Page 60 of Iris' Lying Eyes

I seethed the entire way, holding the hysteria at bay by pretending I wasn’t in a car headed to John’s den of horrors. Instead, I played a game. With each vehicle we passed, I envisioned myself in that car, making up fantastical stories about where we were headed.

The green sedan with the middle-aged couple were my mom’s bunko friends, taking us to a tournament (I was a bunko phenom) on the other side of the state.

The blue van with a rack on the top was my one-way ride to the Pacific Coast Trail, where I planned to hike into the mountains and never leave.

When we pulled off the highway, I waved at a girl maybe five years old and closed my eyes. She was going on, and I was staying behind. Always behind.

Bypassing the house, John dragged me into the barn behind it and tied me to the slats inside one of the stalls, where I stayed for two damn days. When he finally untied me, my hands and feet burned from disuse, and I walked like a newborn foal just gaining her legs.

Ever the impatient dick, he pushed me along until we both stood outside the barn. A sea of corn waved in the distance, the stalks taller than my head.

This was before Hunter and his penchant for hunting, but I still hated those stalks.

Much like the cabin, bad things happened in the corn.

My limbs froze, and I stumbled under his grip as he forced me into the maze.

“Fucking move,” he grunted.

Nodding dumbly, I stared at my feet and willed them to go. Take off. And never stop moving, but although my body may have been urging me to flee, my mind was already trapped.

John didn’t use the holes like Hunter did, so they were fewer in number and mostly for my benefit. My skin itched from the brush of the leaves, and I refused to look up from the ground where my shoes sank into the soft dirt.

When we finally stopped, I looked back with a sinking sensation, no longer able to see the trail. Instead, I was trapped in a shroud of corn that pressed in on me from all sides.

John pushed me to my knees, and I bowed my head, sucking back the tears building in my eyes. But from this vantage point, I couldn’t miss the girl in the hole.

She was my age, maybe a little older, and she looked up with tear-stained cheeks and frightened eyes.

The thing was, she wasn’t pleading with John. Nope, her hazel eyes, the copper ring vibrant against the navy-blue hue, bored into mine with a desperation that hurt my soul.

John had no use for her and barely spared her a glance. This, more than anything, was like a punch to the gut. She was here because of me. This was my fault.

Blindly, I stared at her, flinching when John placed something cold against my shoulder.

“Here,” he said, and I looked up only to recoil from the gun brushing my skin.

“Stop,” he grunted, cuffing my head.

Immediately I stilled, but I knew without a doubt that whatever was about to happen next would change me. Irrevocably.

“Take it,” he said, and I whimpered, or maybe she did. I don’t know.

Clasping the cold metal in my trembling hand, I bowed my head. I couldn’t look at her because I was afraid I would see me.

We were both damned.

Apparently, my acquiescence was not what John wanted, and he grabbed my hair, pulling it back until I met his icy stare.

“Shoot her,” he said as though asking me to pass the salt.

The girl screamed, and the sound echoed in my eardrums. Slowly, I shook my head, and he raised a brow. “Shoot her now.

“I-I can’t,” I whispered, like a little bitch.

John glanced into the hole with a grimace, presumably annoyed by her hysteria.

I made a choking sound in my throat, and without looking at me, he pushed me over the hole. Unfortunately, this forced me to meet her panicked stare once more, and the pleas that were muted before became a crescendo of sound that surrounded me in high definition.

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