Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📕

You can leave if you want. Just get in your car and drive home. That’s a choice too. But all choices will have consequences.

This is your first decision to make. I’ll know when you’ve picked up this message. The clock is running, and you have ten minutes to get to me before I think you’re not playing fair. There will be a cost if you delay.

Good luck.

He hasn’t signed it, but he didn’t need to. There’s an underlying strangeness to it that is more of a signature than just a name. It gives me shivers. The writing on the paper is precise, but deeply indented. Written with conviction and force. He’s been careful about the words he chose too; there’s nothing overtly threatening, though the threat overall is there. He could just as easily play it off as a game, a prank. In a town this small, with a man this rich . . . I can’t trust the local police. I’m not sure I can even trust the state police; there’s absolutely nothing I can give them to really make them believe me. It’s all puzzle pieces, and how you put them together.

The other page in the envelope is a printed map of Heartbreak Bay. All the way out on the far end of the horseshoe shore, the lighthouse. He’s put a red X over it.

I hand the note to Kez, and the map. She looks at it in silence, and says, “We’re not going there first, if that’s where he wants us.”

“I don’t think it really matters where we go,” I say. “I think Jonathan’s had a lot of time to think about what we’ll do, and he’ll have planned for it.”

Everything but what I’m about to do, because by this time he must believe that we’re caught. Trapped in his spiderweb of a town. Out of good options.

I take the burner phone I bought out of my pocket and dial home.

“Gwen?” Sam answers so fast that it takes my breath away. The sound of his voice. The reality of him. I feel him here with me as I squeeze my eyes shut. “Oh Jesus, Gwen?”

“I’m here,” I whisper, and then try again, louder. “Sam, I’m okay. Kez is with me. We’re okay.”

“Where are you? Javier is here. We can be on the road in half a minute.”

“You can’t,” I tell him. “Sam, remember I asked you if you’d—you’d look after the kids? In case anything happened?”

“No.” He does remember, he’s just rejecting the question. “We’re coming to get you out of whatever shit you’re in. Listen to me: the man you caught, the homeless man—”

“I know. Leonard Bay is MalusNavis.”

“He’s—” He takes in a breath so deep it sounds painful. “He’s also the kid who came to talk to me at the airfield, Gwen. He called himself Tyler Pharos. I should have put that together, should have told you . . . Pharos is a lighthouse. MalusNavis is a beacon. Fuck. I could have stopped this, I could have—”

“It’s not your fault, Sam.” I feel okay now. Centered. Calm in a way I haven’t been on this long, hellish trip. “I screwed up too. Look, I need you to convince the FBI that Kez and I are tracking a killer that they ought to be after. Look at my computer. Put it together. Get them moving, Sam.”

“Moving where?”

“Salah Point, North Carolina,” I tell him. “The lighthouse on the bay. But we can’t wait for them. And you and Javier need to stay there. If he decides to come after the kids—” I can’t finish that sentence. “Please, Sam. Please do this for me.”

He’s silent for a long, long minute, and then he says, “I will get people to you, Gwen. If I need to lie, I will. But I will get them there. Damn the consequences.” It’s killing him not to be in this with me, I can feel that. It would kill me in just the same way.

“I love you,” I whisper. It sounds shaky. I don’t want to let go, but I know I need to. We’re out of time. Jonathan/MalusNavis was very clear about that.

I open my eyes once I’ve ended the call. I look at the little, anonymous town, the nonexistent traffic, the lack of human faces on the street. It feels . . . empty. This whole town is a spiderweb, and we’re caught already. It’s a long, long road back to anything like civilization.

“Gwen,” Kez says. “Why would he let us find out who he really is? What his real name is?”

I think about that. About the way MalusNavis has closed in on me. Shown his face. Given me everything, even if in indirect and slippery methods. And I think about what Sam just told me: that he talked this young man off a bridge. That might have been false, just another ploy.

But what if it wasn’t? What if, finally, he’s had enough?

This may be his endgame. Either way, it has to be mine.

“Kez,” I say. “Look at the map.”

“What am I looking for?”

“That shows the bay, the lighthouse, and a house, right?” She nods. I reach into the car and pull out the map I drew from the research I did on Jonathan’s cell phone, before I dropped it. “What’s missing?”

“The cannery,” she says. “Maybe it was torn down.”

“Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he left it off because he wants us coming straight for the lighthouse.”

She blows out a frustrated breath. “Jesus. Your mind, Gwen. You scare me sometimes.”

“We need to go to the cannery,” I say. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”

Kez grabs me by the arm as I pass her, heading for the driver’s seat. “Or—and hear me out—we wait for Sam to get real boots on the ground here to back us up.”

“He said ten minutes.” I gently pull free. “Ten minutes until there are consequences. Whose pictures did he send you?”

She doesn’t answer. She just stands there, fists clenched, and then nods.

We get in the Honda and drive.