Page 107 of Happily Never After

He was already on her, his knee pressed heavily into her back. She writhed like an angry cat, summoning every ounce of strength. This wasn’t going to be how she died.

“Help,” she called out again. Her desperate screams echoed back at her. He was so heavy. He dragged her hands behind her back. Something cool and thin threaded her wrists. Oh, hell. He had zip-tied her. She kicked her legs, but her thumps to his back went unnoticed.

She shut her eyes and concentrated. Maybe her psychic mother could hear her somehow. She pictured Alice in her mind.

Help. Ranch. Help. Ranch.She repeated the words over and over again as the man tightened her bonds.Come on, Mom.

Suddenly, the man lifted her off the ground and tossed her over one shoulder. What he lacked in height, he certainly made up for in strength. He smelled like body odor and the cloying, sweet smell of a citrus energy drink that her ex Jason had been obsessed with for months.

She wiggled and wriggled with everything she had left, calling for help the whole way. Couldn’t Brad and Goldie hear her?

Apparently unfazed by her best impression of a fish out of water, the man only held her harder. He carried her across the parking lot and a short way down the road. A nondescript white car sat under the shade of a tree. At least a bird had had the good manners to take a dump on the trunk lid.

“Help!” she yelled one final time before he dropped her into the trunk. Her last view of the world was a greasy, annoyed-looking man who hadn’t even remembered to zip his fly.

God, it was hot in here. Panic was setting in. She was all but dead. What could she do?Think, Claire. Alice had gone over trunk abductions with her before. Sawyer had mentioned it in lessons too.

The car growled to life beneath her. Gravel crunched under the tires. This was it.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

To Do:

- Survive

It waspitch black in the trunk, and Claire’s hands were still bound behind her back. Country music wailed from the front seat. She rolled her eyes. There was no way Conway Twitty was going to be the background music of her untimely death.

Oh, a left turn. So far that made two rights and a left. The drive was smoother now. They had to be on a highway. She was running out of time. There was no knowing what was at the end of this road. ESA made people disappear. Would she be tortured? Raped? No one knew where she was. No one even knew to look for her. If she somehow managed to survive, Luke would undoubtedly kill her.

Okay, this was Los Angeles. There were cars and people everywhere. All she needed was to kick the taillights out and wave at the cars behind them. Abduction 101. The drivers callthe police, creepy dude gets pulled over, boom. Home in time for dinner. She could do this.

But there was a snag in her plan. Her hands were bound tightly behind her back. How was she supposed to yank up the corner of the carpet covering the taillights with no hands? She rolled onto her side and braced herself. The plastic bit into her wrists as she strained against the zip tie. It didn’t budge. She tried again, harder this time, but didn’t gain a centimeter. She was trapped.

She went limp even as her breath went ragged, coming in hitches.

Death had been in the back of her mind since the Barney incident. Prior to her first abduction, she had assumed that, like most people, she would live a long and plentiful life and die of old age surrounded by a crowd of loving grandchildren. If she died young, surely it would have been from doing something heroic, like saving dogs from a burning building or jumping in front of a bullet. She had never imagined that death would almost come in a dimly lit parking garage at the hands of a knife-wielding serial killer. Nothing could have prepared for her to face death again less than a year later.

Was this the end? Claire Hartley, dead at twenty-seven. Murdered by misogynists. She would never get married. Rosie and Winston would be orphans. She would never meet Nicole’s baby. She would never again hug Luke so tight that he almost threw up.

Against her will, a tear slid down her cheek.

“No.” She bit down hard on her bottom lip. She would not give this idiot the satisfaction of making her cry. “Focus, Claire,” she scolded herself. Dr. Goulding’s instructions came back to her. “Count to ten.”

She counted, breathing deeply to slow her rapid heartbeat. She should have just agreed to take the stupid anxietymedication. Now was not the time for a panic attack. Slowly, painfully, the trembling subsided. Her heart eased to a slightly more normal pace, and the all-encompassing feeling of doom inched away.

She was not helpless. If she could bring her hands to her front, she would have options—punch out the taillight, break into the back seat, punch this asshole in his stupid, greasy face. She had done more complicated poses in yoga class.

The car hit a bump, and her head smacked off the carpet. At least when Barney had kidnapped her, she had been unconscious for her trunk ride. The smell of stale fast food wafted in from the back seat. Her stomach clenched.

She planted her feet and thrust her hips toward the lid of the trunk. Shit. This was never going to work. There wasn’t enough room to maneuver.

The panic crept back in.Think, Claire. Think.There was always a solution. She wiggled and scooched until her elbow banged something metallic. She reached one hand out and felt the curved, metallic tip of a shovel. A dozen feelings hit her at the same time. Surely she could use this shovel to escape her bonds. But a shovel meant her captor meant to do some digging—probably six feet of digging, if she had to guess.

Her captor was now singing along, painfully out of tune. This idiot was not going to take her life. She flipped over and backed up until her bound hands reached the tip of the shovel. Plastic sawed against metal as she worked her wrists back and forth over and over again. Her arms burned. Her face ground against the scratchy carpet.

There was a light snap, and her wrists sprung apart. They smarted like they had been burned. Claire flipped and wriggled toward the tail light. Her head brushed against something—a latch! Of course. Most trunks these days had a latch to open the back seat. Her fingers curled into a tight fist, and she pulled. Thesmallest click was barely audible over the country music droning from the driver’s seat. The seat nearest her collapsed. The music grew louder, but her captor didn’t notice over the drone of the radio.

Now what? Did she hit him with the shovel and try to incapacitate him? If he lost control of the car, she could hurt someone else. A tractor trailer rolled by the left window. The car bumped smoothly down the road. They were definitely on a highway. She stuck her head an inch into the back seat.

---