Carved in Darkness (39 page)

“You think I’m gonna kill you?” he said and laughed. “Where’s the fun in that?” He matched her movements as she slid along the body of the car, just a fraction of an inch, toward the trunk. “To tell the truth, I hate guns. Too impersonal.” He winked at her. “You remember what I like, don’t you, Melissa?”

“I remember you’re a sick, twisted son of a bitch who can’t get it up unless he’s in the middle of killing something,” she said. He took a few steps back before he stopped and smiled at her.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he said, feigning hurt moments before he lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.

EIGHTY

T
HE BULLET TORE THROUGH
the flesh of her thigh, ripping muscle as it punched through the other side. The force of it knocked her off her feet and into the dirt, flat on her back. Teeth gritted, she refused to cry out as white-hot pain seared her leg from hip to toe. She stared up at an impossibly blue patch of sky surrounded by green treetops and tried to remember how to breathe.

Wade holstered his gun and leaned over to examine her thigh but kept his distance. “Yup. That ought to do it.”

She refused to look at him. “Fuck you.”

“It’s a through and through, what’s the big deal? You’re a badass, remember? I’m just a dumb hick cop—had to level the playing field.” He grinned down at her.

“Gutless piece of shit,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

He came toward her, two steps closer than was prudent, and had no time to stop the attack. Her good leg whipped out, the heel of her boot hammering into his kneecap, and he dropped like a stone.

She fisted a hand in his hair and drove her knee into his face, but it struck the hard bone of his forehead instead, doing little damage. Her other hand grappled for the gun in his holster, her fingers closed around the butt of it. Before she could pull it clear he stopped her cold, landing a heavily-fisted blow to her thigh, dead center on the hole he’d put in it.

A scream tore through her throat, taking her fight with it as it rushed up and out into the sky. She went limp, her vision going gray around the edges while she fought to stay conscious.

“I gotta hand it to you, you’re a helluva lot feistier than I remember,” he said. Standing, he leaned against Lucy’s car. “That’s good. I like it. Most girls I bring here just cry and beg me not to kill ’em … sooo boring.” Wade looked down at her, the corner of his mouth lifted in a crooked smile. “Don’t worry, Melissa, I thought about you the whole time. You know what they say—you never forget your first.”

She rolled onto her side in the dirt, clutched her thigh, and said nothing. The nausea from the drugs was nothing compared to the pain that crowded her, pushed in and crushed her from all sides.

He stood up straight, taking a glance at his watch. “Alright—enough lollygaggin’,” he said, giving the bottom of her foot a playful kick. “We’re gonna play, you and me. I want you to run.”

He wanted to chase her, run her down like an animal. “Eat shit, you crazy hillbilly.”

“
Crazy
… okay.” He point the gun at her other thigh and pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed into the ground, bare inches from her leg, kicking up a plume of dust that stung her eyes. “Consider that a warning.” He sighed. “You’re either gonna run, or I’m gonna make that hole in your leg a matched set. Then I’ll drag you by your hair into our little love nest, and you’ll never see the light of day again. Maybe I’ll hop a plane and go get us a new playmate. You think little Riley is ready for some fun and games?”

She thought about her baby sister. About how bright and innocent she was. About the things he would do to her if ever given the chance. Rage and hate flashed, white-hot, in her gut, blinded her for just a moment. Gripping the bumper, she pulled herself up, leaning on the car, favoring her injured leg.

A steady river of blood flowed from her thigh, into her boot. The tacky warmth of it between her thighs ignited a hellish nightmare of memories that flashed in front of her, random and out of sequence.

“Nearest neighbor is ten miles from here—just a short stretch of the legs for you, which is why I had to slow you down a bit. I’ll give you five minutes and then it’s game on. I’ll even leave the gun behind, maybe you can circle back around and get to it in time,” he said.

“Why? Why not just take me inside and get started?”
More time
…
she needed to steel herself against the pain that would careen through her body the moment she applied pressure to her leg. The smile perched on his face tightened around his mouth, drawing it into a sneer.

“Because you need to remember what you are,” he said. “You’re mine. No matter what you do, no matter who you try to become, you can’t change that.” He looked at his watch and then back at her. “Four minutes.”

Without warning, she spun on her good leg, dug the heavy sole of her boot into the soft earth of the clearing and pushed herself away from the car. She did the only thing she could do. She ran.

EIGHTY
-
ONE

S
HE WON’T LET YOU.

Wade watched her run into the trees. Truthfully it was more of a hobbling lurch, but Lucy’s words stuck with him. They’d been pushing him since she’d said them, worrying him that maybe she’d been right.

She’d changed. No helpless cowering. No begging for mercy. He realized that he’d had a hand in her metamorphosis. That it’d been the pressure and pain he’d applied during their time spent in the dark that had changed her.

She was different. She wasn’t his Melissa anymore.

That fucking trooper had ruined it all—spotted him in Lucy’s car on I-80 and called it in. With the trooper about to investigate, he had to leave her in the trunk and double back to the main road in the JPD Blazer. He cut the trooper off at the pass, assured him that he’d patrol the area and keep him informed. It had taken longer than expected. By the time he’d gotten back to the cabin, he wasn’t sure she was still entirely under the influence of the Ativan Kelly injected her with. He left a bottle of water laced with GHB in the trunk, but he had little hope that she’d actually drink it.

He’d thought of popping the trunk and hauling her out at gunpoint but knew doing so would be a mistake. He’d seen her in action, knew how dangerous she could be in a close contact situation. He decided to err on the side of caution and called out to her under the guise of potential rescuer. If she responded, he’d let her out of the trunk and lure her into the cabin. If not, he’d know she was still out cold and just drag her inside. She’d been awake and it had gotten messy. Things hadn’t gone as he’d planned, but they were still salvageable.

He frowned down at the gun in his hand, momentarily regretting his decision to challenge her. His daddy’s words came back to him:
Nothing good ever comes easy, boy.

His daddy was right. The truth was that he could never look at her, touch her, hurt her, unless he knew for sure that
he
was the thing to be feared. Not a piece of metal. And she had to know it too.

He ejected the clip from the gun and thumbed the bullets into the dirt before slapping it back home. He popped the last bullet out of the chamber and laid the gun on the lid of the trunk as promised. He found his knife folded up in the pocket of his khakis and flicked it open. He looked at his watch.

Time was up.

“Ready or not, here I come.” He tilted his head back and yelled it to the sky. Suddenly, he felt strong. He felt ready. His Melissa was in there somewhere, hiding.

He just needed to peel back the layers until he found her.

EIGHTY
-
TWO

S
ABRINA RAN.
E
VERY STEP
she took made her feel like a coward and a weakling, but she ran anyway. Survival was the only thing that mattered. She thought of Riley, of what would happen to her sister if she was dead, or worse—captured. The only way to save Riley was to kill Wade. Survival was key.

The moment she hit the trees she changed direction, traveling for a few steps before changing directions again, this time traveling for a few hundred. Weaving this way and that, blindly through the brush—low-slung branches slapping at her face and arms as she rushed forward in a blind panic. Her only thought was to get as much distance between her and Wade as possible before her leg gave out.

Wade …

The thought of him, gun in hand, grinning down at her pushed renewed power into her legs but she knew it’d be short-lived. She was bleeding badly, her thigh coated in it, the loss making her dizzy, but she pushed on. Her initial burst of speed lagged to a shuffling lurch and she fought to keep her feet beneath her. What should’ve been easy now took every ounce of strength she possessed. She changed directions even though she knew she couldn’t outrun him, not with a bullet hole in her leg. She needed to find a place to hide, assess the damage done to her leg. But she was too close to the clearing to stop and dress the wound.

She’d never make it, even if he were telling the truth about the neighbors. Ten miles might as well be a hundred in her condition. Every step was agony. A pain so intense that every footfall brought her to the brink of unconsciousness, but she’d learned long ago how to pull away from it, to float above the pain. She did so now, thinking of nothing else but putting one foot in front of the other.

Four minutes. She had four minutes to get as far away as possible, and that was only if Wade played fair. His face, handsome and earnest, shoved its way to the forefront of her mind.

It was Wade. Her brother.

She heard him call out, tease her that he was coming, that her time was up. Her heart sank.

He sounded so close.

She wasn’t far enough to keep running and expect to survive. Without the hole in her leg, she would’ve been nearly a mile away by now, but she hadn’t even managed to cover a quarter of that distance. If she kept going, he would simply run her down. Scanning the area, she spotted a fallen tree a few yards ahead and gunned for it. Diving behind it, she hunkered down in an effort to conceal herself.

With shaky hands, she stripped her shirt off in favor of the black tank she wore underneath. Her shirt was red and would be easily spotted, even through the dense screen of trees she hid in. Next she unbuttoned her cargo pants, sliding them down to mid-thigh in an effort to survey the damage to her thigh.

It was a bloody mess. The hole punched through it a deep, weeping well of blood. Twisting her shirt around itself, she wound it around her leg, high above the wound, tying the sleeves together in a tight knot in an effort to, if not stop the bleeding, slow it down. Yanking her pants back in place, she tried to think about what came next.

A weapon. She needed a weapon. She raised herself on her haunches, felt the binding around her thigh squeeze tight. She leaned to the side, taking pressure off her injured leg and began scrounging in the dirt for a stick, a rock … anything that would serve as a mean to hurt him.

Her fingers closed on something small and hard, but smooth. Too smooth to be a rock. She picked it up, examined it—and knew almost immediately what it was.

It was a bone.

A vertebra—from the size and shape she knew that it was human. That it belonged to a young girl who used to have blue eyes. She looked into the surrounding trees and felt ill. They were here. This is where all those girls disappeared to. Left in the open, exposed to the elements and the wild animals she was sure inhabited these woods. Grief and panic came for her, but she was ready. She broke away—detached herself from what she held in her hand. There would be time for grieving, but not now.

Placing it gently on the ground, she scrounged, found more bones, and placed them in a growing pile until she found what she was looking for.

EIGHTY
-
THREE

W
ADE WOUND HIS WAY
through the dense cover of trees and brush—zigzagging through the woods. There was no pattern—some distances were covered for a few feet, others for several yards, but they always changed direction. He had no idea where she had gone.

Truth was, his neighbors were more like fifty miles away. But if he’d told her that—that there was no possible way she’d ever find help—it would’ve ruined everything. He’d learned over the years that it was when he gave them hope that he had the most fun.

Finding a fallen tree, Wade hopped over the bulk of it, ignoring the twinge in his injured knee. He crouched, took a few seconds to look the spot over. Bent foliage, tacky smudges of blood congealed on them. She’d taken brief refuge here. The small pile of bones was interesting—she’d found one of his toys. The terror she must have felt when she realized what she held in her hand was almost palpable.

He imagined her binding her wound, resting the frantic gallop of her heart as she lamented over the futility of it all; and he smiled, taking a deep breath, drawing in her scent. He ran his fingers along the leaves that bore her blood and brought them to his lips. His tongue slipped from his mouth of its own volition, needing a taste.