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

I’m so focused on that, it doesn’t occur to me to wonder why the door moves so smoothly. And then I’m blinded by a white-hot glare of light and a wall of sound so chaotic, so loud that it stuns me like a physical blow. The noise is crippling, astonishing; it drives me to my knees. I’ve dropped the shotgun and clapped my hands to my ears and I don’t care, anything to stop the noise, though even that doesn’t stop it, only muffles it the slightest bit. I can’t see either. Blinding strobes in my eyes. By that time, I realize I’ve triggered a trap and drop flat, which I should’ve done in the first place, and try to roll away. The farther I get from the doorway, the better I feel, but I can’t see. My ears are bells ringing with incoherent noise. Kez. Where’s Kez?

Someone’s pulling me away from the chaos, hands under my arms. Taking me farther from the torture. Thank you. Thank you, Kez. I try to say it, but I don’t know if I’m actually speaking, shouting, screaming. My ears don’t work yet.

I can’t see anything. Just blindingly white ghosts of strobes that persist and twist and move.

The noise gets fainter. The strobes get less blinding. I feel myself being pulled into a dark, quiet area, and I suddenly need to throw up. I roll on my side and do that, horrified and ashamed and wildly out of control, and I can hear myself sobbing and gagging now, but as soft and distant as a memory.

“Kez,” I whisper. Or think I do. “Kez—”

A shadow moves in front of my blurred vision and leans close. I try to focus.

It’s not Kez.

It’s him.

Empty, bland face, expressionless eyes. One side of his head is crushed in, but healed over. It’s been years since the day his sister was taken. Years for him to learn how to pretend to be normal, or some approximation of it.

The fumbling uncertainty of Leonard Bay is gone as he searches me, finding and collecting my weapons. I feel a tug at my pants legs, and then he flips me onto my face. Zip ties tug my hands together behind me. Fast, efficient, merciless. I can’t get to the ankle gun, if it’s even still there.

“It’s for your own protection.” I hear the words indistinctly, like they’re coming from the surface and I’m far, far underwater. “Trust me.”

He flips me over again. I’m trying to get control, but I just manage an uncoordinated flail with my legs before he has the collar of my jacket and is pulling me relentlessly onward. I can’t see anything but what we pass, and that’s just shapes and shadows that resolve into concrete columns, padded iron supports. The acoustics of the room shift, or my ears do, and I realize that we’re passing a silent, still sculpture of a processing line. The smell is horrific here. A physical presence forcing itself down my throat.

But everything is so clean.

“I knew you’d choose this,” he says. His voice is faint under the constant ringing. “Clever people always do this to themselves. You just can’t help it.”

“Kez,” I say. “Where’s Kez?” I try to fishtail, slow him down. It doesn’t work. He’s strong, and when I manage to hook a foot onto a passing support, it just slides free at his next tug. “What did you do to Kez?”

“She’s fine. I didn’t want to hurt her, you understand that? She’s not the point. I admire what she does.”

He’s pulled me through most of this assembly line, I think, but no, it just keeps going. Conveyor belts and metal bins, snaking off in all directions. The guts of the machine. Millions of fish passed through here. Billions. All bled and gutted and filleted and packed for easy consumption. And now it’s me being processed.

“You said there’d be choices!” I manage to shout it, and now, finally, my voice sounds nearly normal to my ears, though there’s a constant loud, sizzling hiss I’m not sure I’ll ever lose again. “This isn’t a choice!”

“We haven’t even started,” he says. “Do you know how much time it takes to destroy a life? One second.” His voice is strangely flat and unaffected, like he doesn’t know how to communicate emotion or doesn’t care to try. If he had an accent, he’s lost it with time and training. “Sometimes it takes longer. It took my sister a lot longer to die. Minutes.”

I don’t know how to answer. I can’t tell if the knife is still on my belt. The shotgun’s gone. I don’t know if I have anything left to use at all.

“Three,” he says. “Two. One. We’re here.”

He stops pulling me, and I immediately roll right to try to twist his wrist, break free, but he isn’t surprised. He lets momentum carry me over to my right side, and I feel myself sliding forward as he throws me, like a bowling ball. I try to stop myself, but he steps back, and I feel his foot land firmly in the small of my back. I feel a tug and a small, sharp nick of pain. My hands are free. I try to push myself up.

He kicks me hard, so hard I feel all the air forced out of me, and then I’m sliding forward again.

Into the dark.

I hear the door slam behind me and locks being thrown. I hear my own panicked breathing, the frantic slap of my body flopping against the floor. Tile, I think. Burning cold. It’s absolutely black in here, except for the pallid strobe afterimages my eyes are still remembering in chemical traces. I force myself to go still, to relax. He stayed outside. I’m alone in the dark. I just need to breathe and think.

My hands and ankles are free. I can stand up. I just need to be careful not to bash my head against something, trip, break bones . . . I’ve always had