But even as the thought – and subsequent relief – formed, I heard it.
Footsteps.
Slow, steady, like they had all the time in the world, like having girls tied up in the bathroom was no cause for concern, and certainly not for a quickened pace.
Dread worked its way up my thought at the possibility that that was the case. That this was no cause for alarm because this was the norm. That maybe I was at the hands of some psycho serial rapist murderer.
Granted, I hadn’t heard of any, and I was pretty up on current events. But this wasn’t New Jersey. This was Connecticut. Different state, different crimes, different psychopaths behind them.
Who knew what kind of crazy resided in the Still Revolutionary! state.
I had a feeling I was about to find out though.
Panic gripped my system, compressing my rib cage, crushing my heart and lungs, everything that made breathing and life possible as my arms pulled frantically against the binding,my body scooting forward, giving me more leverage as I yanked until my arms screamed, until my shoulders threatened to break, feeling uselessness and hopelessness overwhelm me as I felt no budging at all.
There was a hand on the knob.
A turning.
More light streaming into the room.
On a choked sound I knew I would berate myself for if I lived through this ordeal, I gave it one last desperate yank.
And flew forward a foot as the tube gave, as freezing water started spurting everywhere, covering me, soaking through the material of my dress before I could even wipe the water out of my face enough to see who had moved into the room.
I didn’t need to see, though, as things would turn out.
Because I could hear just fine.
“You always were a lot more trouble than you were worth.”
Gary.
I shouldn’t have felt shock, a punch to the gut sensation I really had no right to feel.
Because, of course it was Gary.
I mean, sure, a lot of crime was random.
A lot of women taken were taken merely because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time while being the wrong gender.
It came down to that a lot of the time.
But in my case, this was the most logical outcome.
I had been actively seeking out a man who had clearly been a skilled conman, intent on stealing back the money he took from me after a long job that had him playing my boyfriend. And fiancé.
It would have been naive to think he would just… let me do that.
But, in my mind, it wasn’t just me.
It was Kai and me.
And if we ran into some serious trouble, it would be me and Kai and Quin and Gunner and Miller and Smith and Finn and Lincoln and Ranger.
So I wasn’t alone.
I wasn’t working alone.
And because of my backup, I had felt stupidly invincible in the whole endeavor.
And maybe, just maybe, there was a naive little part of me that didn’t think Gary was capable of kidnapping me, of… what? Killing me?
But that was naive.
Because this man had lied to my face almost every single day for years. He had used my body. He had stolen my trust. He had ripped away my security.
He was capable of many things I never would have been able to reconcile against the man I thought I had been sharing my life with.
Had I been thinking clearly instead of fighting through the pain racking my system, instead of trying to escape, maybe I would have come to this very logical conclusion.
That of course if I was being kidnapped, it would be by the man I was trying to track down.
“This is a stupid move, Gary. If that is even your name.”
“Of course it’s not. Just like it wasn’t true that I hated TV and loved healthy eating.”
He looked different.
It took me a long time to decide if that was just because the rose-colored glasses were off, was because all I could see when I looked at him were eyes that looked into mine while he lied to me, hands that touched my sister, a body that had used mine.
All that was surely a factor that somehow made me not realize before that his eyes were just slightly too wide set. Which they had to be to accommodate the broadness of his nose – not obnoxiously so, but enough that it couldn’t truly be called classical, Roman, but that wasn’t all of it.
He looked different because he was different.
The face he kept shaved had a couple days’ worth of stubble. His eyes were a deep brown color. I had no idea if the color I had always known was the fake color, or if this was. His hair was darker. And his clothes were no longer what I was used to – the uniform he had used to fool me, based on my personal preferences. No. He looked like some wannabe surfer dude in wine red board shorts and an ill-fitting white tee, the V of the neck pulled wide from over wearing it. You could see chest hair. Some medallion – cheap and golden – was nestled there as well. It was something I had never seen before, but something that looked worn, soft from age around the edges, whatever pattern had been pressed into the surface rubbed nearly invisible.