Nate’s shouting something through the speaker, but I can’t make out his words. I’m frozen as Cormack reaches for me, one hand closing over my arm in a tight hold, the other pulling the cell from my weakened fingers.
I try to move, but my limbs aren’t cooperating. Try to fight, but I have no strength. Try to scream, but I have no voice.
There’s only darkness, spreading like a cancer through my mind, reducing my vision until the blurs of color fade to black.
The last thing I remember before Cormack tosses my phone into the ocean and everything slides out of focus is the sound of Nate’s voice, tinny and distant, barking one word through the speaker.
“Phoebe!”
Chapter Thirteen
Some people are optimists.
Some people are pessimists.
I’m a Gemini.
Phoebe West, in defense of her
occasionally mercurial nature.
When I come to, I’m in a windowless room I don’t recognize. There’s a musty, dank smell like mold or mildew, and I get the sense I’m underground though I don’t know for sure. Goosebumps cover my exposed arms and legs – between the fright in my veins and frigid air in my lungs, all my hairs are standing on end.
It’s so dark in the room there’s barely any difference when I peel open my eyes. Not regular darkness — the pervasive, personified kind of dark that almost seems alive; where shadows slither along the walls and any corner might be hiding monsters. The kind that keeps children awake at night, weeping into pillows with blankets clenched tight, calling out for someone to comfort them.
I’d take a monster under my bed over this nightmare any day of the week.
My head aches like someone’s taken a jackhammer to it — lingering effects of whatever drug he slipped me. I can feel the rope wrapped tight across my midsection, binding my wrists to the arms of the steel-backed chair, looped fast around my ankles. My tongue pushes uselessly at the duct tape covering my mouth.
I thrash for a few moments until my strength runs out.
Scream until my throat goes raw and I’m out of breath.
For all my trouble, nothing but muffled cries escape the thick tape. My wrists chafe until the skin breaks, but my binds never loosen.
No one hears me. Or, if they do, they don’t bother to come.
As the drug haze slowly clears, my mind swims with questions.
How did I get here? Did Cormack carry me from that bench to his car? Was he working alone? Why on earth would he take me? And above all, why the hell was I so fucking stubborn when Nate told me not to go out with him?
I don’t have answers to any except the last.
Pride.
Nate crashed back into my life out of nowhere, a rogue meteor disrupting my carefully-balanced orbit, and expected me to trust him like nothing had changed between us. Like no time had passed and I still thought he hung the moon.
Except I wasn’t six years old anymore, that day he’d stolen a screwdriver from the gardener’s shed and unscrewed my training wheels when Dad wasn’t home and Parker was inside playing some video game.
Trust me, he’d said, both hands on the handlebars of my sparkly pink bike. You can do this, little bird.
And I had. I’d trusted him, a ten-year-old kid, with every fiber of my being because I knew he’d never let me fall.
But he isn’t that boy anymore and I’ve long since stopped being the girl who puts blind faith in other people to protect her.
Trust isn’t transferrable. It doesn’t leap over years, cut through hurt and heartbreak. Once its foundations are shaken, the whole damn structure is destroyed. You have to demolish it with a wrecking ball and build it back up from ground level.
Nate expected me to ignore the rubble. To trust him without ever giving me a reason.
I can’t.
It hurt too goddamned much last time he disappeared to let him waltz back into my life and give orders like he’s earned the right. Call it pride, call it self-preservation, call it whatever you want — bottom line is, leaping into anything involving Nate before I look long and hard at the consequences… well, that felt like the biggest threat to my heart in history.
I just wish I’d been a bit more concerned with the looming threat to my life.
***