I felt as if Donovan had shoved me backwards into an iced bath. I was stunned.
‘There’s somebody with Sam?’
‘There are five people with Sam, last I heard.’ He patted the coat pocket I’d seen him put his phone in earlier. ‘It pays to stay updated.’
‘They’re in touch with you?’
‘Well now, it wouldn’t be much of a threat if they weren’t, would it?’
A threat.
To Sam.
‘Who are they? What will they do?’
‘Trust me, that really shouldn’t be your focus right now.’
‘Does Sam know?’
‘That’s hard for me to say. They’re sharing their phobias with him. What do you think? It’s their first session. Will he be able to tell one of them is faking?’
I probed my lip with my tongue, the bloodied cut stinging like a tiny voltage.
Cortisol flushed through me.
I had a sudden urge to leap up at him, shove him out of the way, try to get out and contact Sam, but at the same time I knew I had to concentrate.
If it was a lie, it was a horribly plausible one. And if he wasn’t lying . . .
‘Are they going to hurt Sam?’
‘He’s not in any more danger than you are right now.’
Not a good answer.
And not a reassuring one, either.
I glanced at the cupboard door again, appalled that Bethany was behind it, crushed by what he’d done.
Then I flashed on an image of Sam in a room with five total strangers. He’d have no reason to suspect that one of them was there under false pretences or that they could be a danger to him.
And Donovan wasn’t wrong. I knew that Sam ran an open group. That was the whole point of it. Anybody could walk in and participate.
Sam had shared some concerning stories with me in the past. I knew he sometimes interacted with people who were deeply troubled, not just in his support groups, but for a lot of his private research projects, too. He liked to pass it off as academically interesting, telling me he got jazzed by interacting with people with unusual hang-ups or personality disorders, striving to understand them, but I got that really he didn’t want me to worry.
I also knew that he was driven to help people and try to solve their problems, especially if their problems were complex and deep-rooted.
Like mine.
I loved that about him but, right now, it made him vulnerable. Because Sam wouldn’t be anticipating any kind of threat and, if a threat came, he wouldn’t be skilled at defending himself.
He was tall and gangly, six foot one. Lean, not muscular. Healthy, but not fit. He didn’t go to the gym or lift weights. He’d never been in a fight in his life as far as I knew.
He was bookish. Caring. Decent.
He’d been so incredibly patient with me. So understanding. I’d relied on him so much.
And now, just the thought of him being taken from me . . .
I felt my heart rate accelerate. My throat constrict.
‘I want to talk to Sam. I have to know he’s OK.’
‘That’s what I’m counting on.’
‘You can’t hurt him.’
‘Then don’t make me.’
I felt light-headed. My mouth tasted bitter.
But even as my worries massed in my chest, the thought occurred to me that perhaps the danger to Sam wasn’t as immediate as Donovan was making out. I doubted whoever was watching Sam would risk threatening him while four other strangers were in a room with him, would they?
I stared at Sam’s keys in my hand, trying to understand the implications of what Donovan was telling me and not telling me.
I was having difficulty with it. There was nothing about my life, or Sam’s life, that should have drawn a man like Donovan into our orbit. We weren’t the kind of people something like this happened to.
Or are you?
Bad things have happened to you before.
My gaze traced the scar on the inside of my arm until it stopped at the puncture wound close to my elbow.
I couldn’t quite fathom what it meant.
Donovan had told me he hadn’t drugged me. I had no reason to trust him, but it must have been twenty minutes now since the needle had gone in and I remained conscious and increasingly lucid.
The back of my skull was still tender where I’d banged it. My head hurt with a slow, dull ache. But my vision and my balance were normal again and my nausea had mostly faded.
And the other physical sensations I’d experienced – my shortness of breath, accelerated heart rate, flushes of heat and perspiration – could all be explained by the surplus of adrenaline, panic and fear I’d been subjected to.
But still.
That puncture mark.
I raised the crook of my arm closer to my face, probing my skin. It didn’t hurt very much. There was a slight purplish bruising radiating outwards. A reddish halo around the tiny dot of blood in the middle.
Wait . . .
A dangling sensation – as if I was suspended from a thread that was about to snap.
‘My toothbrush,’ I heard myself say.
‘Excuse me?’
I closed my eyes for a second, concentrating. ‘I could tell something was wrong when I went into the en suite looking for Bethany. It was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but that’s what it was. My toothbrush was missing.’ I opened my eyes and looked at him. ‘Why did you take my toothbrush?’
Judders through my chest, radiating outwards, a sudden flush of pins and needles that augured something worse was to come.
And then another thought, cascading onwards.
Logical, but bewildering.
It made a kind of sense, but not the kind of sense I wanted to confront.
‘You didn’t inject me.’
‘I already told you that.’
‘But I felt the needle. I felt it sink in.’
This time he said nothing, and I knew I was right.
‘Because you weren’t injecting me,’ I said. ‘You were extracting something. You took my blood.’