Page 175 of Dare To Fall

Me: Ari, what are you doing? You said you were coming straight home to talk.

She doesn’t reply immediately, but when her text finally comes through, it turns me cold.

Kitten: I’m sorry, your little kitten can’t come to the phone right now. She’s a little tied up.

A photograph is attached—of Arabella. Her eyes are closed. There’s duct tape across her mouth and a bruise forming on her cheek.

Kitten: Red or green, Eli? Are you ready to play?

Chapter 116

Arabella

Consciousness weaves in and out. Darkness meets my eyes when I open them before they close again. Memories stir. A car coming to pick me up. A man wearing a ball cap pulled low over his face.

Evan.

I’d tried to get out of the vehicle, but the doors had been locked. When I wouldn’t stop trying to break the window, he pulled over and climbed in the back with me. We fought, and he injected me with something. After that, everything is blank.

I try to lick my lips, but the duct tape over my mouth prevents it. My cheek is throbbing where he hit me. When I try to move, I discover my hands are bound behind my back, and my ankles are tied. My limbs are numb.

I open my eyes, my head still dazed from whatever drug he’d given me. Then everything slides into nothingness again.

A cool breeze caresses my cheek, rousing me to awareness a second time, and I shiver. I snap my eyes shut at the bright light, then squint through narrowed slits.

Evan is smiling down at me. “Don’t worry, Zoey. You’re safe now.”

His finger strokes my cheek, and I flinch away from his touch.

Why is he calling me Zoey?

He lifts me out of the trunk of the car, and a painful prickling sensation spreads through me. I can’t even struggle to escape with the way he has me tied up, and he carries me away from the car.

Where are we?

“I’m taking you home.” Evan breaks the silence. “We’ll never be parted again.”

My head lolls against his shoulder, and I search for any sign of something familiar as he walks. He stops abruptly, and lowers me to the ground, then rolls me onto my side. When he turns away, I try to loosen the ropes around my wrists, but none of my efforts to get free are successful. Eyes wide, I watch as he pushes aside a thick overgrown bush and pulls up a metal trap door.

Evan chuckles when he glances my way.

“Eli doesn’t know about this way in. The Academy is riddled with tunnels that run every inch of the campus. Old Churchill made sure he had plenty of escape routes out of his precious mansion. We’re about a mile from the school.”

We’re back at Churchill Bradley Academy. How is anyone going to find me here?

Panic tries to swallow me whole, and I close my eyes, breathing through my terror.

“The place is still on lockdown.” Evan continues, scooping me back up into his arms. “It’s just the two of us.”

I’m trapped with a psychopath. What is he going to do with me? Kill me as he did with Kellan and Zoey.

He carries me toward the hole in the ground, and it’s only then that I realize there are stone steps leading down into a tunnel. Ignoring my struggles, he descends into the dark.

My breathing is coming out in shallow pants. I need to focus on not hyperventilating, because losing myself to fear won’t help me get out of this.

Evan swings me up over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and closes the trap door above us with a heavy clunk. Thrown into darkness, I shudder as cold air licks my skin. Light bursts into life a second later, the beam of the large flashlight Evan is now holding cuts through the blackness.

I blink, trying to stem the tears threatening to fall as helplessness overtakes me. The only sounds are his footsteps echoing along the tunnel and my harsh breathing.

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