Page 192 of Deliverance

“My girlfriend has been kidnapped,” I say, approaching the uniformed receptionist, an older-looking woman with silver streaks in her hair.

She gives me a stare, one of her eyebrows arching up.

The words just spill out of me, angry, desperate, and pleading. I tell her everything I learned from the PI while she’s scribbling something on the top page of her yellow notebook, then after I’m done, she asks me to take a seat.

“I don’t have time to sit around and wait for your paperwork to clear.” My voice shakes.

“You need to calm down,” the woman urges. “I’ll have one of our officers reach out to the Los Angeles Police Department in a minute.”

My heartbeats slow in my chest, becoming a crawl instead of a sprint. “Are you serious?” I step back, away from the receptionist, and scan the unremarkable gray walls of the station. “Is anyone going to do anything at all?”

With that, I dash outside and back to my Jeep, everything in me boiling over. A collection of voices follow me through the doors, but I don’t care to stop or look behind me.

I just drive.

I don’t know where.

I follow the road blindly.

Until it takes me outside the city limits. Only then do I steer toward the edge of the street and park. If the police don't want to search for her, I’ll do it myself.

I have the list of the properties. That’s a start.

30 Drew

There’sblood in my mouth, its coppery taste coating my tongue and throat.

I don’t know where exactly I am, but I know it’s far from home, because I can see snowflakes falling outside through the small opening between the heavy curtains covering the only window in the room.

My hands are still bound with a zip tie. Rhys went to the trouble of securing me to the headboard of the bed, and I’m sitting with both wrists awkwardly suspended over my shoulder and my knees pulled up to my chest with my long skirt pooling around me.

My vision is blurred and my jaw hurts. Truth is, the blow to my face was partly my fault. In a fit of rage, I tried to tackle Rhys when he attempted to help me out of the trunk during the car switch. The fight ended up with me getting backhanded, landing on my ass, hitting my head, and seeing stars for the remainder of the trip. To my surprise, when we arrived at a cabin somewhere in the woods, he tried to give me Tylenol.

I told him to fuck off.

That proved to be a bad tactic. It only aggravated him. He slapped me again and now my whole face is throbbing, the area around my left eye tender and swollen.

Zander will be furious.

That thought snaps something awake in me, but it’s not enough to make my brain work full-time just yet. I can almost feel the weight of the toxin in my system, spreading through my blood vessels, weighing my limbs down, slowing my reactions and dulling my senses.

Part of me understands what’s going on, but part of me is still in shock, not quite believing that this is actually happening, that this is reality, that I’ve been ripped away from my life of comfort and dragged into the middle of nowhere by my ex-husband.

But for what purpose?

The question stirs through me, heavy and terrifying.

Soft clinking comes from another room. I can hear his footsteps moving around the house, clipping against the wooden floorboards. Eventually, the door slams and the silence that swells in the cabin becomes oppressive.

Quiet Rhys is always the worst. It means he’s planning something.

Stunned by the realization, I jerk my wrists to test how well the headboard is attached to the bed, but the monstrous thing doesn’t budge. Instead, the plastic tie cuts even deeper into my skin, rubbing it raw.

Two very similar pink lines mark my ankles as well, but they don’t sting anymore. The burn started to fade away after Rhys cut them off with a pair of scissors.

Scissors!

Narrowing my eyes to bring my surroundings into focus, I study the space. It’s small. Aside from the bed that looks to be queen size, there's a nightstand, a dresser, and a door next to it that probably leads to the bathroom. A few faded paintings are hung on the wooden walls and the air smells of pine.

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