Page 87 of Beautiful Prey

Taking my tied hands, he turned them, palm up. He used the tweezers to pick out the bits of glass still stuck in my skin. The pain was worse than I expected, and I tried to move my hands away, but he held them tight.

Why was he doing this? I wanted to ask but all I could do was yelp in pain as he pulled glass from my hands. I figured he would have kept the shards in, letting the pain worsen, let them sink into the flesh so they were buried too deep, all the way to bone.

But he took out every single bit he could find, making sure not to mar the skin further. Once he was finished, he turned on the sink and waited for the water to turn clear before taking a cloth from the bag and wetting it. He cleaned the blood, washing thoroughly before placing the antiseptic.

When he was done with my hands, he moved to my feet. He moved me to sit on the toilet seat and put my feet on his thigh.

His eyes were focused on his task as if he was merely working some menial job. I wanted to reach out toward him and slap him, making him look at me. How was he able to ignore me? As if I were no one?

Once he finished cleaning my feet, he gripped my jaw so I couldn’t pull away and cleaned the blood from my chin. When he was done, he stood. As he went to brush past me, I reached out and grabbed the side of his pants.

He stopped and I tried to pull him in, but he wouldn’t budge. He took hold of my hands and unlatched them from his side. He wouldn’t look at me, he wouldn’t acknowledge me. He picked me up instead and brought me back into the bedroom, dropping me on the bed.

He took all the supplies and started for the door. Quickly, I brought my hands up and ripped the cloth from my mouth.

“Emery, stop!”

He must have heard the pain in my voice. He must have noticed it because he paused just at the edge of the doorway.

But it was short-lived. Before I could say more, he was gone, shutting and barring the door, locking me in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The night had been long and now morning finally came, light seeping inside from the hairline crack of the narrow, boarded up window, just above the bed. I could hear the birds outside beginning to sing. It was the only sound left now. The house was silent.

Since the time Emery had barred my door, I sat listening. I could hear his footfalls throughout the house, going up and coming down the stairs many times. I heard thuds and bangs of things being moved around. Then I heard the vibration of a drill from above in the garage and every so often the sounds of hammering. The closest neighbor on either side was beyond a set of woods which surrounded the house. And at the back was the river. Still, whatever he was working on, he did it at night.

I heard a door shut upstairs and didn’t hear him again for several minutes. I guessed he had gone outside.

The room was bare of most things. I hopped into the bathroom and nudged the cabinet door below the sink open, finding nothing but pipe cleaner. There were a couple of towels and a few rolls of toilet paper. I went back into the bedroom and went through the drawers. Nothing.

Even if I couldn’t find something to cut the binds, I made use of what was around me. The corner of the drawer was pointed if not exactly sharp. I tried sawing against that first. With no luck, I looked around and then lowered myself onto the ground at the foot of the bed. Underneath it was empty. I looked for sharp edges everywhere. I sawed against the metal frame, then I tried the drawer again. It was a slow process, but the thread was beginning to fray. At one point, I even started to use my teeth, gnawing and biting at the rope, spitting pieces of thread out. My hands loosened a little, but it still wasn’t enough.

Eventually a door slammed shut upstairs, making me freeze. Then, the sound of drill again.

When I took a break from my binds, I sat on the bed to listen and let my mind wander. I imagined he was shutting us in, turning the house into a tight little box where no one could get to us. Or it was just me he wanted to shut in. Fortifying the cage he had built.

When he eventually moved upstairs and it was quiet again, I returned to trying to saw at the ropes.

Soon, exhaustion took me. I still didn’t close my eyes, but I laid myself in a corner, far from the door. From that point, I didn’t think much. My mind mostly ran through everything that had happened up till now, what I could have done differently, how stupid I felt for returning to Lena’s and not just continuing to drive on, drive out of the state till morning. But then I came to realize he had to have been following me from the moment I had left Whiteleaf. He wouldn’t have stopped no matter how long I ran.

Every move was staged—taking me north, letting himself be seen at the gas station, driving up the main highway, throwing the phone out the window. He wanted to throw Liam and the others off course. It might take the police days, if not weeks, torealize it was a dead trail before they started to even consider he would bring me to the one place no one would expect.

The morning was quiet which meant he was done until nightfall. But he was still somewhere. Somewhere close. I didn’t understand what he was waiting for or why he was putting in all this effort. I didn’t like where my mind wandered in trying to find the answer. I’d seen and read my share of awful crimes. Of women taken and the horrifying things the men did to them. For some reason my mind lingered on the toy box killer. Jamie had once done a paper on him. A man who tortured his victims in a trailer he had built into a soundproof box, filled with his fucked-up torture devices—his toys. I didn’t want to believe Emery would do such a thing, but I also knew he was capable of many things I didn’t think he’d ever do. He’d shown me that last night. Hell, he’d shown me that six years ago. I just had been too blind, too desperate to pay attention.

Somehow, as I slipped deeper into the nightmares my mind conjured up, I must have dozed off because I jumped, nearly hitting my head against the wall, when I heard the door to my room open.

Emery walked in, wearing his red skull mask again. In his hand was a large duffel bag. One of mine. He stared at me as I sat in the corner of the room, then he dropped the bag by the dresser. He stalked toward me, and I cowered against the wall.

He picked me up and put me on the bed again. Now that I didn’t have the cloth in my mouth, I was determined to get him to listen to me, but I knew I had to be very cautious so he didn’t shut me up again. The last thing I wanted was to be hogtied again and to have something shoved in my mouth before duct tape got slapped across my face.

He took out a hunter’s knife that had once been my brother’s.

I tensed as he knelt before me, gripped my ankles, then slowly began to cut the binds. I hardly felt any relief despite thefact. I let him free my feet and move on to my wrists before I opened my mouth.

“Are you going to kill me?”

He didn’t respond but I noticed him slow for a moment before continuing to cut the rope.

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