Page 136 of The Good Girl

“If you stop, I’ll shoot him. Head west toward the highway.”

I do as he asks, ignoring my dad, my tears, and my panic. I focus only on surviving.

The window opens a crack in the back. I look in the rearview mirror and see the figure wearing a hoodie covering their face, tossing my phone out the window. There goes my hope of G tracking it.

I swallow down the urge to puke and focus on the road. I’ll get my chance to make a run for it. I just have to bide my time. The pen knife burns a hole in my pocket, but I know if I try to use it now, I’ll be dead before I can even stop the car. I don’t allow myself to think about all the things that can go wrong. I’ve done enough research to know that being taken to a secondary location is the worst thing a kidnapper can do.

The rope scratches the skin of my neck, rubbing it raw, but I don’t dare take my hands off the wheel.

“Take a left here and keep the speed limit.”

I do as he asks, wondering when Havoc will know something is wrong. I told him what time the meeting was supposed to finish. It let out a little earlier than I thought, but by now, hewould assume I was on my way home. When I don’t make it back, he’ll call. And when he cannot reach me or Probe, he’ll come look for me.

When he knows something is wrong, he’ll have G dig and see what he can find. Surely, in this age of CCTV, there are a dozen cameras around that caught my kidnapper on camera. All G would need is one clear shot to identify him. Once he has that, he’ll dig until he knows everything down to his underwear size. They’ll find me, and Havoc will come for me guns blazing. That’s not a doubt in my mind. The question is, will he find me in time?

I turn when he tells me to, taking a side road that is far quieter than the one we just left. I swallow and keep going, taking in everything I can around me—things that can be used to trace back to this location, things I could tell the cops if I survive.

I think of my dad. I have no idea what he was doing there today. I didn’t even know he was still in town. Our relationship might be a mess right now, but the look in his eyes when he realized what was happening to me will haunt me forever.

How will he get over this when he barely survived the first time? Every nightmare he had is coming true all over again.

“Turn off here.”

I make the turn onto a bumpy dirt road. The panic threatens to claw at my insides when I realize we’re getting closer to our destination. The road is longer than I anticipated. It takes twenty minutes before a house comes into view. A lone structure that looks like a family farmhouse, not the place where I’ll likely end up dead.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

Make yourself more human to him, Nevaeh.

I need to make him see me as a person, not an object.

“Pull over here and get out. Try anything stupid, and I’ll kill you. Don’t make me do that, Nevaeh. That’s not what I want.”

I stop the car and swallow. “What do you want?” I whisper, scared of the answer.

I open the door and slip my hand into my pocket, fingering the knife as I flip it open and slip it into my sleeve. The sharp point presses to my wrist as I bend to keep the knife from slipping free.

I close the door as he climbs out and use the move to put me closer to him. With his gun, he can kill me wherever I am. With this knife, I need to be closer. I lock my legs to stop them from trembling.

He climbs out, gun pointed at me, and hoodie pulled low over his head. He closes his door and the slam makes me jump. Covering me with the gun, he uses his teeth to pull the glove from his free hand. I close my eyes for a moment when his hand reaches out almost reverently to trail over my cheek.

I open them when I realize his skin feels papery and rough. A glance at his hand shows aged skin covered in liver spots. The hoodie threw me. This man is much older than I thought.

“The missing piece, finally,” he murmurs, pleasure clear in his voice. He lets me go and lowers his hoodie.

He’s much taller than me. Too tall for me to reach anywhere important. I’m not sure the knife is big enough to do much damage to his chest, and his stomach is covered with the baggy hoodie.

My writer’s brain tells me to go for the femoral artery, and before I can second guess myself, I let the knife slip fully into my hand. I grasp it tightly, ready to make my move when I get a good look at his face.

His cold eyes belong to the homeless man from outside the diner.

The liver-spotted hands belong to the man from the book signing.

But it’s more than that. Now that I can see all of him, I realize I know him.

He smiles that creepy smile that always made me uncomfortable as a kid. “Mr. Markham?”

“Hello, little one.”

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