“Try not to move,” Sterling told me. “You’re going to need to conserve your energy, because when he gets back here, I’m going to distract him, and you’re going to run.”
“My hands are bound, and I’m tied to a post. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ll get him to untie you, to untie me. I’ll distract him.” There was a thread of quiet determination in her voice, but there was also desperation—a desperate need to believe that what she was saying could happen. “Once he’s distracted, you run,” she said fiercely.
I nodded, even though I knew he had a gun, knew I wouldn’t even make it out the front door. I lied to her, and she accepted the lie, even though she knew as well as I did that a distraction wasn’t going to be enough.
There was no enough.
There was nothing but him and us and the certainty that we were going to die in this damp, rotting cabin, screaming with no one but each other to hear.
Oh, God.
“He broke from Redding’s pattern.” Now Sterling was the one trying to distract me. “He’s broken away from him altogether.”
So maybe we wouldn’t die the way Emerson Cole had, the way the dozen women Daniel Redding had murdered before being caught had.
This isn’t Redding’s fantasy anymore. It’s yours. You enjoyed squeezing the life out of me. Did you enjoy hitting me with that gun? Are you going to beat us to death? I forced myself to keep breathing—quick, shallow breaths. Will you display our broken bodies in public, the way you laid Emerson out on the hood of her car? Will we be trophies, testaments to your control, your power?
“Cassie.”
Sterling’s voice brought me back.
“Is it sick if I wish I was normal?” I asked. “Not because I wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t trade my life for the lives that I’ve helped save—but because if I were normal, I wouldn’t be sitting here climbing into his head, seeing us the way he sees us, knowing how this is going to end.”
“It ends with you running,” Sterling reminded me. “You get away. You escape, because you’re a survivor. Because someone else thought you were worth saving.”
I closed my eyes. Now she was just telling me a story—a fairy tale, with a happily ever after.
“I knew a girl growing up who used to plot her escapes from all kinds of nasty situations. She was a living, breathing guide to surviving the most unlikely worst-case scenarios you could possibly think of.”
I let Sterling’s voice wash over me. I let her words banish all the things I didn’t want to think.
“‘You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest. Oxygen is running out. If you try to break the coffin, you’ll wake the cobra. What do you do?’”
I opened my good eye. “What do you do?”
“I don’t even remember, but she always had an answer. She always had a way out, and she was so darn cheerful about it all.” Sterling shook her head. “Sloane reminds me of her sometimes. When we grew up, she worked in the FBI laboratory. She always was better with facts than with people. Most second graders don’t appreciate a classmate who’s constantly putting their lives in theoretical peril.”
“But you did,” I said. Sterling nodded. “Her name was Scarlett, wasn’t it?” I asked. “She was Judd’s daughter. Your best friend. I’m not sure what she was to Briggs.”
Sterling stared at me for a few seconds. “You’re eerie,” she said. “You know that, right?”
I shrugged as well as I could under the circumstances.
“She was Briggs’s best friend, too. They met in college. I’d known her since kindergarten. She introduced us. We all joined the FBI together.”
“She died.” I said it so that Sterling didn’t have to, but she repeated the words anyway.
“She died.”
The sound of a door opening ended our conversation. Ancient hinges creaked in protest. I fought the urge to turn toward the door. It wouldn’t be worth the bolts of pain the movement would send through my face and neck.
You’re standing there. You’re looking at us.
Heavy footsteps told me he was coming close. Soon, the man who’d killed the professor and Emerson, Clark, and—in all likelihood—Christopher, was standing directly between Sterling and me.
He was holding a hunting rifle.
YOU
Guns and neat little bullet holes and the glory of being the one to pull the trigger.
They’re yours. This time, you’re doing it your way.
The little red-haired one who practically begged you to take her isn’t looking so good. She’ll be the first to fall. Her face is already a mottle of bruises. You did that. You. The FBI agent’s face is marred with obvious tear tracks. You rest the rifle to one side and reach out and drag your thumb over her face.
She jerks back, but she can’t fight you. Neither of them can.
“I’m going to untie you,” you say, just to watch the surprise flicker through their eyes. “You’re going to run. I’ll even give you a two-minute head start.”
Take them. Free them. Track them. Kill them.