Chapter 17
Iwake up with my hands zip-tied and my wrists bound to my ankles, folded into one painfully cramped position. Hailey and Lila are both slumped nearby, either asleep or unconscious again, and the van is standing still.
It’s even darker than before. Dead of night, I’m guessing. And I feel just as dead.
“Hailey,” I whisper, as quietly as I can. “Lila.”
Nothing. Neither of them so much as twitches.
I let my head drop and force myself to think through the haze.
This is the worst possible scenario. I can’t believe it got this bad.
Why the hell did I take those goddamn pills?
Then again, it’s not like I really had a choice.
Somebody should change the motto of my life already, because at this rate I’m going to be an eternal prisoner.
“Deep breath in, Skye,” I tell myself out loud. “It’s all good.”
I don’t believe it, not for a second. My heart is packed with panic so tight it’s almost dizzying, leaving no room for logic to settle.
And maybe that’s exactly why, when something shifts on the opposite side of me, I let out the loudest shriek my lungs can manage and jerk so hard a sharp pain snaps through my neck.
“Jesus,” someone sighs. “Relax. You’d think I was a wraith with a scream like that.”
I clamp my mouth shut and suck in a shaky breath, cradling my head as the ache flares. My neck hurts like hell, but fear shoves the pain aside and orders me to look. I have to see who the hell is talking to me right now.
It isn’t the girls.
Fuck. The girls didn’t even react to my scream.
And when I realize who it is, a cold little part of me wishes I hadn’t looked at all.
“Rhea,” I mutter. “What the hell are you doing here?”
My nemesis, the girl in love with my man, the one who nudged me onto this neat little death trip, floats down like she has all the time in the world. She lands lightly, then settles against the far wall, crossing her arms and cocking a brow at me like I’m the one who doesn’t belong.
“Why,” she says, voice dry with amusement, “I thought you could use a friend. There aren’t many people around for you to chat with right now.”
“And whose fault is that?” I snap. Between the panic still crawling under my skin and the pain radiating through my body, she is the last thing I want to deal with.
“It’s not me who fucked up the plan.”
“Yeah, you just gave us a mission made for a fucking royal-caliber hitman.” I blow the hair off my face, but one particular, very annoying strand drops right back where it was before. I glare at her. “What do you want?”
She doesn’t answer. She just blinks at me, slow and unbothered. It lasts a second, maybe two, and then it hits me. She isn’t ignoring me. She’s waiting me out, giving me the space to look past my rage and actually think.
Rhea, the Grim Reaper, is here. She knows where I am. Which means she just became my one real, tangible chance to get the hell out.
“What do you want?” I ask again, and this time the words come without the venom.
They’re the same words, but they don’t mean the same thing. Before, I might as well have told her to fuck off. Now I’m asking what her terms are, because she has to have them. People like her don’t just appear out of the goodness of their free will, and I don’t trust her to start now.
“You really think that badly of me, don’t you?” she asks instead.
I mean… what am I supposed to say to that?
She’s not exactly a nun.
Before I can force out anything that isn’t a smart remark, she leans toward one of the girls and reaches for the zip-ties.
Her fingers pass straight through the plastic.
She tries again, like she’s testing the boundary, and gets the same result.
Then she shifts closer to me, and every instinct in my body tightens, ready to recoil.
I don’t trust her. A nasty part of me wonders if what I saw before was her good side, if she’d offered me a sliver of mercy while being an utter bitch only because she wanted to look good in Talon’s eyes.
Talon isn’t here now to watch her perform, and if she wants to unleash hell on me, nothing’s stopping her.
But she doesn’t.
She comes in close, calm as anything, and hooks a finger under the plastic at my wrist. The zip-tie shifts. It actually tugs.
“Huh,” she mutters. “Seems like you’re in luck. You being half-alive, half-dead means I can touch you. Your possessions seem to count, too.”
A second later, her scythe is in her hand as if it has always been there.
She sets the blade against my skin and my breath catches hard.
One wrong move, one slip of her wrist, and she could open my veins.
I would bleed out in here. Instead, she slices through the ties with a clean, precise motion.
The plastic drops away, leaving my wrists free.
“Much better,” she says.
I freeze for a beat out of pure stubbornness, the kind that insists I didn’t need her and refuses to hand her the satisfaction.
Then the pain in my neck spikes until it’s all I can think about, and I have to give in.
Slowly, I unfold, stretching my limbs inch by inch, letting my legs slide out flat on the floor.
“Oh, shit,” I mutter as I do it. “Everything hurts me.”
Rhea nods like she knows exactly what I mean. “Yeah. That bastard mastered the art of tying you up so you beg for death by the morning.”
She slides back down to the opposite end of the van. I rub at my neck for a couple of seconds, trying to chase the worst of it away, and then I still myself and just stare at her. She’s looking around the cramped space with an almost casual detachment before she finally meets my gaze.
“They kept it the same,” she murmurs. “The van. I knew they would, but I haven’t stepped foot inside since I died here.”
My throat tightens as the silence settles between us.
After a moment, I catch myself chewing my lip, fighting the anger coiling in my chest, and I make a decision I do not particularly like.
As much as I cannot stand her, I can understand this.
I know what it is like to be forced to stare at something traumatic while you are suspended between helplessness and fury.
I know what it feels like to step back into the center of it and have to battle it in real time.
The look in her eyes holds all of it at once, acceptance and pain, and that raw, scratchy discomfort that sits under the skin and never quite goes away. She tries to hide it behind indifference, but I see it anyway. I had the same expression when I stepped foot inside Mark and Jessica’s home.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I say, and I mean it.
Nobody deserves captivity. I have only been here a little while, but the dread in this place is too strong.
It clings to everything, like her despair soaked into the metal, like the despair of every girl who died here is still trapped in the air.
“Me too,” she says.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask. “To save them?” I point at the girls. “Do you know something, something I don’t? Some secret exit?”
Rhea sighs and looks around again. Then she points to the small space where the hatch was. The wall there looks nearly seamless again, and it terrifies me all over anew how meticulous these killers are, how far they will go to make sure they can play with human life however they want.
“There used to be a ringer there,” she says.
I frown. “A what?”
“Metal loop. Screwed into the frame.” She nods at the wall. “Tie-down point. Like this used to haul cargo before it started hauling girls.”
“Is it still there?” I’m already pushing myself up, moving toward the spot as she answers.
She gives a short, humorless laugh. “Not a chance. If it helped me once, they’ll have ripped it out the second I was gone.”
I stop so fast my pulse stutters, then I look back at her over my shoulder. “You escaped?” I echo.
“For a while.” Her gaze slides away. “Before they captured me again.”
My stomach rolls.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“Believe me, neither do I, most of the time.” Her mouth twitches as she shrugs. “Besides, it’s a pretty lame fucking story. If you want ammunition to dislike me, it’s a perfect candidate.”
I watch her, trying to decide whether she’s serious or baiting me.
“A lame story,” I repeat. “Lamer than me getting caught like this? I don’t think so.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she says. And then, annoyingly, she smiles. I feel the stupidest urge to smile back, which makes zero sense when I’m still fantasizing about killing her.
“Fuck it, fine,” she says after a moment, like she’s arguing with herself and losing. “What else do I have to lose? I might as well tell you.”
“I’m all ears,” I say. I don’t have anything better to do anyway.
“They caught me around a year before I met Talon. I was just a runaway from home. My parents sent me to nursing school, but after a while I had this big epiphany that all I ever do is what others tell me to, and I just ran. I told them I was going to travel for a bit before I decided my youth was over. These guys were supposed to give me a ride.”
A year before Talon. That’s weird. I sit down and let her continue.
“They kept me for around four months. Back then they were still new at this and were making a lot of mistakes. The ringer was one of them. The hatch was looser, and it sat half a millimeter proud because the hinge pins were cheap and the screws had been in and out too many times. When the van moved, it made this tiny tick-tick sound.”
I don’t say anything.
Rhea leans back against the wall.
“I found the ring by accident,” she says.
“My shoulder shifted when the van hit a pothole, and my hand dragged along the wall. I felt cold metal, just the edge of it under the panel seam. I pressed my knuckles into the corner until it flexed. The cover popped up just enough to get a fingertip under it. Eventually I could slide my hand into the gap.”