Marissa wrestled, seesawing her wrists back and forth against the coarse wood grain of the chair she was perched on. She’d been at it for hours now, but it didn’t matter. The rope wouldn’t loosen. It was tied too tight. And even if it wasn’t, even if she’d managed to spring a single hand free, it was too late. She couldn’t escape now if she wanted. Her captor had returned. She’d heard his car humming in the driveway a few minutes ago. It ran for several minutes before the engine chugged and all was quiet again. A door opened and closed, and every fiber of her being spasmed at the same time.
The house he’d brought her to was unusual. A two-story abandoned farmhouse, out of town by several miles. She’d never been here before. The room she was in had a concrete floor and a gut-wrenching stench, reeking of decades of stale animal skins. A bear hide was nailed to one wall, the fur of an elk nailed to another.
At least she couldn’t see them anymore.
Marissa had been sitting in the dark basement for so long she’d lost track of time. She didn’t even know if it was still the same day or not. Her stomach churned, desperate for even the tiniest morsel, and her mouth was parched, like she’d been sucking on pieces of cotton. Every sound fed into her paranoia, and she envisioned mice crawling at her feet, or worse.
Rats.
Tears gushed down her face as she tried to make sense of it all. Kyle had always been so kind before today. So caring. It was as if a screw had come loose in his brain, fueling an inner rage, and she was the intended target.
The basement door cracked open, and her stomach lurched. He was coming. A long, overhead light flickered on and off several times before a fluorescent glow prevailed. She closed her eyes, the blast of white almost blinding after a lengthy span of blackness.
Footsteps shuffled down the stairs, stopping three quarters of the way down. He sat on the edge of an unfinished wood stair, glanced down at her. His eyes looked different. Screwy. Deranged. He wasn’t himself. Not anymore.
She sat straight up, her eyes coming to rest on the .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson laying sideways across his right pants leg. It was like he wanted her to see it, wanted her to know it was there. But why? Was this some kind of joke? Part of an elaborate sex game? They’d experimented before, almost always at his insistence. She never minded. It was fun. Sexy. After all, how many girls her age could say they were the mistress of a man so much older than they were? Thinking about it now, her friends wouldn’t have believed her anyway. Kyle was one of the town cops, and he was getting his rocks off with an underage high school student.
“Why am I here?” she asked. “Why am I tied up? You haven’t said a word to me since you brought me to this hellhole.”
He rubbed one hand over the other. Kept staring.
“How long are you going to keep me here?” she continued. “Answer me!”
A slight laugh escaped his lips. “Well now ... that all depends on you, Marissa.”
“I don’t understand.”
He tipped his head to the side. “Don’t you?”
She fisted her hands. “Why are you doing this to me?! This isn’t funny.”
“Doin’ this to you? What about what you’ve done to me?”
“I haven’t done anything. And hey, if you think no one’s gonna come looking for me—you’re wrong. Just because you’re a cop doesn’t mean you won’t get caught. When they look up my phone records, they’ll see your number all over them.”
He dug into his pocket, waved a cheap, plastic flip phone into the air. “You mean this phone? This burner phone? They won’t find a thing.”
“Let me go, Kyle. I want to go home.”
He lifted a finger into the air. “Utt, utt, utt. I talk now. You listen. How much does she know about us? What have you told her?”
“What?”
“I want the truth, now,” he said. “No lies.”
“I just told you. No one knows a thing.”
“You were with her at the cemetery. You were talkin’ about me.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about!”
He stood, aimed the pistol in her direction, and fired. The bullet pierced a hole right below her calf muscle. Blood dripped down her leg, filling the inside of her tennis shoe. She squealed in pain. “You asshole! You friggin’ shot me!”
“Don’t play games with me, Marissa.”
She wasn’t playing anything.
“Kyle, you’re scaring me. Stop this. Let me go!”
“You women ... you’re all like a mess of weeds. Cut one down, and the next day you multiply. Quinn Montgomery knows about us. I’ve been followin’ her, trying to contain it, askin’ myself how she knows. The answer is simple. You told her. What I need to know is, what did you say?”
Her leg was throbbing, the pain mounting. Uttering a few simple words in response seemed near impossible. It wasn’t true. Quinn didn’t know anything. She couldn’t possibly.
“Answer me!” he demanded.
“I haven’t told anyone about us, Kyle, just like we agreed.”
“You’re. Still. Lying!”
Tears flowed. “Please. If you could just—”
He was laughing again. “You were nothin’ but an insignificant, temporary plaything. A teenage slut. A filler. Someone to pass the time. And now your time is over.”
“What we had between us, it meant something to me.”
He rolled his eyes. Her attempt to find a way to appease him wasn’t working.
“I saw you talkin’ to Quinn at the cemetery yesterday, watched the entire intimate conversation. You told her what was between us didn’t you?”
He blathered on, kept repeating “she knows,” saying he had to do something about it, like Quinn was an unmanageable dog he needed to put down.
The man was delusional. The one-hundred-percent-certifiable-mental-patient kind of crazy. And he had a new fixation—Quinn—a woman who hadn’t done a thing to deserve it.
She bit down, forced herself to talk through the pain. “We talked about work. And Evie. That’s all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Give me your phone. I’ll call her right now, put her on speaker, so you can hear it for yourself.”
“Just how stupid do you think I am?”
Kyle ran a hand down his face, considered Marissa’s statement, started pacing. He stopped, squatted in front of her. “Maybe you’re right, Marissa. Maybe Quinn doesn’t know anything. Still, I need to be sure.”
He pawed down the side of her face with his hand. The thought of him touching her now sickened her, but what choice did she have? She’d do anything to save her own life.
Anything.
“I’d never lie to you, Kyle. The time we spent together, I’ll cherish it. Always.”
She hoped her words would elicit even the faintest glimmer of compassion.
They didn’t.
“Even so, I have plans for her. For us. I can’t take a chance that she’ll find out about you.”
“I just thought ... I mean ... I’m turning seventeen soon, and I was hoping we could ...”
He pressed three fingers to his lips. “Oh, well, look at that. You really believed we had a future together. How sweet.”
“You can still release me. It’s not too late.”
“Sorry, darlin’, I just can’t risk it. I’m not goin’ to prison for you.”
“But what we did, it was consensual.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re an underage kid, and I’m a cop.”
She tried to keep her wits about her, remain calm by taking a series of short breaths. In. Out. In. Out. It seemed to help until he said, “You understand I have no choice. I have to kill you now.”
He raised the pistol to the center of her forehead and pulled back on the hammer. It clicked into the firing position. If she had a final plea to make, she needed to make it now. “Wait! Kyle, please. I’m pregnant.”
He stepped back so quickly, he lost his footing, tripping over a metal toolbox on the floor behind him. The pistol tumbled from his hand, clanking against the solid ground and firing a bullet that shot a hole through the only side window in the room. Kyle pounded a fist on the ground before retrieving the pistol, standing back up again. “Why should I believe you’re pregnant?”
“Go to the store, buy a test. I’ll pee on a stick if you want, prove I’m serious.”
Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. “It’s not mine. Can’t be. We used protection every time.”
“Not every time.”
He glanced to the side, thought about it, seeming to recall a few times he probably now regretted. “I thought you said you were on the pill.”
I ... uhh ... stopped taking the pill two months ago.”
“You what?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to go to college, and I thought once I got pregnant, you’d want to be together.”
“You ... betrayed me. You went behind my back.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The same man who several minutes before had called her insignificant, a temporary plaything, now acted as if he was the victim.
Fingers spread, he chanted the same sentence over and over again. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
She didn’t care what had happened. She cared about being alive.
“I can’t kill a baby,” he continued. “Naw, naw, naw. A baby? My baby? How was I supposed to know about the baby? I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I ...” His words trailed off, his eyelids diminishing into slits while he took a good, long look at her. “All of this, it’s your fault.”
“All of what?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? I killed Evie Richelle.”
No. It wasn’t true. He didn’t. He couldn’t have. “I ... I ... don’t understand.”
“About a week and a half ago she saw us.”
“What? Where?”
“It was the night I dropped you back off at work to get your car.”
“That’s not possible. The store was closed. No one was there.”
“Evie was. Sitting in her car. Watching the two of us, wonderin’ why you were in the front seat of my patrol car. Problem was, it was dark so I didn’t see her at first. We were kissing. My hands were all over you. And she saw. She saw it all. I knew she wouldn’t be able to turn a blind eye. She never does. It’s just not who she is. She would have ratted me out or tried to convince you to say I was the one being inappropriate. Say you were raped or somethin’.”
“So you—”
“Caught her by surprise. Did what needed to be done.”
He was confessing for a reason. This was the end. Her end. Baby or no, her fate had been decided. There would be no arguing with her parents about college. No future life for her in Cody. Not a single moment of joy knowing what it was like to be a mother for the first time. She’d never see her baby. Not in this life. “I’ll do anything you want, Kyle. I’ll make something up, tell my parents I got pregnant from a one-night stand with a boy I didn’t know. I’ll fix it. You’ll see.”
“You teens. You’re all the same. Every last one of you. Think you can bat an eyelash, say the right words, twist your lips into a perfect smile, and you’ll have us men beggin’ at your feet.”
Once again the pistol was raised to her forehead, and she heard the last words she’d ever hear. “Well guess what, darlin’? Ain’t gonna happen today, I’m afraid.”