Page 11 of Black Hearts

4

Celeste

I triedto sleep while I was on the table, but it never came. Even though I felt nauseated and exhausted, the foreboding fear far outweighed that, and the adrenaline kept me wide awake all day.

The one positive about the lack of rest was that I had a lot of time to think. Not that it would do me any good. Somewhere around five or six, Dwyer would return, and I would begin to experience the sort of agony that made my TOS pain seem like a walk in the park.

I had realized, though, in all my thinking time, that there was no way Alex had been arrested. Dwyer wouldn’t have let any of his colleagues at the FBI or police know that he had the Heartbreaker’s identity (via West). He would’ve kept it a secret and organized for his Circle acquaintances or henchmen to go and detain him instead.

If he hadn’t done that, then people would be wondering where the hell I was after my ‘rescue’. They’d also be starting to wonder where West was by now, and they’d be asking Dwyer all about it. Also, Alex would’ve told everyone about the existence of the Circle if he was arrested, in a last ditch effort to eradicate them from the world, and Dwyer couldn’t have that, seeing as he was one of them.

A chilling thought suddenly shot down my spine. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Dwyer had arranged for Alex to be arrested last night when he returned home, but he’d simply paid off one of the cops or agents to shoot him dead on sight. He could never talk then. Never reveal the existence of the Circle. He would simply go down in history as ‘that serial killer who committed suicide by cop before he could ever tell anyone why he did it’.

As for the loose thread that was me… Dwyer might’ve never told them I was there, or that he ‘rescued’ me. It would explain why I couldn’t see any other police or FBI backup around when I left the house with them, and why the rescue effort seemed so casual (and of course, why he murdered Agent West—so there was no one else who ever knew I was there). He could’ve purposefully gotten to the house ahead of time under the guise of reconnaissance, retrieved me, and then given the order for the others to go ahead and swarm the place to arrest Alex. No one else would’ve been made aware of the fact that I was ever there. He might’ve even made the box of my photos and mementos in the house ‘disappear’ just so that no one would ever suspect that Alex knew me or had me there at any point.

I let out a defeated groan and squeezed my eyes shut, begging for sleep to finally come, just so I could rest my tortured mind. Every time I thought of a scenario in which Alex would be safe, I realized how unlikely it was. Deep down, I guess I already knew that the most probable scenario was that he was already dead. The thought made me sick with grief.

I’d been so wrong about him. I kept thinking he intended on keeping me locked away from the world forever, never allowed to go back to college, have a job, see any of my friends. Ever. But now I realized he did that to protect me. If I’d been out there in the world, the Circle would’ve caught up to me and killed me. Alex had to keep me away from everything for as long as it took to snuff out their existence, just to keep me safe.

All because he cared about me.

If and when he wiped out the Circle for good, I would’ve been allowed to have a relatively normal life. I would’ve finished my degree, gone back to work, seen all my friends again. Alex had even sacrificed himself by saying I could tell the police exactly where I’d been the whole time, knowing he’d be arrested for kidnapping me and keeping me in captivity, just to make me happy. As long as I was safe in the end, he didn’t care what happened to him. He felt that strongly for me.

I knew how deep my own feelings ran now, and I knew what I’d have done once he set me free. A little too late, but still… I knew. If somehow he was still alive, and he actually came to rescue me—not that I deserved it now—I would stay with him. I would never tell anyone what he did to me; how he abducted me and held me against my will. It would be our dark little secret forever and ever.

Maybe that was insane. Choosing to stay with a guy who put me through all that seemed completely crazy, but I didn’t care. He went about things in a fucked up way, sure, but he did it because he cared about me and wanted to know I was safe. He loved me in his own strange way, and it was a pure, selfless love which asked for nothing in return. I felt the same way, though. I loved him back.

From the start, our relationship had a dark thread woven through it, and it always would. But it was still love. I knew that now.

Too late.

My heart ached at the thought of all the things we’d never have now. All the things we’d never share.

The door creaked open a few minutes later, and my system went on high alert again as Dwyer stepped inside with a nasty smile. He was pushing another cart with some food, towels, rope, and far too much water for me to drink, held in an enormous plastic bottle.

He uncuffed my hands and yanked me into a sitting position. “Want some water?” he asked, nodding toward the bottle.

A strange, unsettling feeling drifted into my stomach at his words, as if I were missing something major, but I nodded anyway. “Yes,” I croaked. After eight hours with zero water, I was parched.

“How much? A lot, I assume.”

“Yes.” I nodded, suspicious of his sudden generosity.

He poured some into a cup, then handed it to me and watched me with beady eyes as I gulped it down. Then he grabbed some of the food—a bag of flavored rice crackers—and gave that to me as well. “Eat,” he commanded. “You need energy.”

“For what?” I asked, stupidly. I already knew what. He didn’t want me passing out during torture. He wanted me awake and alert, processing every second.

He smiled nastily. “For our next session, idiot. I still have a lot of questions for you, and you’re going to give me answers this time.” He eyed the stainless steel tray that had been sitting near me all day, twisting his lips as his gaze fell on the blowtorch. “I came to realize, unfortunately, that I can’t melt your eyes out as I so hoped to do. As much as birds and other animals like to pick them out of dead bodies, so that it would look quite normal at first to a coroner, I realized it might leave burn marks around the eye sockets. That can’t be explained by animal predation, and we do want to make it look like a suicide in the end. So.…” He waved his hand, as if this were the most normal conversation in the world. “I need to do more invisible things to you.”

“Invisible?” I said quietly after swallowing the last cracker. My shoulders slumped slightly with relief at the realization that he couldn’t burn me or cut me. All those things would show up on an autopsy.

He saw my relief and chuckled. “There’s still plenty of ways to torture someone without it showing up on the body. Your friend, for example. I’m going to find her soon, one way or another, and no one important will care if she goes missing. No weird family history there, nothing to dig into. Just another runaway girl who wound up murdered by gangsters. At least that’s what they’ll think. So I’ll be able to burn her and cut bits off her, and you’ll just have to sit and watch.”

Guilt twisted my stomach into knots again, and I almost vomited up the rice crackers and water. If he caught Samara and hurt her, it would all be my fault.

“What do you think her screams sound like?” he mused.

I reached out to try and slap him, but he caught my arm in time and pushed it back down before restraining me again with the metal cuffs. “Now, now. All you have to do is answer my questions, and Samara will have a far easier time once she’s here. But for now, you said you wanted a lot of water….”

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