She’s still thinking of Luke when she feels the weight of a heavy, unnatural sleep descending on her, and before it takes her completely, she thinks, All right, Mr. Mattingly. Let’s hit the road.
Charlotte is sixteen years old and holding the gift from Uncle Marty on her lap. She’s still known as Trina then—she only changed her name after her grandmother’s death—and she’s only been free of her father for several weeks. Her brand-new bedroom, the one her grandmother made for her out of the house’s old sewing room, is immaculate but mostly bare. It’s waiting to be filled with knickknacks and curios and posters, the stamps of an ordinary teenage life she hasn’t been allowed until now. The sunlight here in California seems so much clearer than the light back in Georgia, cutting through the part in the bedroom’s ruffly sky-blue curtains with cleansing power.
Does Uncle Marty know how special this gift is? Does her grandmother? She visited them a few times over the years, but always strictly under her father’s supervision. Do they know she’s never had a computer of her own and never been allowed to use the internet unsupervised? Now she has her very own laptop, her very own connection to the world.
It makes her head spin.
Given who she was, given what she’s been through, her father believed letting her surf the net by herself was the same as letting her walk alone through a bad neighborhood at night. Several times, they’d been hacked by true-crime conspiracy theorists convinced that little Trina Pierce had played more of a role in the Bannings’ crimes than she’d let on and that there was proof of this on her father’s hard drive. The truth was, her father’s insistence that she keep performing for horror movie fans all over the country placed her in more danger than any Google searches.
But what does that matter now? She’s free of him, free of those speaking engagements he’d always schedule to coincide with the release of a new installment in that ridiculous horror movie franchise that claimed to be based on her life.
She can hear her grandmother and Uncle Marty out on the front deck, talking to the few lingering guests. The party was for her, to welcome her to Altamira, California, the little town at the foot of Big Sur where her grandmother reinvented herself after almost drinking her life away while grieving her only daughter and granddaughter.
The guests were her grandmother’s other AA friends, all bright-eyed and rosy cheeked no matter their age. Each one of them seemed to be guzzling a caffeinated beverage, their eyes alert for any new food item that might appear from the kitchen at a moment’s notice. Sober folks needed their parties to have food, Marty assured her. It’s how they made up for the sugar intake they lost when they got off the sauce. They’re not married, Marty and her grandmother, but they’re girlfriend and boyfriend, even though that seems like a silly way to describe two grown-ups in their fifties.
In addition to the computer, the other gifts were all things her father didn’t allow her. All sorts of novels, both youthful and grown-up, scary and romantic. DVDs of popular movies for her new disc player. Nothing filtered, nothing censored. Magnifying glasses. Ant farms. Elegant leather-bound diaries. A buffet of things that might pique her interest, since no one, not even she, was quite sure of what those interests were.
Only now that she’s free of him does she realize the extent to which her father managed her life. She’s always thought the erratic blend of tutors, homeschooling, and therapists was simply about maintaining the grueling travel schedule they had to meet to keep up with all the appearances, a schedule that intensified whenever a new Savage Woods film was released. But recently, she’s started to understand her father had a different agenda. When she saw how quick he was to send her to her grandmother’s once she refused to appear with him onstage again, it was impossible not to believe that what mattered to him most was the money he could make off her. So, when she looks back on his protectiveness, she doesn’t see a dad trying to protect his little girl’s feelings. She sees him trying to keep her on script. He shielded her as best he could from depictions of other teenagers’ lives, of other normal families. Of kids who went to school and made friends, kids whose lives were not constant therapy and constant touring around the country and sometimes the world.
But that’s over now.
In another week or two, once she’s had a chance to settle in, she will go to a normal school. Go to normal classes. Try to make normal friends.
Now, she has her very own computer.
She can go anywhere online. Read anything. Watch anything.
But once she opens the Google web page, her fingers type the words automatically. Simultaneously, she feels a sudden weight pressing against her upper back. She figures she’ll just find pictures she’s never seen before, that’s all. But that’s a cover story for a need she’s too afraid to identify. She wants to know more, the things she’s sure her father never shared.
She wants to know what she went through.
Fingers trembling, she lifts her hands to the keyboard and types her mother’s name.
“Hailey?”
Not her name.
Someone else’s.
The voice is smooth and confident, the tone reserved. He’s measuring every word because he’s convinced his words have as much power as the restraints he put her in while she was out cold. Charlotte knows better than to mistake his tone for humility; it’s quiet, dangerous arrogance.
She blinks, unsurprised by all of it. The gag in her mouth, the fabric hood plastering her hair to the crown of her skull, the pressure on her wrists and ankles, and the hard, unyielding surface under her back. For another woman, an unprepared woman, these would be implements of terror, no doubt. And they should be. But she’s visited hells like these before.
There’s a bright light shining on her face that prevents her from seeing anything beyond the dark shadow of her captor sitting next to whatever she’s tied to. When he leans forward, she sees his trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache, his deeply set puppy-dog eyes under heavy dark brows. He’s still wearing the baseball cap he wore to the movie theater. It’s Cyrus Mattingly, for sure.
Behind him, she can just make out a patch of flat concrete wall. Are they on his property in Waxahachie? Cole and his team know it backward and forward, but she insisted they not share any of the details with her. She’s willing to bet this is some sort of storm cellar. How long does he plan to hold her here?
He reaches forward and gingerly tugs at the straps of her gag. It’s all for show. The thing’s firmly in place, but he’s demonstrating that the ball gag inside her mouth is attached to a more extensive contraption that covers the lower half of her face, even wrapping her nose, save for two slits that allow her nostrils to take in air. She’s not sure but she thinks it might be leather. The sedatives are wearing off in stages. Now she can feel her hair bunched up and smashed to the top of her head, covered by the top half of whatever this bizarre face mask is. It’s meant to do more than silence. Only her eyes and forehead are exposed. Her ears are covered by the sides of the hood, but the fabric’s not so thick that she can’t hear through it.
“Can you hear me? Blink once if you can hear me.” His tone’s so casual he could be asking her for directions to the nearest grocery store.
She blinks once.
“Good,” he says, but he sounds distracted. “I’d like to tell you a few things about what you’re wearing. It was made just for this so it probably feels strange. Does it feel strange?”
Your wording’s also strange, she thinks. It was made just for this, not I made it for this.
She blinks once. He nods, tightens a strap against the side of her head.
“I need you to understand something, OK?” Again, that unnervingly calm tone. Like he’s bringing her in on a secret that will benefit them both. “There’s something you need to do here. It’ll make all this better, promise. It’ll make you better, too. I know that might be hard to believe, but it’s the truth. You’re not going to have to wear this thing much longer, but I can’t take it off you just yet
. So, while you’ve got it on, let’s agree to some things, OK?”
She blinks once. But she’s busy taking in details. The deadness in his eyes, the fidgety but consistent way he keeps securing the mask’s various straps. There’s also what he doesn’t do: he doesn’t caress her. He doesn’t kiss her. His manner suggests she’s not some sexual plaything he’s brought here for his twisted delight. For now, he remains invested in her submission to the strange implement designed to silence her. The sedatives are wearing off in stages like they did with the last two monsters who drugged her. For the first time, she feels a slight tickle against the back of her throat. At first, she thinks it might just be saliva or postnasal drip. But it’s not. It’s solid. And with a jolt of fear, she realizes there’s some sort of rubbery extension attached to the gag’s solid rubber ball and it’s lying against the back of her throat like a sleeping snake.
Gooseflesh sweeps her reawakened skin. For a second, she’s sure she triggered. But when she goes to ball up her fists, the plastic flex-cuffs on her wrists don’t break.
She’s running the lyrics for “Angel of the Morning” through her head and it calms her some, but Mattingly noticed her jolt of fear, and now he’s studying her with a patience and reserve that suggest supreme confidence.
“Hailey? Blink once if you’re listening to me.”
She blinks once.
“The thing in the back of your throat—you can feel it now, I can tell. You need to be very careful of it, OK? I don’t want it to hurt you. I really don’t. But if you scream, something bad will happen.” He sounds as if some godlike force is inflicting these indignities upon her, and not him, not Cyrus Mattingly. “If you scream, you’ll probably throw up and I won’t be able to get back in time to get the thing off you before you choke. And I don’t want that to happen and you shouldn’t, either. Now, a lot’s going to happen tonight that you might not understand. Not right away anyway. For now, I need you to embrace your silence. Can you do that for me, Hailey? Can you just breathe? Can you just stay silent? It’ll be good practice for the rest of the night. ’Cause we’re going to spend a lot of time together.”
She’s not surprised when he places a gloved palm against her exposed forehead. He is, however. He’s surprised she didn’t flinch, and for a moment, some look passes through his otherwise dead eyes, some vague suspicion that it seems like he’s trying to put words to but can’t.
Shit, she thinks. It’s too late to flinch now. It’d be obvious she’s faking it. So, she puts as much fear as she can into her wide eyes, blinks madly as she tries to see him through the light. He leans forward, blocking out whatever light source is blinding her, staring into her eyes without any trace of evident emotion. His breath still smells like popcorn; she’s grateful for this marker of the passage of time, however sour.
When his gloved fingers caress her exposed throat, gently but without any tenderness, she does flinch, and he nods as if this was confirmation he needed. She prepares herself for some mad, lunatic speech intended to enflame her fear, but all he says is, “Your silence is your strength, Hailey Brinkmann. Forget everyone who’s ever told you otherwise.”
She blinks once.
He nods and pats the side of her cheek gently.
Then he’s gone, and she’s alone with the blinding light.
A few seconds later, she hears what sounds like double storm doors creaking open directly overhead, but she can’t see anything past the lamp’s fierce white blaze. Then she notices a strange feeling in the last place she wants to feel anything right now. An intrusion in her most sensitive parts, which makes no sense, given that she’s not naked. But it’s clear he had no trouble sliding off and then replacing her pajama pants.
There’s something else, she can feel. She’s right at the edge of triggering. Closer than she’s been all night. She was stupid to assume the fact that he didn’t caress her face or try to kiss her meant his madness had no sexual tint to it. Clearly he violated her while she was unconscious with some sick implement like the one currently lodged in her throat. And if Cole managed to get cameras inside this storm cellar, too, then everyone in the command center watched while Mattingly worked on her.
Not the same, a rational voice that sounds like her grandmother’s whispers. Calm down, honey. They don’t feel the same. Luanne’s ghost is right. Whatever’s been placed inside of her down there is smaller, plastic. Not as intrusive. It doesn’t seem designed to immobilize and humiliate.
It’s a catheter, she realizes.
At first, this realization seems comforting. Until she realizes that no matter how basic and utilitarian this device, it means Cyrus Mattingly plans to keep her confined like this for a very long time.
8
Tulsa, Oklahoma
When Zoey Long tosses her keys on the console table, Boris the Destroyer leaps off her sofa and streaks down the apartment’s single hallway, an orange blur across the cream-colored carpet.
Her cat’s frenzied escape doesn’t surprise her. Zoey’s too startled by how good her apartment smells, the best it’s smelled in days.
Maybe enough time’s gone by since Boris got into those nachos she stupidly left on the kitchen counter, or maybe her decision to move the cat’s litter box out onto her tiny patio was a wise one. Whatever the case, she can once more smell the little glass bowls of spiced apple and cinnamon potpourri she’s placed every few feet.
If she weren’t so stressed out from her fight with Jerald, she’d track the cat down and make him sit with her on the sofa. But right now, she doesn’t have the energy. He’ll come out after a bit, she’s sure. Probably just in time to rub against her legs and purr during all the best parts of whatever she decides to watch on TV.
Unless, of course, Jerald calls, in which case her cat will end up interrupting one of the most uncomfortable conversations of her entire life.
But Jerald isn’t going to call. Zoey’s sure of it. Not now, not ever.
It’s over.
It has to be.
She’s never spoken to him that way before. Never spoken to anyone that way, really. And she’ll need a dozen phone calls to her sister and her girlfriends before she’ll be one hundred percent convinced he deserved it.
Her sister, Rachel, will say he did. She’s never liked Jerald, not since he showed up to her birthday dinner at Prhyme Steakhouse in a T-shirt and shorts before dominating the conversation with talk of how much cash one of his ex-girlfriends was making as an Instagram influencer.
Zoey Long has never considered herself the angry type.
In Zoey’s view, anger was arrogance, plain and simple. Angry people, she would have said if pressed, were childish and spoiled and masking those truths with aggression. She wouldn’t have used the words childish and spoiled, of course, because she wouldn’t want to make the person she was talking to angry. But as far as Zoey was concerned, if you stomped your feet and slammed doors, it didn’t matter how old you were—you were throwing a tantrum, plain and simple.
And Zoey didn’t throw tantrums.
But she wasn’t exactly the sweetest of girls, either. Her friends thought she was a good listener, but her friends also knew that on most days she preferred books to people. She was different from her sister, or so she thought. Rachel could be a ferocious loudmouth when the situation called for it. Just the other day, in fact, over drinks at the little dive bar down the street from the dental office where they both work, her big sis had implied that Zoey’s lack of anger might be a weakness. That wasn’t the extent of what Rachel said, of course, but that was the part that kept ringing in Zoey’s ears afterward.
How had Rachel worded it exactly?
Zoey had recently accomplished something “pretty f’in’ monumental” and she wasn’t celebrating herself enough. Worse, she was probably staying fairly quiet for one reason. If she spoke up about her new success as an author, it would draw attention to the fact that her boyfriend of one whole year was staying pretty damn quiet about it, too.
I
f only she could call Rachel right now—she’d be so proud of her—but Rachel’s on a flight over the Atlantic with her husband, an anniversary trip to Paris. So, for now Zoey’s best option is quality time with her thoughts, awaiting the emergence of her jittery cat, and wondering whether she had a right to read her boyfriend for filth because he insulted the realization of one of her lifelong dreams.
Sex books, Zoey fumes, bracing herself against the doorframe because the memory of Jerald’s words is that powerful. Just don’t talk about your sex books in front of my mom next week.
A year of seeing each other exclusively, the first ever visit to his parents, and his main concern was that she stayed quiet about the first major accomplishment of her adult life. They weren’t sex books, for Christ’s sake. They were romance novels. And while she hadn’t expected Jerald to become a Harlequin junkie just because she’d made some Amazon bestseller lists, she’d expected him to give her a little more credit for all the time and hard work she’d put into them.
True, he’d thanked her for the new laptop she’d bought him with some of the royalties, but that was about it.
She’d spent ten years of her life outlining the backstories of the Roark sisters, plotting out various versions of the ancient legend that was the source of their shared supernatural abilities. She’d drawn dozens of maps of Fog Harbor, the picturesque town on the Oregon Coast that was home to their compound, written three different books in the series, all of which were rejected by a slew of New York agents for reasons ranging from the condescending to the cutting. Then one day, her online author friends in her various Facebook groups encouraged her to “go indie,” as they put it. She’d scraped together the money for editors and a cover designer, and then the miraculous happened.
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 8