Bits of bark hit her left eye. Dana ducked and scampered away on all fours. The second and third bullets hit somewhere above her. She had no idea where.
“Dana?”
She had only one conscious thought: Keep as much distance between her and the juicehead as possible. He had been the one who locked her in that damn box. He had been the one who made her take off her clothes. And he had been the one to make her wear the jumpsuit with only socks.
No shoes or sneakers.
So here she was, running through these woods to escape from this psycho—in her stocking feet.
Dana didn’t care.
Even before the big juicehead had locked her underground, Dana Phelps had realized that she had been had. At first, the worst part of it wasn’t the pain or the fear but the humiliation and self-loathing for falling for a few photographs and well-turned phrases.
God, how pathetic was she?
But as the conditions worsened, that stuff flew out the window. Her only goal became survival. She knew that there was no point in fighting with the man who called himself Titus. He would do what he had to in order to get the information. She may not have been as broken as she pretended—she’d hoped it would make them let their guard down—but the sad truth was, she had been pretty badly cracked.
Dana had no idea how many days she had spent in the box. There was no sunrise or sunset, no clocks, no light, no dark even.
Just stone-cold blackness.
“Come out, Dana. There’s no need for this. We’re going to let you go, remember?”
Yeah, right.
She knew they were going to kill her and maybe, from the looks of what Juicehead had been up to, even worse. Titus had made a good sales pitch when he first met with her. He tried to give her hope, which in the end was probably crueler than anything in that box. But she knew. He had shown his face. So had the computer geek and Juicehead and the two guards she had spotted.
She had wondered, lying in the dark all those days and hours, how they intended to kill her. She had heard the sound of a bullet once. Would that be how they’d do it? Or would they just decide to leave her in that box and stop throwing down the handfuls of rice?
Did it even matter?
Now that Dana was aboveground, now that she was finally in the great, beautiful, spectacular outdoors, she felt free. If she died, she would at least die on her own terms.
Dana kept running. Yes, she had cooperated with Titus. What good would it do not to? When she was forced to call to confirm the bank transfers, she hoped that Martin Bork would hear something in her voice or that she could try to slip him some kind of subtle message. But Titus kept one finger on the hang-up button, the other on the trigger of a gun.
And then of course, there was Titus’s big threat. . . .
Juicehead shouted, “You don’t want to do this, Dana.”
He was in the woods now. She ran faster, knowing she could battle through the exhaustion. She was gaining ground on him, moving deftly through the foliage, ducking branches and trees, when she stepped on something and heard a sharp crack.
Dana managed not to scream out loud.
Her body tumbled to the side, a tree preventing her fall. She stayed up on one leg, cupping her left foot in her hand. The stick had broken into two sharp pieces, one of them slicing through and then embedding itself in the bottom of her foot. She tried to ease it out, but the stick wouldn’t budge.
Juicehead was running toward her.
In a blind panic, Dana broke off what she could and left the splinter sticking out of the sole of her foot.
“There are three of us coming after you,” Juicehead shouted. “We will find you. But if we don’t, I still have your cell phone. I can text Brandon. I can tell him it’s from you and that the stretch limousine will take him to his mommy.”
She ducked down, closed her eyes, and tried not to listen.
This had been Titus’s big threat—that if she didn’t cooperate, they would go after Brandon.
“Your son will die in your box,” Juicehead shouted. “If he’s lucky.”
Dana shook her head, tears of fear and fury running down her cheeks. Part of her wanted to surrender. But no, don’t listen. Screw him and his threats. Her going back didn’t guarantee her son’s safety.
It only guaranteed that he’d be an orphan.
“Dana?”
He was gaining on her.
She hobbled back to standing. She winced when her foot hit the ground, but that couldn’t be helped. Dana had always been a runner, the kind who jogged every day without fail. She had run cross-country at University of Wisconsin, where she’d met Jason Phelps, the love of her life. He had teased her about her addiction to the runner’s high. “I’m addicted to not running,” Jason had told her on too many occasions. But that hadn’t stopped Jason from being proud of her. He traveled with her to every marathon. He waited by the finish line, his face lighting up as she crossed. Even when he was sick, even when he could barely get out of bed, Jason would insist that she still run, sitting at the finish line with a blanket on his thinning legs, waiting expectantly with his dying eyes for her to make the final turn.
She hadn’t run a marathon since Jason died. She knew that she never would again.
Dana had heard all the great lines about death, but here was the universal truth: Death sucks. Death sucks, mostly because it forces those who stay behind to survive. Death isn’t merciful enough to take you too. Instead, death constantly jams down your throat the awful lesson that life does indeed go on, no matter what.
She tried to run a little faster. Her muscles and lungs may have been willing, but her foot would not cooperate. She tried to put weight on it, tried to fight past the shooting pain, but every time her left foot hit the ground, it felt as though a dagger was being jammed through the sole of it.
He was getting closer.
The woods were spread out in front of her as far as the eye could see. She could keep running—would keep running—but suppose she didn’t find her way out? How long could she keep going with this splinter in her foot and a maniac chasing her down?
Not very.
Dana jumped to the side and rolled behind a rock. He wasn’t far away now. She could hear him pushing through the brush. She had no choice now. She couldn’t keep running.
She would have to stand her ground and fight.