She’d risk her life, but she wouldn’t risk mine.
“Stop struggling,” the silky voice whispered in my ear. He pressed the gun harder into my temple. My whole body hurt. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stop struggling.
“I’m doing what you asked. Let the girl go.” Sterling sounded so calm. So far away.
It was dark outside, but things were getting darker as my vision blurred and inky blackness began to close in on me.
“Take me. That’s what you came here for. I’m the one who got away from Redding. Proving you’re better than his other apprentices, killing them isn’t enough. You want to prove you’re better than him. To show him.”
The grip on my neck relaxed, but the gun never wavered. I sucked air into my burning lungs, gasping for just one breath, then two.
“Eyes on me, Cassie.” Sterling shifted her focus from the UNSUB to me just long enough to issue that instruction. It took me a moment to realize why.
She doesn’t want me to see him.
“Knock her out. Leave her here. She wasn’t part of the plan. Your plan.” Sterling’s voice was steady, but her hands were shaking. She was playing a dangerous game. One wrong word and the UNSUB could kill me as easily as he could knock me out. “She can’t identify you. By the time she wakes up, you’ll be long gone, and I’ll be yours. You won’t lose me, the way Redding did. You’ll take your time. You’ll do it your way, but they won’t find you. They won’t find me if you stick to the plan.”
Sterling was targeting her words at the UNSUB, playing on his fears, his desires, but I heard what she was saying, too, and the real kicker was, I believed her. If I couldn’t identify the UNSUB, if he took her, if they left me in the driveway unconscious, by the time I woke up, it would be too late.
He’d have too much of a head start.
But there was one way to make sure that Briggs knew immediately that something was amiss. One way to make sure that he could find her.
The UNSUB let go of my neck.
“Look here, Cassie. Look right here.” I could hear the desperation in Agent Sterling’s voice. She needed this, needed me to keep looking right at her.
I turned around. Even in the dark, I was close enough to make out the features of the UNSUB’s face. He was young, early twenties. Tall and built like a runner. I recognized him.
The guard from the prison. Webber. The one who’d been disgusted by Dean’s very existence, who had a problem with female FBI agents. The one who’d refused to allow us to stay in the car.
The pieces fell into place in a single, horrible moment: why the man hadn’t let us stay in the car, how Redding had known I existed, how our third UNSUB had been able to kill Christopher Simms in prison.
“Redding would take me, too. He’d kill me, too.” My voice was scratchy and barely audible. “You work at the prison. You know he asked for me. You’re probably even the one who delivered the message.”
He could shoot me. Right now, he could shoot me. Or my gamble could pay off.
All I saw was a flash of movement, the glint of metal. And then everything went black.
YOU
The gun cracks against her skull with a sickening thwack.
It doesn’t sicken you.
The girl’s body crumples to the ground. You aim your gun at the pretty FBI agent. She looked down her nose at you when she visited Redding. She dared to tell you what to do.
She probably laughs at boys rejected from the FBI Academy, let alone the local police force.
“Pick her up,” you say.
She hesitates. You aim the gun at the girl. “Either you pick her up, or I shoot her. Your choice.”
Your heart is thudding in your ears. Your breaths are coming faster. There’s a taste to the night air—almost metallic. You could run a marathon right now. You could dive off Niagara Falls.
The FBI agent picks up the girl. You pocket her gun. They’re yours. You’re taking them both. And that’s when you know.
You’re not going to hang them. You’re not going to brand them. You’re not going to cut them.
You have the One Who Got Away. You have his useless little son’s girl. This time, you think, we’re doing it my way.
You make the FBI agent put the girl in your trunk, climb in herself. You knock her out—and oh, it feels good. It feels right.
You slam the trunk. You climb into the car. You drive away.
The student has become the master.
Consciousness came slowly. The pain came all at once. The entire right side of my face was white-hot agony: throbbing, aching, needles jabbing down to the bone. My left eyelid fluttered, but my right eye was swollen shut. Bits and pieces of the world came into focus—rotted floorboards, heavy rope encircling my body, the post I was tied to.
“You’re awake.”
My good eye searched for the source of the voice and found Agent Sterling. There was blood crusted to her temple.
“Where are we?” I asked. My arms were bound behind my back. I twisted my neck, trying to catch a glimpse of them. The zip ties digging into my flesh looked uncomfortably tight, but I couldn’t feel anything beyond the blinding pain radiating out from my cheekbone.
“He hit you with his gun, knocked you out. How’s your head?”
The fact that she’d ignored my question did not go unnoticed. A moan escaped my lips, but I covered it as best I could. “How’s yours?”
Her dry lips parted into a tiny, broken smile. “I woke up in the trunk of his car,” she said after a few seconds. “He didn’t get as good a hit in on me. I pretended I was unconscious when he brought us in here. As best I can tell, we’re in an abandoned cabin of some type. The surrounding area is completely wooded.”
I wet my lips. “How long ago did he leave?”
“Not long.” Sterling’s hair hung in her face. She was bound the same way I was: hands behind her back, tied to a wooden post that stretched from ceiling to floor. “Long enough for me to know I can’t get out of these knots. Long enough for me to know that you won’t be able to, either. Why, Cassie?” Her voice broke, but she didn’t stop talking. “Why couldn’t you just do what I asked? Why did you make him bring you, too?”
The anger drained out of her voice from one sentence to the next until all that was left was a terrible, hollow hopelessness.
“Because,” I said, nodding toward my right foot and wincing when my head protested, “I’m wearing a GPS tracking anklet.”