Your heart is thudding in your ears. Your breaths are coming faster. There’s a taste to the night air—almost metallic. You could run a marathon right now. You could dive off Niagara Falls.
The FBI agent picks up the girl. You pocket her gun. They’re yours. You’re taking them both. And that’s when you know.
You’re not going to hang them. You’re not going to brand them. You’re not going to cut them.
You have the One Who Got Away. You have his useless little son’s girl. This time, you think, we’re doing it my way.
You make the FBI agent put the girl in your trunk, climb in herself. You knock her out—and oh, it feels good. It feels right.
You slam the trunk. You climb into the car. You drive away.
The student has become the master.
Consciousness came slowly. The pain came all at once. The entire right side of my face was white-hot agony: throbbing, aching, needles jabbing down to the bone. My left eyelid fluttered, but my right eye was swollen shut. Bits and pieces of the world came into focus—rotted floorboards, heavy rope encircling my body, the post I was tied to.
“You’re awake.”
My good eye searched for the source of the voice and found Agent Sterling. There was blood crusted to her temple.
“Where are we?” I asked. My arms were bound behind my back. I twisted my neck, trying to catch a glimpse of them. The zip ties digging into my flesh looked uncomfortably tight, but I couldn’t feel anything beyond the blinding pain radiating out from my cheekbone.
“He hit you with his gun, knocked you out. How’s your head?”
The fact that she’d ignored my question did not go unnoticed. A moan escaped my lips, but I covered it as best I could. “How’s yours?”
Her dry lips parted into a tiny, broken smile. “I woke up in the trunk of his car,” she said after a few seconds. “He didn’t get as good a hit in on me. I pretended I was unconscious when he brought us in here. As best I can tell, we’re in an abandoned cabin of some type. The surrounding area is completely wooded.”
I wet my lips. “How long ago did he leave?”
“Not long.” Sterling’s hair hung in her face. She was bound the same way I was: hands behind her back, tied to a wooden post that stretched from ceiling to floor. “Long enough for me to know I can’t get out of these knots. Long enough for me to know that you won’t be able to, either. Why, Cassie?” Her voice broke, but she didn’t stop talking. “Why couldn’t you just do what I asked? Why did you make him bring you, too?”
The anger drained out of her voice from one sentence to the next until all that was left was a terrible, hollow hopelessness.
“Because,” I said, nodding toward my right foot and wincing when my head protested, “I’m wearing a GPS tracking anklet.”
Sterling’s head was bowed, but her eyes found their way to mine.
“The minute I left the property, Briggs got a text message,” I said. “It won’t take him long to realize that you’re missing, too. He’ll pull up the data from my tracker. He’ll find us. If I’d let you go alone…” I didn’t finish that sentence. “Briggs will find us.”
Sterling lifted her head to the ceiling. At first, I thought she was smiling, but then I realized she was crying, her mouth stretched tight enough to clamp down on any sounds trying to escape her mouth.
Those don’t look like tears of relief.
Sterling’s lips parted, and an odd, dry laugh escaped. “Oh, God. Cassie.”
How long had we been here? Why hadn’t Briggs already come bursting through that door?
“I never activated the tracker. I thought wearing it was deterrent enough.”
The tracker was supposed to go off. It was supposed to lead Briggs right to us.
It had never occurred to me that she might have lied to me. I’d known I was taking a risk, but I’d thought I was putting my life on the line to help save hers.
The tracker was supposed to go off. It was supposed to lead Briggs straight to us.
“You were right about Emerson’s killer.” Those were the only words my lips would make, all there was left to say. The killer would be back. No one was coming to save us.
“How so?”
I could tell by the look in Sterling’s eyes that she was keeping the conversation up for my benefit, not hers. Mentally, she was probably berating herself—for not finding the killer, for agreeing to live in our house and dealing us in on this case, for letting me in when I’d knocked on her door.
For not activating the tracker. For letting me believe that she had.
“You said that Emerson’s killer was between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight, above average intelligence, but not necessarily educated.” I paused. “Though if he stuffed us in his trunk, that seems to suggest that he doesn’t drive a truck or SUV.”
Sterling managed a wry grin. “Ten bucks says that wasn’t his car.”
My lips tilted slightly upward on one side, and I winced.