by Alana Terry
“Maybe you should just accept the fact that you’re not good enough to hold her attention. You’ll never be good enough,” Marx continued.
Edward flung me to the floor as if I weighed nothing, and I landed hard on the scraps of wood and nails. I coughed as my throat spasmed, making it difficult to draw in a breath. I climbed shakily to my hands and knees and looked back to see the killer closing the distance between him and Marx.
No. This was exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Marx had drawn his attention away from me, and now Edward was going to kill him. I had to do something.
I stumbled to my feet and looked around the room. I picked up a chunk of wood that looked like a decorative knob for a bed—it felt heavy—and hurled it at the back of Edward’s head. I hoped it would be more accurate than the bullet I’d fired at him. It landed with a painful-sounding clunk against the back of his skull, and he whirled around with a snarl just as I scrambled out the door and down the steps.
Chapter 40
I HOPPED OVER THE LAST step and sprinted to the front door. I twisted the knob, but it didn’t open. I flipped the dead bolt and pulled, but the door was as immovable as a wall.
I searched the door frantically as I heard his heavy boots thumping down the steps after me. My heart sank when I spotted the nail at the top of the door—pounded in at an angle—and another at the bottom. He’d nailed the door shut.
I ducked sharply out of the way when he came up behind me. He slammed into the door hard enough to make the chandelier above us rattle. I stumbled backwards over the debris, my bare feet barely registering the pain as slivers of wood and glass cut into my skin.
There had to be another way out.
The windows were boarded over with plywood, but maybe one of them was loose enough to pull off. I ran to the nearest window and tugged at the corner of the sheet of wood. It didn’t give. I tried the next window.
“You can’t escape me, Holly,” Edward said in his calm, taunting voice. He straightened by the door and seemed to fold the anger back inside himself before looking at me.
He twisted the knife in his hand as he stalked forward slowly, predatory. I backed away from him, bumping into broken furniture and tripping over old empty beer cans and bottles that someone had left lying on the floor.
The backs of my legs collided with something solid, and I glanced behind me to see the living room couch: old, plaid, and gutted until nothing but the bare bones remained.
Edward covered the distance between us too quickly with his long stride, and I scrambled over the couch. His hand landed where my ankle had been a moment before. He let out a sound of frustration that barely sounded human and shoved the couch aside. I leaped out of the way as it slid across the floor and slammed into the wall, taking a chunk out of the plaster.
He kept coming, and I backed toward the fireplace. There was nowhere to go. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice trembling.
He tilted his head as if the question surprised him. “Because I want to.”
“My family never did anything to you.”
“Your father was weak.”
My father had been a gentle man whose strength had lain in the wisdom of books and the knowledge he shared with his children; it hadn’t been a physical strength. “My father wasn’t weak,” I shot back.
“Your father couldn’t even protect his family. He deserved to watch them suffer, to see his weakness play out in front of him before he died. He cried like a child as he watched me with your mother, and when I disposed of that simple creature you called your sister.”
I clenched my fingers into fists and wished I could hit him. Gin had been sweet and innocent.
“Do you know what a real man is, Holly? He’s strong, in control, dominant.” He gestured to himself as an example. “He takes what he wants because he can, he does what he wants because he’s strong enough to do so.”
My back collided with the wall, and I breathed heavily as I stared at him. He was absolutely out of his mind. There was no rationalizing with someone like him.
I looked around the room, desperate for something to help me, and picked up one of the glass bottles.
“What are you going to do with that?” he asked tauntingly.
“I’m gonna hit you with it, obviously.” I knew that my only chance was to throw him off balance and then run and hide. I glanced at the doorway at the far end of the room that led into the dining room and my eyes snagged on a pair of shoes—small red flats—sitting on the floor in the corner.
I blinked, certain I was imagining them.
Next to them was a brown jacket lying on top of a pile of colored T-shirts. My clothes. I hadn’t given much thought to where Edward had left my clothes after he stripped me of them. He’d never intended for me to leave my parents’ room alive, so he hadn’t bothered to hide them; he’d just left them lying on the bottom floor where he never expected me to be.
A plan percolated in my brain.
I might have time to grab one thing and run before he reached me. Shoes or jacket. My feet were bleeding and bruised, and the house was littered with broken glass and splinters of wood. But the jacket . . .
“And let’s face it . . .” Edward was still speaking.
I threw the bottle at him, and he dodged it with surprising agility. It shattered against the wall behind him, and I bolted for the far end of the room. I grabbed the jacket off the top of the pile and escaped through the doorway into the dining room.
I slammed the flimsy wooden door behind me and slid the lock into place. My family had shared dinner every evening in this room for as far back as I could remember. Gin and I had gathered the plates from the china hutch, which now lay broken face down on the floor, and placed them around the table with silverware and glasses.
I skirted around the broken china hutch to avoid the glass. Edward shouldered the wooden door, and it split down the middle. He reached his arm through the jagged gap and drew back the lock, flinging the door open. He stormed through the dining room after me with none of the reservations I had about the glass scattered across the floor.
He leaped over the china hutch into my path, and I skidded into him with a terrified shriek. He shoved me back into the wall hard enough that my legs nearly gave out beneath me. I snapped up the small purple canister that had still been nestled in my jacket pocket, turned my face away, and sprayed it into his eyes.
He let out a deep, throaty sound of pain, and his hands flew to his face.
I darted around him to the basement door. I pulled it shut behind me and locked it from the other side. I knew it wouldn’t stop him, but I hoped that, between the pepper spray and the lock, it would at least slow him down enough to give me time to hide. I scurried silently down the steps into the darkness.
I groped around for a place to hide. I knew there were windows in the basement, but they must have been boarded over along with the rest of the windows in the house.
Something slammed into the door at the top of the steps, and I jumped. He was coming.
My thumb grazed something that felt like a screwdriver, and I grabbed it. I followed the edge of a desk until I came across the small alcove where the chair was supposed to rest.
I crawled inside and curled up as far from the opening as possible. Pain lanced through the wounds over my ribs with every breath, and the flow of blood hadn’t slowed. I wrapped an arm around my stomach to put pressure on the wounds.
I gripped the screwdriver against my chest as I leaned my head back against the desk and closed my eyes to rest. I was exhausted and unbearably cold, and as the moments passed, I started to shiver. I wasn’t sure if it was from the cold concrete beneath me or the blood loss.
Another heavy force hit the door at the top of the steps and the door splintered, sending chunks of wood raining down the steps and over the railing to the floor. The staircase creaked beneath Edward’s heavy weight.
“That wasn’t very smart, Holly,” he called out, and his tone was dangerous. The pepper spray had
barely slowed him down, but it had made him furious. He was already intending to torture me to death; how much worse could it get if he was angry?
I heard the quiet scrape of his boots landing on the concrete.
I buried my face in my arm to muffle the sound of my rapid breathing. There was no ambient noise like there was in the city. There was pure, absolute silence when he stood still, and I knew he would be able to hear me breathing.
Lord, I’m so afraid. Please be with me.
Slow, quiet footsteps moved through the basement. “You can’t hide from me.”
A familiar tapping sound joined his voice. He didn’t have a window to tap on this time, so I could only imagine he was tapping his fingers on the knife.
“There are only so many places to hide in a basement. I will find you. I found you in New York,” he said, his tone inviting me to respond. I said nothing. “I was there for work and I happened to see you out jogging. Your hair, your eyes, your body. You were unmistakable. You can’t even imagine how delighted I was to be reunited with you. It was like . . . divine intervention.”
God’s divinity had nothing to do with his twisted plans. He bumped into something, and I tensed at the sound of boxes crashing to the floor. He kicked them aside.
“I’ve thought about what I would do to you when I found you so many times,” he admitted with a sigh of such primal pleasure that it made my stomach lurch.
His fingers tapped rhythmically on the knife again. “I’m a man who gets what he wants. I wanted your mother from the moment I saw her at the veterinary clinic, so I took her. She was . . . exactly as I expected her to be: gentle, obedient, maybe even a little desperate, and willing to do anything to protect her children. She was what a woman is meant to be. But you, Holly, you seem a little confused.”
My pulse pounded loudly in my ears as footsteps brought him closer.
“You seem to be under the impression that you can fight me. You can’t fight me. You’re small and weak. You seem to think that you can outsmart me, but you’re not a thinker. You’re just a simple woman who needs to be pointed in the right direction. I followed you for weeks before I sent that note card, and it took a man to figure it out.”
I clenched my teeth. I knew I was small, and I wasn’t exactly strong, but I wasn’t ignorant.
“You’re not even capable of saving yourself. What do you think would’ve happened in the park two months ago if I hadn’t been there?”
Did he want a thank-you card for stepping in? We both knew he hadn’t killed that man to save me; he’d killed him for even thinking about touching me, because he believed I belonged to him.
“You’re pathetically helpless.” He drew in a breath to continue his lecture on my shortcomings, when a distant thumping caught his attention. An abrupt silence filled the basement as he stilled, holding his breath along with me, and listened.
Another quiet thump drew my eyes upward. For a moment, I thought it might just be Marx trying to break free of his restraints, but then something thumped again, and it sounded like it was coming from the front of the house.
“Sounds like we have company,” Edward said, and I could hear the sound of his shoes scuffing the floor as he turned slowly, listening for the origin of the thumping.
It was moving around the house. I supposed it could be teenagers looking for a place to stir up trouble for the night. Judging by the graffiti on the walls and the discarded pop and alcohol bottles in the living room, it wouldn’t be the first time.
A small part of me dared to hope it was someone looking for me or Marx. Maybe they would find a way in to help us. The sound stopped and the silence stretched.
“Now that we’ve illuminated the fact that you’re weak, ignorant, and helpless, why don’t you stop hiding and accept that this is inevitable,” Edward suggested.
He really did think I was ignorant if he believed I would just give up after that speech and impale myself on his knife.
He walked forward, and I stiffened when the tip of his boot connected with the back of the desk. He tapped his foot against it a second time. Something—probably a hand—slid along the outside of the desk, following the edge of it just the way I had.
I curled into a tighter ball when I heard him step directly in front of the alcove where I was hiding. He was less than a foot away from me. I tried not to breathe.
The thumping erupted again; only this time it was directly outside the basement. It sounded like something heavy repeatedly smashing into wood. Edward backed away from the desk until the sound of his footsteps melted into the darkness with him.
Another thump, and something broke. Moonlight poured into the basement, and I realized someone had just kicked through the board that had been fastened over the window from the inside.
There was a muffled grunt and the quiet slap of shoes hitting the cement as someone climbed through the narrow window and dropped into the basement. I didn’t dare crawl out of my hiding place to see who it was.
“Holly,” a male voice whispered.
I didn’t recognize the hushed voice, but I could think of only one person in this town who might come looking for me: Jordan. He’d probably followed my trail through the woods, and it led him to the house.
A flashlight beam pierced the darkness, and I flinched away from it when it bounced off the floor beside the desk. I watched it with cat-like fascination as it flickered up and down over the walls.
He needed to turn it off. The killer was in the basement with us, and he was broadcasting his location with the beam of the light.
“Holly?” he called again.
I considered coming out of my hiding place, but I dismissed the thought as quickly as it came to me. I didn’t know where Edward was hiding, and the last thing I wanted was for him to lunge out of the shadows and grab me.
I barely heard the shuffle of feet before the deafening crack of a gunshot made me cringe and slap my hands over my ears. I heard muffled shouting and the sound of things crashing around the room.
The beam of light flickered wildly across the walls and floor until the flashlight rolled to a stop. It cast shadows onto the wall, and I watched, frozen, as the two male silhouettes wrestled. Edward and Jordan were on the floor somewhere behind me, and the smaller of the two shadows wasn’t winning.
I forced myself to crawl out from under the desk.
I gathered my shaking legs beneath me and looked at the two men across the room. Jordan was maybe six feet and 160 pounds. The killer dwarfed him. He was on his back on the floor, gripping Edward’s wrist with both hands as the killer tried to plunge the knife into his chest.
“Edward!” I shouted.
The killer jerked and looked at me in surprise, and Jordan punched him in the face.
“Run, Holly!” Jordan commanded as the hit threw Edward off balance. He scrambled out from under him. I darted past the two of them and up the steps. Jordan grabbed the flashlight that lay at the foot of the steps and fled up the steps after me.
I slid to a stop in the dining room and tried to backtrack to avoid the glass. Jordan must have been looking over his shoulder, because he plowed into me and nearly sent me sprawling into the glass. He wrapped an arm around my waist before I could stumble into it and picked me up.
I let out a surprised gasp of pain.
“Yeah, I know, five feet,” he said as he carried me over the glass. “I’ll apologize later.” He mistook my cry of pain as a cry of protest. He dropped me gently in the doorway that bridged the dining room and the living room. “What’s wrong with the front door? My key didn’t work.”
“It’s nailed shut,” I said as I pressed a hand to my stomach. I slipped my feet into the red shoes along the wall as Jordan swore quietly under his breath.
“Any other way . . . ?” He noticed the blood smeared across his hand and arm and flicked the flashlight in my direction. “Geez, Holly, what . . .” He took a step closer to me when he saw my tank top.
“I’m fine,” I said. “There’s
no other way out. Where’s your gun?”
“In the abyss,” he answered as he flicked the light toward the basement. He must have lost it in the fight. He drew in an unsteady breath as Edward squeezed through the doorway at the top of the steps, his face a mask of tempered rage.
I bit back a frightened whimper as my gaze flickered to the knife that was still red with my blood.
“That is a big man,” Jordan mumbled a little nervously. He backed me through the doorway into the living room, deliberately keeping himself between me and Edward, as the man stalked slowly toward us. “We need to get you out of the house somehow.”
“He has Marx. I’m not leaving him.”
Jordan blinked. He’d known Marx was missing, but he must not have connected his disappearance with the killer yet. “Where is he?”
“Upstairs.”
He glanced at the staircase and up at the second floor. His fingers twitched a little uneasily on the flashlight as he lowered his gaze back to Edward. “Okay. I’ll . . . delay the giant. And pray God drops a slingshot in my lap.”
I shoved my screwdriver at him. “It’s not a slingshot.”
He nodded and puffed out a breath. “It’ll have to do.”
Edward was nearly on top of him by the time I reached the bottom of the steps, and Jordan gave no indication of backing down. He had to be terrified. He was smaller and armed with nothing but a screwdriver against a giant with a skinning knife.
Edward lunged at him. Jordan ducked, spun out of the way, and kicked the back of the man’s knee, sending him stumbling. I had to trust that he would be okay. I ran up the steps on pure adrenaline.
I never used to think the upstairs hallway was so long, but it seemed to take me ages to reach the master bedroom, and I was out of breath by the time I wrapped my fingers around the doorway and pulled myself inside.
Marx paused in his struggles to break free of the ropes that held him to the chair and looked up at me—either because he sensed my presence or because he’d heard me running like an elephant down the hallway.
“Holly, what are you doin’ here? You were supposed to run. I told you to . . .” His voice trailed off and some of the color drained from his face. I followed his gaze to my stomach. “How bad is it?”