Page 45 of To Have and to Hold

“Speak,” he whispered, and it was worse than if he shouted it. Soft words behind a mask had the same threat that a monster under a childhood bed did.

“Sp-Spence?” I managed, bending forward over the phone but this time, afraid to touch it.

Pause. “Emme? Emme?”

His octaves arced over the artificial connection and exploded into the room. My chest burst with so much pulsing, clogging pain. I imagined this was what the beginnings of a heart attack felt like.

“Spence! You have to—”

The explosion this time was of a different sort—my head cracking into the wall behind me. The shock was so guttural my lips wobbled like that of a fish, silently sucking for air.

Words between the Skull and Spencewere exchanged, but I couldn’t hear over the clanging, the ringing of so many head injuries in such a small period of time. My hands pressed into my temples in the darkness in hopes of keeping me connected and conscious. I would never forgive myself for passing out now.

“Fine,” the Skull said, seemingly as annoyedas when he swatted me like a beetle. “What was your first date?”

I slumped against the wall, my upper half deciding to join the rest of me on the floor.

“I’m talking to you!”

My calves flopped against the nudge with his foot. “What was your and Spencer Rolfe’s first date?”

I pushed up from the ground, failed, and replied with my forehead pressed against the cool stone. “The…the library. When he first started tutoring me. I…I brought him a chestnut latte that he hated.”

An amused pause followed. “Very good,” the Skull said, and reiterated it to Spence. Spence.

I had to pick myself up, say something to let him know where I was…

Except, what could I tell him? I was in a basement somewhere, maybe out of state because I didn’t know how long it took to get here in the first place? That a man with a skull mask had me? That I…that I was left with nothing, not food, clothes, water?

But Spencewas here, if not physically.Within yelling distance. I had to give him something.

But I’d seen next to nothing of what the Skull actually looked like. His face was covered by a scarf initially. I thought he had blue eyes, light eyes, but so did half the country. He was tall. Broad. Basically, a man. I had no age to go on, no kind of demographic. My kidnapper had given me nothing.

I shook my head. Could not give up. Of all people, the Skull was calling Spence. There was a connection there, I just had to find it. Was it our past? Was the Skull someone I knew from years ago? Someone Spence knew?

So, I gave Spence all I had.

“Basement,” I said, heaving up on my palms, but it was spoken too tentatively, with such bare gusto that I reared up on my knees and used the wall as support as I struggled to my feet.

The Skull turned, his flashlight beam curving across on the floor.

“I’m in a locked basement in a house!” I cried with the rawness of an adrenaline-swelled throat. “Spence, he called you for a reason—”

The Skull said into the phone, his mask so still and white against the trembling shadows around the single cone of light, “Either you believe me or you don’t. I have better things to get to.”

The phone clattered to the floor once he clicked off with Spence. The light in the Skull’s right hand swung as he paced toward me.

“My dear,” he said, “you are in so much trouble.”

---