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Cassandra sat frozen in one spot, breathing hard, staring at the inert form of the man who’d been about to kill her.
The seconds passed, each one tripping over in time with her racing heart. Had he been knocked unconscious by the fall? She was frightened to move or even barely breathe in case he got up again and released his full fury on her as punishment for kicking him like that.
But as she sat there, waiting, the seconds turned to minutes, and still he didn’t move. Cass stared at his back, trying to see if he was moving at all. Was his back subtly rising and falling with shallow breaths, or was he as utterly still as she thought he was?
A strange combination of terror and relief flooded through her. Unconscious, he wouldn’t be able to hurt her, but she was still chained to a tree with no way of getting free.
“Hey,” she tried, her voice a hiss. “Hey, you!” She didn’t even know his real name to be able to call it, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to wake him up anyway. If he was unconscious, she only had a limited amount of time where she might be able to get herself free, so she didn’t want him to wake up, did she?
But what if he’s dead? What if he’s dead, and you’re stuck here, chained to a tree in the middle of nowhere?
She shook the thought from her head. He couldn’t be dead, could he? People didn’t just die like that. She was still in the same sitting position, her back up against the tree. He hadn’t moved at all. Was this a trick? Some sick part of a game he was playing?
With her heart pounding and her mouth running dry, she stretched out her toes. Her calf and thigh muscles strained as she tried to reach him. The tips of her sneakers brushed his shoulder and she quickly snatched her feet back again. Something was on the ground, seeping out from under him. Red stained the tips of her white sneakers.
Oh God oh God oh God.
She remembered the knife he’d been carrying so lovingly. It must have been under his body when he fell, pointing upward.
This was a good thing, wasn’t it? If he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to hurt her.
She didn’t want to even hope this whole thing could be over, that she might have survived him, despite everything.
He had the key to the padlock in his jacket pocket. She’d seen him take it out and put it back in again several times. All she needed to do was get the key out of his pocket and she’d be able to unlock herself from this fucking tree and get the hell out of here. She would have to try to find some civilization and get to the police and report the murders of the seven women. It wouldn’t bring much comfort to their loved ones and families back home, especially those who were still holding out hope that the missing women were still alive somewhere. But at least it would bring them some closure, and they’d be able to take comfort knowing the sick son of a bitch who did this to them was dead.
Dead. There was a dead body in front of her. A real one. Someone who’d once been a living, breathing human being.
No, she needed to stop thinking of him like that. He hadn’t been a human being. Human beings had feelings and emotions and empathy. That fucking bastard had been a monster. He was responsible for the deaths of seven young women, and she would have been the eighth if she’d not acted.
But she was out here alone in the middle of nowhere, and she was surrounded by the dead. The dead man who had taken her. And the seven dead girls who were buried and decomposing underground.
Cass let out a scream of despair. She’d never felt more alone than she did in this moment, not even when she’d been younger, after everything had happened.
She needed to get her head together and get on with this. The sooner she got the key out of his jacket pocket, the sooner she’d be able to free herself. She knew it would be a risk trying to find someplace safe to go when she had no idea of her location and was surrounded by hundreds of miles of woodlands. But she didn’t have any choice in the matter. It wasn’t as though she could fly the plane out of here. She’d be likely to get herself killed. But maybe the plane had a radio so she could call for help. Or perhaps there would be supplies she’d be able to use, or at the very least it would mean some shelter. But hiding away in a plane wasn’t going to get her rescued. Besides, that was nothing more than a pipe dream for the moment. The first thing she had to do was get herself away from this fucking tree and the graveyard the Magician had created.
Cass focused on his body.
Her hands were chained to the tree, so she couldn’t reach out and try to grab his jacket. She had a few inches of give where the chain was loose enough to move up and down the trunk, but that was all.
Taking a deep breath, swallowing down her revulsion, she stretched her legs out toward him again. She needed to grab hold of a part of him with her feet and pull him closer. She still wasn’t quite sure how she was going to reach inside his pocket and take out a tiny silver key when her hands were chained halfway up a tree, but getting the body closer was the first step.
She jerked back, her pulse racing. Did he just move? Did she see it, or was she imagining things?
With her breath trapped in her chest, she stared at the man. Frozen, forgetting even to blink, she waited.
Nothing happened. She must have imagined it.
Realizing she had more dexterity without her shoes, she pushed off her sneakers with her heels. She wriggled down as low as she could go on the tree trunk, so the middle of her back was scraping against the ground. But the trunk grew wider the lower she got, and the chain jammed and wouldn’t go any lower. Could she reach now?
She let out a low groan, wishing there was some other way around this. She didn’t want to touch a dead body, even if she hated the person the body belonged to.
Her shoulders were wrenched behind her in this position, but it allowed her to wriggle a little farther down. Leaves and twigs caught the backs of her thighs, digging into the flesh of her bottom. She tried not to think about the insects that might be creeping and crawling beneath her, the possibility that they might have bred using the decomposing bodies of the murdered women.
“Come on, come on.”
Her feet scraped soft, buttery fabric. His suede jacket. She needed to curl her toes, to try to hook the material and pull it toward her. Biting down on her lower lip as she concentrated, Cass managed to grip the material, the edge of the jacket squeezed between her toes and the fleshy fronts of her soles. With her brow furrowed as she focused, she slowly bent her knees, trying to pull both the jacket and the body toward her.
The jacket slipped out of her grip, and her knees jerked back into her body.
“Fuck!”
Cass growled in annoyance, but she couldn’t give up after one shot. She couldn’t give up at all. She needed to get the key.
Sucking in a deep breath and exhaling slowly to focus herself, she tried again. Her arms were held above her head, the chain straining against her skin as she edged back down. Every millimeter she could get would give her a little extra leeway, allowing her to get a better hold.
She managed to catch the jacket between her toes again. Holding her breath and squeezing the material as tightly as possible, she carefully pulled.
The jacket slipped out of her grip once again, and Cass shrieked with frustration. It wasn’t getting hold of the jacket with her toes that was the problem. It was that the body was too heavy. Any amount of pulling using only her toes wasn’t going to shift it. If it was only the jacket she was trying to pull, there wouldn’t have been a problem, but not the literal dead weight of an entire adult male. She didn’t have enough strength in the grip of her toes to do that.
Her ankles were still chained together, though she had about twelve inches of give between them. Would it help to grab the jacket between both of her feet instead? It was certainly worth a try.
Her shoulder joints screamed with pain, so she pushed back on her heels for a moment, wedging herself higher up the tree trunk. The slack in the chain wasn’t much, but it was enough to allow her to lower her shoulders and roll out her neck. Her fingers had grown cold and numb, even though the weather was still warm, and she wiggled them around, clenching and unclenching her fists to get the blood flow back into them. The chains had cut hard into her skin, creating deep, red grooves, and she used one hand to rub away the pain on one wrist and then repeated the action with the other. It was a small amount of comfort, but she had to take what she could.
When she felt like she was loosened up again, she squirmed her way back down the trunk, ignoring the rough bark scraping her skin, and the sharp twigs and hard pieces of stone stabbing into the backs of her thighs and backside. Like a ballerina with pointy toes, she stretched out both feet, her thigh muscles straining. She was doing her best not to think about the fact this was a dead body she was trying to reach.
The key. Focus on the key.
That was the most important thing in all of this. Without the key, she couldn’t see how she was going to free herself. But with it, she could simply unlock the padlocks and set herself loose. What came after that, she wasn’t sure. But anything would be better than this.
He might have a cell phone in that bag, a little voice spoke up in her head. Or even in another pocket.
But you don’t know where you are.
She’d been unconscious for the majority of the flight. They could have been in the air for thirty minutes, or three hours—she had no way of knowing.
Can’t the police trace mobile phone numbers these days? All you need to do is call nine-one-one, and they’ll be able to track where you are.
Of course, none of that mattered if he didn’t even have a cell phone on him, and it mattered even less if she wasn’t able to get hold of the key and free herself from this goddamned tree.
Cass closed both sets of toes onto the edge of his jacket and closed her eyes briefly. Please, please, please. With her teeth gritted, she held down as tightly as she could and pulled.
Once more, the body remained exactly where it was, not even shifting a matter of millimeters, and the jacket slipped out of her grasp.
She screamed at the futility of her situation, and beat her chained fists against the rough bark of the tree behind her. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
This wasn’t going to work.
The gravity of her situation suddenly sank in, and cold rushed through her.
Oh, God. She was out here in the middle of nowhere. No one knew where she was. She had no way of undoing the lock which held the chains to the tree.
Her breath left her lungs in little gasping pants, the world spinning. She scrambled to her feet, pulling the chain circling the tree up with her. How the fuck was she going to get out of this?
Panic rose inside her.
“Help! Someone, help me!”
The total isolation seemed to tunnel in on her, as though she could see herself from above, the one living human being in miles and miles of wilderness. The tears came now, streaming down her face, and she screamed and shrieked and wailed, bashing her hands against the tree trunk and stamping her feet, like a toddler having a meltdown.
“Help! Please, help me!”
The all-encompassing terror held her in its grip, minute after minute. She may have lost her mind for a while, unable to think past her desperation to be free and have someone help her.
But no one came.
She was all alone.