88
I STAYED UNDER THE WATER. If I surfaced, he would just shoot me. The cold was a shock. Illuminated by the crooked lights above the stone shaft, the water was gray.
I kicked down, steadying myself against the stone wall, trying not to rise again. If I broke the water’s surface, he would kill me. He had to believe me dead.
My lungs felt like they would explode. I heard a distant scream, perhaps Mila. Or, I wished, Edward. Mila was not the screaming type and I was sure Edward was. A crazy, disjointed thought to keep my lungs from shredding. But no Mila crashed down to join us. Yasmin’s face turned to mine, an inch away, eyes half open in the water. I touched her throat. No pulse. A little wooden dove on her necklace floated between our faces.
The lights went out. In the distance I heard a heavy grinding—the stone door shutting. Total darkness. My lungs seared with the burn of spent oxygen. I eased to the surface, tried to breathe as quietly as I could. I failed. My gasps echoed against the stone.
No shot came. Edward was gone, and I was buried in a horrible, suffocating darkness.
I groped for the side of the stone shaft and explored it with my fingers. But it wasn’t smooth concrete; it had to be a more ancient well with hewn stone that might give me a chance to climb it.
I didn’t think I was badly hurt. I could feel furrows along my wrists, where the skin had parted as the bullets had hit Yasmin as I held her, and my already-wounded shoulder hurt very badly.
First try I made it up about five feet before I fell and slid back into the water’s embrace. I didn’t bother to rest. I clambered back up.
I am going to kill your baby. Just because I can.
I made it ten feet. At least I thought I had. The pitch dark could be playing a cruel trick on me. Then I ran out of handhold and flailed, found another grip, lost it. Stone hit my chin and opened the flesh. Blood was a seeping warmth down my front.
The cold water revived me. I started to climb again. Fell again. Climbed again, but now I started to recognize the stones by feel. I used the same path and, after a half hour of agony, I felt the smooth lip of the top of the shaft.
I pulled myself up and lay, spent, my ribs afire with pain, the rest of me shivering and cold. I groped for the wall. I found it and searched, found the stone door.
It was bolted, locked into place, and over the lock was a smooth metal plate. It was engaged on the other side. I had no way to pick it, and no light to see by. Yasmin had taken my flashlight when she searched me.
I am in my grave.
The thought nearly paralyzed me. Someone would come. But how long? How many days? Maybe never? Did anyone else know this complex even existed?
I am going to kill your baby. Just because I can. And the kids on the computer. They were part of Edward’s sick plot.
I slid to the edge of the shaft. I could hear running water. The river would have to surface at some point. But I couldn’t know what turns or twists the stream might take.
How many minutes can you hold your breath? How long?
“Long enough,” I said to the empty blackness. “Long enough.”
I put my legs back over the shaft. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I didn’t want to drop back down into the awful inky darkness. It had taken so long to climb up. I could just wait. Sit and wait and hope that someone found me.
I thought of Daniel.
He needs me.
It was a strange thing to be needed. I hadn’t known it in a long while. The need that Lucy had for me was false, a need curled in the grass like a coiled snake. My parents didn’t need me after Danny died. They hated me for living. Daniel, though, he needed me, and he didn’t even know it.
With that, I dropped into the black.