we never even wonder what was inside the car?
Like it never crossed our collective minds that one of us might actually end up trapped in it.
All we ever talked about, all we ever schemed for, was how to catch it. Get it to open. Leave with the girls alive and the murderers captured.
But fuck. It doesn’t even matter now, does it?
Cassian’s shot. I shot him. Nathaniel’s unconscious. Talon… is Talon tailing us? He was still in the car when everything went down. Also, wait. I slashed the van’s tire. Cassian said it can’t go too far before it breaks through the rim, or something like that.
I swallow hard and tell my heart to calm down. Chances are my guys are going to save us. I believe they will. In the meantime, I need to figure out what I can do on my end.
Besides the creepy ceiling, the bathtub walls, and that seamless floor, there are storage compartments in here.
They’re not the regular kind. They sit recessed into the side panels, and each one has a padlock welded through the latch.
Every hinge is on the inside of the compartment, not the outside.
You can’t unscrew what you can’t reach.
What about my baton? Do I still have it on me?
I pat down my thighs, then my hips, then the inside of my jacket, searching by instinct even though I already know what I’ll find. The place where the baton should have been is empty, a hollow gap that makes my stomach lurch harder than the road ever could.
That bastard took it.
I look at Hailey again.
“How long have you been in here?” I ask. Alex said Hailey was the newer one, but she didn’t give me much more than that.
“Two weeks,” she says. “Maybe three.”
My chest tightens. “You don’t know?”
“They drug us a lot,” she replies. “It… it messes with your head.”
Oh, god.
I’ve watched documentaries about psychos like these, back when my life was still ordinary enough for true crime to feel like entertainment.
They always trot out that line about how to become a monster you have to be hurt first, and I hate it from the bottom of my soul right now.
I don’t want to spare a single thought of sympathy for the man who slammed my head into his car like he was trying to crack a walnut.
And the fact that he’s doing this with his wife, like some shared hobby they’ve turned into a marriage project, makes my skin crawl.
What kind of delusion is that?
Still, under all the disgust and fury, fear slips in anyway, thin as smoke and just as hard to grab. Feeling powerless is practically a theme in my life, and here it is again, heavier than ever, hanging over me like a ceiling that’s about to come down.
“They won’t drug you again,” I say, forcing the words out. “My men will track this son of a bitch down wherever he’s taking us. They’ll save us.”
Hailey stares at me like I’ve just handed her a bedtime story.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
I hesitate, because the truth is I’m not sure about anything.
“I’ve got hope,” I say instead.
It doesn’t land the same. It’s not enough. Her throat bobs as she swallows, and she nods anyway, solemn and small.