CARLY LET herself into the house feeling like the biggest hypocrite who’d ever walked the earth. “What are you going to do with your pain, Bobby?” she asked when she set her purse down on the kitchen table. “Heck, Carly, what are you going to do with yours?”

She tugged the crockpot out of a bottom cabinet and plopped it on the marble countertop between the sink and stove. She just needed to let it go. Cassandra, the woman who’d so drastically altered her family’s life, couldn’t hurt her anymore. What she’d done was long ago, in the past. The past was not now. Now was today, and today her parents were coming home from another Frankie Jovingo Mission Trip, and she was going to get dinner ready for them even though it wasn’t even noon yet.

Carly swung the freezer door open to rummage for vegetables to toss into the pot. Corn, peas, carrots, beans. She found a package of frozen steak chunks and decided it would be good to add that, too.

She tore the packages open and dumped the contents into the pot. She could understand why Bobby was so upset to learn that Mystery Woman was his own mother, but if he was going to be a good Servant, he would have to let it go.

It wouldn’t be easy for him. But the important things in life never were.

“Face it,” a voice said behind her. “You want Cassandra dead.”

Carly’s body went rigid and her chest tightened like a giant had just enclosed her in its fist. Someone had broken into the house while she visited Bobby, and now he was in her kitchen standing right behind her.

She forced herself to face the intruder, hoping against hope he didn’t have a weapon.

Her heart skipped a beat when she laid eyes on the male figure standing in front of the fridge. He had auburn hair like hers. Plain clothing. A winning smile.

It was the same man who’d appeared at the top of the privacy fence and then behind the bench the day before. Carly was certain he hadn’t been in the kitchen when she first walked in.

“Who are you?” she croaked.

He went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Cassandra ruined you. Don’t you remember what it was like? You and Jackie, as happy as could be. The birthday girls. You both were at an age when you thought you’d live forever.”

Carly’s pulse pounded in her ears. This man couldn’t be real, yet here he was, standing before her as clearly as the rest of her surroundings.

“And then Cassandra came along. She wanted to kill her husband but dear, sweet Jackie got in the way of things. I suppose every war has collateral damage.”

Tears filled Carly’s eyes as his words conjured forth memories of that terrible day. The excitement. The laughter. Moments before it all ended.

“How do you really feel about Cassandra?” the man asked.

It was madness, hearing these words from a stranger’s mouth.

“Who are you?” she repeated, wishing he would make some reply instead of going on about Jackie and Cassandra.

The man tilted his head to the side. “Cassandra is free now. Doesn’t it make you angry knowing she’s alive while your sister rots in the ground feeding the worms, forever a child, while you’ve grown into a woman?”

Carly’s legs went weak beneath her. She reached for a red plastic ladle sitting in the dish strainer and brandished it in front of her, knowing she looked about as dangerous as a kitten. “Get out of here.”

“It won’t be that hard to find Cassandra, you know. Autumn Ridge isn’t that big of a city. You could track her down, wait until nightfall, slowly creep up to her door with a gun in hand, and pay her back in kind for what she did. And it’ll feel so good.”

Her purse sat on the table between her and the man. She considered lunging for it and digging out her phone, but the man might try to attack her before she was able to dial 911.

The image of Carly standing above Cassandra’s bleeding corpse filled her mind with such abruptness that she let out a startled “Oh!”

Cassandra lay sprawled on her back in a doorway, her spill of dark hair doing little to mask the new hole in the center of her forehead. You want this, Carly. Oh, yes, you do.

Carly blinked. She still stood in the kitchen between the sink and the table, only now the auburn-haired intruder had come around to her side and towered over her, his triumphant grin so wide she could see almost all of his gleaming white teeth. “If you kill her, you’ll be ridding the earth of a monster. What’s going to stop her from killing another child? You, Carly. Only you.”

Carly swung the ladle at his head. It passed through him as if he were made of air.

He winked.

Something snapped inside her. She swung again and again, and each time the ladle made no impact because nothing was there but the image of an auburn-haired man who was either a figment of Carly’s frazzled mind or a ghost.

The man darted past her, and by the time she turned, he was gone.

Then something fell over up in her bedroom on the second floor.

Carly ran, taking the stairs two at a time. She braked in her bedroom doorway, feeling the color bleed out of her face.

The framed photograph of her and Jackie on their tenth birthday that had sat on her dresser for years now lay in the middle of the floor, the glass cracked in a jagged line right down the middle, separating her from Jackie: a foreshadowing of the more permanent separation they would undergo three years later.

Well, it wasn’t exactly permanent. Carly would die someday too, either today or sixty years from now, and then she and Jackie would be together once again.

Then Jackie’s favorite stuffed bear, a red furry thing she’d named Valentino, flew off a shelf and landed next to the broken frame, a seam down its back unraveling and spewing stuffing all over the carpet and braided rug.

At the same instant the crucifix hanging over the bedroom window jumped from its nail and went smashing into the dresser mirror, shattering it into hundreds of glimmering shards, the weight of the ladle changed in Carly’s hand. She found herself holding a Taurus Model 605 snubnosed revolver—the same one her father kept locked in the gun cabinet in his study.

This can’t be happening. I don’t even know the combination to get into the cabinet.

Her hand slowly brought the nose of the revolver to her right temple.

It’s you or Cassandra. Cassandra or you.

Something warm rolled down Carly’s cheek as Cassandra’s dead face swam in her mind’s eye.

IN THE morning Jack headed westward into the mountains to the place where Troy—thanks to Vincent—had opened his newest enterprise. Jack didn’t officially work there, but he’d visited enough times that everyone there knew him.

Troy called it the Domus. Latin for “house,” it was technically a country club with highly select membership. Membership was granted by invitation only, and Troy had one of his most trusted employees (unfortunately not Jack) carefully screen each new member before granting them entry.

The Domus sat at the end of a two-mile-long gravel lane accessible only by a winding logging road that saw little traffic. Hidden among thousands of square acres of evergreen forest, the nearest human dwellings were easily five miles away. The building that became the Domus had been a spiritual retreat back in the seventies, long before the owners went bankrupt and foreclosed on the property. Troy had snatched it up when he got into the logging business, knowing that the building could someday be of use to him.

It had needed some obvious upgrades, and he’d completely remodeled some of the floors to better suit his needs. Jack suspected that some of the workers Troy hired had probably never been seen again once reconstruction was complete.

At least that’s what he’d have done if he were Troy. It paid to cover one’s tracks.

Jack’s car jolted as he turned into the lane, which was blocked by a plain white gate but no “No Trespassing” sign, as the latter often tempted people to do just the opposite. He put the car in park, climbed out, and walked up to a log post jutting from the ground beside the lane.

He pushed a brown button embedded near the top and eyed the tiny black pinprick where a camera had been hidden in the post.

A voice squawked out of an unseen speaker. “Password?”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Inkblot.” The password changed on a weekly basis. Farley, the man in charge of Domus security, said he chose the passwords by using a random word generator online.

Jack personally found the whole idea of passwords absurd.

Farley coughed a few times through the speaker. Then, “Name and purpose.”

“Jack Willard, and I work for Troy, which you very well know. It’s not like I haven’t been here several dozen times before.”

“Hey, man, I’m just following orders.”

The white gate swung open, and Jack got back in the car.

It was a long, bumpy ride back to the Domus. The lane finally opened out into a wide gravel lot that fronted the great log structure. The Domus boasted two upper floors, a basement, and a subbasement and could accommodate up to fifty guests at a time.

An in-ground swimming pool and tennis court were visible off to the left of the building. A middle-aged woman in a black swimsuit and giant sunglasses lounged in one of the chairs beside the pool while paging through a novel. Jack knew her as Carol, but it wasn’t necessarily her true name. Many members signed up under aliases. Only Troy and the employee who screened them knew their true identities.

Jack strode up to the massive wooden doors. Cool air washed over him as he entered the tile-floored lobby where the ceiling extended up to the second floor.

Giselle, the young receptionist, stood up behind the counter. Today she wore a skin-tight black top, a faux-pearl necklace, and blood red lipstick that stood out sharply against her pale skin and curly platinum blonde hair. “Jack!” she exclaimed with a blush. “We weren’t expecting you today.”

“I’m just full of surprises, aren’t I?”

Giselle let out a giggle as he approached the counter. Jack knew she’d had a crush on him from the moment she’d started working there. “So what can I do for you today? Looking for a little voyeurism or something dirtier?”

“I wanted to know if Vincent was busy right now. I’d like to talk to him.”

Giselle’s expression soured. “Good. Maybe you can talk some sense into him. I assume you heard what he did?”

“Troy said he wants to take a vacation.”

“Then you haven’t heard the latest. Vincent got out last night.”

Jack’s stomach flipped. “What?”

“He disappeared after the evening show, and his chip must be malfunctioning because they couldn’t track him. Farley and the others combed the woods, and at eleven o’clock they found Vincent blundering his way back to the building. Apparently he got scared and came back.”

Interesting. “Where is he now?”

“As far as I know, he’s waiting for the morning show to let out.” Her lip curled. “I hope you convince him not to do anything rash again. If he escapes, I’m out of a job.”

Unless Orin and Theo find another like him. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Jack strode toward the western corridor and descended the first flight of stairs he came to. As he traversed the carpeted lower hallway, he could hear the faint sound of excited voices coming from the room that was his destination.

He pushed open the door and slipped into the darkened theater-style room. Ten or so men and women occupied the descending tiers of seats. Jack recognized the Staffords, a gray-haired couple in their sixties who traveled the country in their free time; a brunette twentysomething named Ella who claimed to be working on a psychology degree; and a thirty-year-old maintenance man in overalls named Louis. The others were strangers to Jack, though one man appeared to be dressed like a banker and another woman wore a summer dress and too many bracelets.

All stared enraptured at the spectacle unfolding behind the six-inch-thick layer of Plexiglas positioned in the place of a movie screen.

Jack took a seat in the back row to watch.

Behind the Plexiglas lay a small room that was empty save for two individuals: a muscular man and a boy of perhaps ten. Blood flowed from the boy’s nose and over his lips and one of his eyes had swelled shut, but the man continued to pound him relentlessly in the face. The boy’s eyes were dead, and he took the beating without so much as lifting a hand to stop it.

One final swing and the boy crumpled to the floor.

There came a smattering of applause as curtains drew themselves shut over the Plexiglas. The exhilarated audience stood up, commenting to each other about the highlights of the display before filing out of the room.

Jack’s gaze lingered on the curtains. He’d never been able to understand the voyeurs even though he’d sat here among their number time after time. They wouldn’t dare lay a hand on a child themselves, yet they had no problem watching someone else beat one into unconsciousness. Jack attributed it to cowardice.

The voyeurs would probably deny it.

Jack followed them out and went to the next door down the hallway, where he punched in a code on a keypad. The door beeped and unlocked, and Jack let himself in.

Two assistants were laying the unconscious boy out on a table while Vincent—dressed in a plain white t-shirt and black skinny jeans—stood nearby, wringing his slender hands together. The eyeliner he’d put on that morning had run. Looked like sissy boy had been crying. Again.

The man who had knocked the boy out would have been taken to a different room so he could shower and put on clean clothes.

“All right,” Larry, one of the assistants, said. “He’s all yours.” Heavy bags hung under Larry’s eyes. Jack suspected he was one of the employees who’d stayed up late looking for Vincent.

Larry and the other assistant, Joe, stepped back while Vincent came up to the table and placed a hand over the boy’s black eye. When he removed it, the swelling and discoloration had vanished, and the trickle of blood coming from the boy’s nose drew to a stop. “It’s finished,” he whispered before shrinking back against the wall.

Larry proceeded to wipe the blood off the boy’s face. His eyes fluttered open, and Larry spoke to him in soothing tones: “It’s okay, buddy. You’re all back to normal so you can be ready for tomorrow’s show.”

The boy made no response.

Jack cleared his throat. “Vincent?”

Vincent jerked his head toward Jack, and his face paled. “Oh. I didn’t see you come in. What are you doing here?”

Jack noted that Larry and Joe made a point of not acknowledging Jack’s presence. “I wanted to talk to you,” Jack said, ignoring them in turn. “You do have time for that, right? Or are you going to spend the next few hours sobbing like a baby?”

Vincent glared at him. Then his expression softened. “If you want to talk, let’s go outside.”

“So you have a better chance of running away? That bimbo at the front desk told me what you did.”

“Jack, you don’t understand.”

“Then enlighten me.”

MINUTES LATER, Jack found himself sitting next to Vincent out by the swimming pool, Carol having gone inside. “So you wanted to run away,” Jack said.

Vincent put his head in his hands. “You don’t know what it’s like not being allowed to leave because you can go anywhere you want. It’s eating me up. I—I don’t think I’ll survive much longer if I stay.”

“Yet you came back.”

Vincent grimaced. “They made me do it. I can’t resist them.”

“Few could.”

“They whisper things to me. Awful things. And—” Despondency wrote itself across Vincent’s face, then he suddenly seemed calmer. “What is it you wanted to talk about?”

Jack took a moment to collect his thoughts. Upon waking that morning, he’d known he needed to come out here and do something but wasn’t sure what it was. At first he’d thought he wanted to clear up his foul mood from last night when the Roland dweeb showed up at the apartment and pulled a knife on him, but once he’d reached the outskirts of town he realized his trip to the Domus was meant to be something more.

“What would you do,” Jack asked, “if a little punk came to your house and threatened to stab you if you didn’t do what he wanted?”

“Troy would destroy him.”

“I’m asking you.”

Vincent’s expression deepened into a frown, and a new glint shined in his eyes. “We would destroy him, too. You shouldn’t have let him go. You could have ended him once and for all.”

It unnerved Jack only a little hearing another entity’s words coming out of Vincent’s mouth. He knew that one of them was often with him, as well. It even gave Jack encouragement from time to time. In fact, it was just that encouragement that made him decide to track his grandfather down using the information provided by Kerry, a hacker employed by Troy. Kerry had wormed his way into records showing an illegal change of identity for Graham, who had taken on the name of David Upton; the real David Upton having died in a car accident in Florida at the age of five.

Jack knew that one or more of the others had also helped him evade the police last week when they showed up to arrest him and Graham. Always coming in handy, they were.

Jack cleared his throat. “It would have been too risky to kill him there. We would have been seen, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before they lock me up again.” He paused. “I’ve been thinking about something Troy said. He wants to give me a promotion but I can only do it if I pull off the impossible.”

“Then you should think outside the box.”

“I’ve been trying.”

“Destroy him.”

“What?”

“Destroy him.” Vincent’s body gave a massive lurch as if he’d been shoved from behind, and he blinked wide, wondering eyes as if awakening from a dream. “Sorry, Jack. I must have dozed off for a minute. What is it you wanted to talk about?”

BOBBY REGRETFULLY left Bill Trautmann’s home without having broached the subject of the missing van—changing topics from Graham’s insanity to vehicular theft would have been so jarring that Bill’s suspicions would have been roused.

Instead, when he pulled out of Bill’s driveway, he made an abrupt turn into the electric company’s lot and parked between two of the vans.

Not sure what he would find, he killed the engine and got out.

Four spaces down from his, a mechanic had the hood of another van popped up and was rummaging around in its engine.

Bobby took a deep breath and casually walked around the side. “Hey.”

The mechanic gave a start and studied Bobby with coal-black eyes. In one hand he held a slender wire that was wet on one end, and in the other was a paper towel. He wore a white t-shirt with the Trautmann Electric Company name and motto printed over the left breast, and beneath that was embroidered the name “Angel.”

“What do you want?” Angel asked in a Mexican accent much thicker than that of Lupe Sanchez.

Bobby couldn’t take his eyes off the guy’s name.

“It’s pronounced AHN-hel,” the man said, reading Bobby’s mind. “I said, what do you want?”

“Have you worked here long?” Bobby asked, saying the first thing that came to mind.

Angel’s eyes narrowed. “Four years. Why?”

“I just wondered what kind of boss Mr. Trautmann is. I’ve heard he has a low tolerance for poor conduct.”

The man gave a nod. “Ah. Sí. You are looking for a job, no? Bill, he is a nice man, but tough.” Angel gestured at the van before him. “Like this van disappears yesterday and turns up in its spot a while ago. Bill says, ‘Angel, go make sure it’s safe to drive.’ Like someone stole it just to mess it up a bit. So I check steering, brake fluid, now oil…what?”

Bobby’s heart stuttered. “You said this is the van that was stolen?”

“Sí, and now it is back. Someone must have had a change of heart. If only more bad men were like this one, the world would be great place, no?” He grinned.

“What makes you think a man took it?”

Angel shrugged and wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead with the back of the hand clutching the paper towel. “It is a man sort of thing to do.”

Bobby took a few steps backward and squinted in through the passenger window. Clean gray seats. Shining steering wheel and dashboard. No trash or dirt on the floor. “Did you clean it out before checking the oil and stuff?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you care if I have a look in the back for a minute?”

Angel’s amiability was replaced with his previous suspicion. “What is this about?”

“I’m nosy.”

Angel’s mouth tightened, and he glanced over his shoulder in the direction of Bill Trautmann’s house, which was mostly obscured by a thick stand of fir trees lining the lot. “Maybe I am nosy, too. Tell me what you really want, and then you can look inside.”

Like Bobby was going to tell Angel that the woman who’d birthed him had very likely been held in the back of this van for an undetermined length of time. “I just thought there might be some clues back there about who might have swiped it. You know, so you can tell the police.”

Angel seemed to think this over for a moment or two before saying, “Very well. Take a look. But you will not find anything.”

“Thanks.”

Bobby slid the passenger side back door open and climbed in. Goosebumps rose on his arms and the back of his neck when Angel’s words replayed themselves in his mind. All he could see through the windshield was the van’s open hood and brief glimpses of Angel moving around on the other side of it.

Could Angel have been the one to take the van? As a company employee he would have had a key, so Bobby couldn’t dismiss the possibility. But would he really be that obvious if he were the kidnapper?

The inside of the van smelled like Windex. The gray carpet on the floor appeared to have been vacuumed. A toolkit and some coils of wiring sat neatly on one side of the empty space.

He had the idea that even if the police came along checking for stray hairs and fingerprints, they wouldn’t find much of anything. Adrian Pollard’s abductor had known what he was doing.

But who was her abductor?

It startled him when he realized he’d become fully immersed in his search for her once again. She’s nothing to me, he thought. Just someone who needs a bit of saving. When he did find her, they would simply acknowledge each other’s existence before peacefully parting ways. Bobby certainly didn’t want to start a mother-son relationship with her. Her other children wouldn’t have done that. They would have been hurt, too.

The idea that he had siblings he’d never met made him feel strange, as if he’d just learned that the earth actually had four moons or that there was a secret continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that nobody ever talked about. He wondered how old his siblings were, where they lived, and if they were anything like him.

No. He couldn’t let himself think about that. He would have to crush those questions before they seeded themselves in his brain and began to grow. To learn the answers, he would have to sit down and have a long chat with Adrian, which was out of the question.

Bobby backed out of the van and slid the door shut. “Nothing,” he said. “I guess Bill will never get to find out what kind of creep stole his van.”

Angel stood beside him with his arms folded across his chest, his face warped into a scowl. “Get out of here before I decide to tell my boss you’re just here to snoop around.”

Bobby caught a glimmer of something in the man’s eyes, and he thought, Aha! “Are you talking about Bill or somebody else?” He continued before Angel could answer. “I see how it is. You know somebody who needed a van since using their own might have been incriminating, and you lent this one to him to use instead. They probably even paid you for it. Right?”

Angel opened his mouth to voice what probably would have been some kind of objection, but the ringing of Bobby’s phone cut him off.

He wanted to ignore it, but his gut told him he needed to take the call. “Excuse me,” he said, and stepped over to his Nissan.

Frowning, Bobby held the phone to his ear. “What’s up?”

“I need you to come over here,” Carly said in such a flat tone that Bobby almost didn’t recognize her voice. “Now.”

Alarm bells went off in Bobby’s head. “Did something happen?”

“Just come over here. Please.”

“I’ve never been to your house. I don’t know where it is.”

“We live at 900 Waterstone Drive off of Skyline Avenue. Do you know where that is?”

“I think so.” Bobby swallowed and glanced back in Angel’s direction. The man was rummaging around under the hood once more. “Do you need anything?”

“Just you. I mean; to talk to.” She paused. “God help me, I sound like an idiot. Just get over here soon, okay? I’ll talk about it then.”

The line went dead.

Coils of dread snared him. Just what in the world was going on?

WHEN THE little girl who’d joined Adrian first awakened, her gaze darted wildly around the concrete room before coming to rest on Adrian’s face.

The haunted look in the child’s eyes tore Adrian’s heart in two.

Adrian had probably looked the same when she first came to in this place, only unlike this child, she had a far better idea of what would happen to the both of them if she didn’t come up with a plan of action, and soon.

She crossed the small room and sat on the edge of the cot next to the girl and tried to smile at her just to provide her with a shred of hope, but for some reason she couldn’t work the muscles in her face to change her expression.

“Honey,” she said, “everything is going to be okay.”

Fat tears welled up in the child’s brown eyes. “I want my mom.”

“And we’ll get your mom, honey. But first we have to find a way out of here.”

Adrian knew that the odds of completing a successful escape without any weapons other than her own two hands were next to nothing, though the child didn’t need to know that. Telling her that she wouldn’t be freed from this prison until someone came along to do unspeakable things to her would have been a cruelty, which Adrian dared not inflict upon one so young.

So Adrian did the only thing she could in the meantime: she talked.

“Honey, what’s your name?” Adrian asked.

“M-Monique.”

According to Monique, she was eight years old, not nine, and she lived with her mother and little brother in a place called Eugene. Monique’s father had “up and left” one day to go live with “some blonde tramp,” and Adrian almost laughed hearing such adult words come out of the child’s mouth but quickly swallowed it back.

“Do you know how you got here?” Adrian asked.

Monique started to shake her head but turned it into a nod, the plastic balls on her hair ties bobbing up and down. “It was Wanda.”

“Wanda?”

“She’s a real nice lady. My mom always says not to talk to strangers but Wanda wasn’t like them.”

“She wasn’t like who?”

“Other people. Other people look at you funny like you smell or something and just keep on walking. But Wanda was nice and talked to me. She gave me a doll one day and my mom got mad and asked where I got it, but Wanda told me not to tell anyone, so I told my mom I just found it somewhere.”

Adrian could see it clearly in her mind. Monique’s mother must have had to work a lot to support two young children on her own, leaving Monique and probably her brother to roam unattended. This Wanda must have been one of the vultures who helped stock this underground prison. She would have seen Monique out somewhere, decided she was easy pickings, and pretended to befriend her so it would be easier to kidnap her.

“What else did Wanda do?” Adrian asked, afraid that her voice would break if she tried to speak any louder.

Monique drew her knees to her chest and gazed at the dirty cot. “She took me to get ice cream. We even saw a princess movie, and all the ladies wore these pretty crowns and dresses.” A look of dreamy contentment passed over the child’s face, as if the thought of being a real life princess was the most wonderful thing in the world.

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Adrian thought. She had practically lived like royalty in the years she’d been with Yuri—she’d had all the clothes, jewelry, and alcohol she’d ever wanted—and all it gave her in turn was a mountain of regret.

It all seemed so juvenile now. It was as if Adrian had been a child her entire life and was just now coming to understand what it meant to be an adult.

She first laid eyes on Yuri when he and his colleagues came to a benefit dinner at the golf course clubhouse where she worked. Adrian’s job that evening had been to work behind the bar counter filling glasses of wine.

When Yuri came back through the line for his fifth glass, she realized he wasn’t just doing it for the alcohol. He wanted to see her. It was just like with Ken and all the others all those years ago. A man had seen her, and he liked what he saw.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, a slur in his speech from the four glasses he’d already consumed. “What’s your name?”

At first she’d blinked stupidly at him like he’d just said something in a foreign language. Well, he did have some kind of accent. Something European, maybe. His hair was so pale it was almost white, though he wasn’t at all old; and he wore a crisp, clean suit with a shiny blue tie.

“I’m Adrian,” she said as a blush warmed her cheeks. “Is there anything else I can get you, sir?”

One of the men she’d seen sharing Yuri’s table stood behind him in line, laughing. “You watch out for this old dog,” he said. “He barks up a lot of trees.”

Yuri ended up staying late after the benefit was over and walked Adrian to her car. He told her he’d grown up in Kiev in the Ukraine and was now the chief executive officer of a financial consulting firm based here in southern Michigan. He slipped her a business card and told her that if she was ever lonely, to just give him a call.

Then he’d slipped away into the night like a shadow fading into darkness, and Adrian felt giddy inside to know that someone with such standing in their city would take an interest in her.

She’d called him the very next morning, and they were married three months later.

“Adrian?”

The sound of Monique’s voice snapped her back to attention. “What is it, honey?”

“You look sad.”

“Well, maybe I am sad.” She shivered, wishing her mind would stay in the present since finding a way out was far more important than lamenting about her years with Yuri. “How do you know Wanda is the one who brought you here?”

Monique’s bottom lip trembled. “She said we were going to the zoo. I’ve never been there before. But we kept on driving and driving, and then I said I was thirsty so she gave me a drink, and then my head got all funny and then I was here.”

A new wave of anger flared up inside of Adrian as she pictured the scene. She looked to the metal door. It could only be opened from the outside since there was no knob in here, but what if there was a way to get the bolt to disengage by sliding something into the paper-thin gap between the door and its frame?

Monique followed her line of sight. “How will we get out?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think someone will come save us?”

No, Adrian thought, but she said, “Maybe.”