Chapter 44
BAILEY
“What’s happening!” I shout as Reed whips forward and slams to the earth.
Zane still has the binoculars to his eyes, staring intently through the windshield.
“Hey!” I slap his shoulder, but he ignores me.
“Watch.”
I raise my binoculars. There’s nothing to see at first—just the meadow swaying in the breeze, the grass rippling.
Then I spot it: a shrub rising in the shape of a man.
What the hell? I blink and try to make sense of the image.
It’s someone wearing one of those camouflaged army suits, the kind made to look like leaves and grass.
The man’s face is concealed by a hood covered in foliage.
I can’t make out his features, but I can make out the gun in his hand—the long black rifle he used to shoot Reed in the back.
I sweep the binoculars back toward Reed’s still form. He’s lying prone with both arms splayed to his sides, his right leg cranked at an odd angle. Beside his head is a dark splatter of blood.
This shouldn’t be happening.
Reed is supposed to be arrested. He’s supposed to be paraded through the news as a callous, reprehensible con man who targets and exploits vulnerable women.
He’s supposed to be sentenced to decades in prison and live out the best years of his life in a cold gray box alone like his dad did before him.
This—whatever just happened—isn’t the plan. It’s something else entirely.
I watch as the man in the camo suit stalks through the grass and draws closer to Reed. It feels like everything is unfolding in slow motion as he climbs the hill and pulls out a pistol. One he raises and aims at Reed’s back.
Crack! Crack!
Reed jerks twice in response. The gun rises toward the back of his head, but I’m already leaping out of the car with a scream.
“STOP! DON’T!”
The man whips around, searching for my voice. From this far away, he looks terrifying, like a creature from the earth—something born without a face.
A radio squelches to my left as Zane speaks. “No more gunfire. It’ll draw attention. Just finish the job.”
The man holsters the gun and then pulls something from his waist and brings it to his lips. “Ten-four.”
I recognize the voice. Sean’s voice.
I turn toward Zane who’s watching me from the other side of the car. He waves at my open door. “Get in.”
“You weren’t supposed to kill him,” I say in a daze.
“Just get in.” His voice is sharper than normal. Cold. I hesitate. We should be hearing police sirens by now.
Bees buzz through my chest, and I take a step back.
He shakes his head. “Don’t.”
“Why not?” I manage.
“Two reasons, the first being this.” He raises a gun and sets it on the roof of the car. “And the second is your brother.”
My legs go weak. “What does Ben have to do with this?”
“Nothing at all. And I’m guessing you want to keep it that way.”
It’s all he has to say. I get in.
We drive.
Zane keeps his eyes on the road. His usual calm demeanor is gone, replaced by something harder, darker.
His fingers flex on the wheel every few seconds, his knuckles bleaching white.
The sun bleeds pink in front of us, draping the outside world in a canvas of pastel tones.
It’s beautiful—a scene that doesn’t match what just happened. The bees in my chest buzz harder.
They killed him.
They killed Reed.
It’s what I say, my lips parting before I can stop them. “You killed him.”
“Yes,” Zane replies.
“Why?”
“Because you wouldn’t.”
“We agreed there wouldn’t be any violence,” I say, trying to remain calm. “This isn’t what we planned.”
“Plan’s changed.”
My forehead crinkles. “I called the police, though. They’ll arrest Sean.”
“You called who I wanted you to call.”
My heart plummets. I’ve been using burners for nearly a year now.
It’s a practice Zane insisted on. No calls from personal phones ever.
We can’t risk being traced. And every phone I’ve used has been supplied by Zane.
The guy has a connection for everything.
Fake documents. Cars. Weapons. People. Which means the woman I spoke to over the phone doesn’t work for the Durango Police Department. She works for Zane.
Veins of ice bleed down my legs. “And the email?”
“Never sent,” he says.
I don’t know why he’s doing this. I’ve paid him handsomely, exactly as we’d agreed.
I never lied to him, never strung him along.
Sure, we’ve had a few disagreements along the way, made a few changes to our approach, but we’ve always been able to work things out, especially in regard to the critical things, and especially as they relate to the last few days.
We’d planned it all with precision, mapped out every single detail.
We made sure everything was perfect before initiating my abduction.
And it was—it went off without a hitch. So why would Zane betray me now?
After all this time? It doesn’t make sense.
But it does, I think. You just don’t see it yet.
We continue to drive, Zane winding down a series of county roads I don’t recognize, pushing further into the remote countryside.
He feels like a stranger right now. The way he’s sitting there, strangling the steering wheel, without saying a word is disturbing.
It makes me wonder if this is the persona Zane painted for Reed when he arrested him as Officer Gunn, wearing a hairpiece that looked so authentic, I would have never guessed the man was bald if meeting him for the first time.
Or did he treat Reed like he treated me when he threw me in the van? The blue-eyed menace with the colored contacts who oozed the threat of violence. His anger had been so authentic when he’d taken me, so physical, it had left me shaken for hours.
I’m sorry for that. It had to look real.
Is this real? Panic swims down my spine. Zane may be a chameleon with his emotions when he has to be, but this—the way he’s acting now, pulling a gun on me and threatening my brother, taking me somewhere in his car—feels different than anything that’s come from him before. It feels dangerous.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“To a place we can talk.”
“How about we talk here?”
He doesn’t reply, just continues to drive.
Finally, after what feels like an hour, we pull off the road and onto a long gravel driveway concealed by a dense wall of pine.
One of those blink-and-it’s-gone turnoffs most people never see.
Zane follows the road until a log cabin with a red tin roof comes into view through the trees.
There are no neighboring houses, no other cars. Just the two of us and this place.
“Now what?” I ask when he cuts the engine.
“Now,” he says, drawing his gun, “we go inside.”