“Shit.” I pushed the door shut, trying to close it back to how I found it, but something fell when it opened, getting wedged in the way. “C’mon.” I whispered, leaning down to pick up what fell and pulling it free.
When I stood up with it in my hand, my blood ran cold and my stomach dropped into my toes as I stared down at it.
A Ghostface mask.
Just like the one Dane wore.
With shaking hands, I opened the door wider and dropped the mask when I saw what was inside.
Clothes. Not just any clothes, though. A dark, hooded sweater and black jeans I recognized from the first night Dane chased me through the woods. That didn’t make any sense.
“No.” As I pushed the hooded sweater to the side, a wave of panic washed over me when my fingers grazed the leather cuffs that had once imprisoned me on the bench in the corn maze. “No.” I cried out silently, backing away from the cabinet like it would burn me if I touched anything else. The desk behind me, adorned with colorful LED lights, provided the perfect setting for the only photo Dane had ever sent me.
I was in that very office.
Lincoln’s office.
Dane’s office.
I bumped into the desk in my rush to get away from the closet, and suddenly all the screens jolted to life as I jumped and coveredmy mouth. My eyes flicked from screen to screen in disbelief as they revealed themselves to me.
I was on every screen.
Every. Single. One.
In some sort of way, I covered each screen. The inside of my guest house was on one, live streaming it. A still image from earlier today when I sat on the edge of my bed, fastening the choker around my neck, covered another.
My skin crawled when I looked from each screen to another, seeing myself on them. It was the same thing on all of them, like a shrine to me. I was the focus of everything.
I covered my mouth with my hand to stifle the scream that tried to rip from my lips as I realized what it all meant.
Dane was Lincoln Bryce.
Lincoln was my monster.
My stalker.
He lied. God, he lied about everything. I was so fucking stupid.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the images on the screens, trying to figure out how extensive his reach was into my life when one image I didn’t recognize caught my eye.
It was of me.
But not recently. I leaned forward, trying to see the background better and realized that I wasn’t standing like I thought I was, but laying down on a tan surface and my eyes were half open.
Every vein in my body froze to ice when I finally figured out what I was looking at.
It was of methatnight. That horrifying, painful night that I couldn’t remember, no matter how hard I tried. “God, please.” I grabbed the mouse and rolled the cursor over to that screen and died a little inside when a play button popped up in the corner.
It was the video.
The video that Tyson had alluded to enough to hold over my head for three years straight. Before I could think better of it, I clicked play and fell into the chair as the shaky cell phone video started playing. As it played, I dragged it from the edge monitor to the largest center one.
The background noise was so overwhelming that it was difficult to discern the actual number of people in the room, but when I figured it out, I wished I could forget already.
Four men loomed above me as I lay mostly unconscious on a bed in the center.
“Fucking lightweight,”Tyson’s sick voice called out above everyone else as he kneeled on the bed next to me.“She didn’t even finish her drink.”