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

museum exhibit. No feeling at all. “Does the gag bother you?”

I nod. He scoots the chair over and undoes it, and I grab in a deep, whooping breath of relief. Then another one. Then I say, “You need to let us go. Right now.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says. “You’re safe here.”

I don’t feel safe. I feel handcuffed to a damn pipe. “I’m pregnant.”

He freezes for a second. Processing the information. Then he says, “Then I’m sorry for the way I treated you. And the car crash. But you’ll be okay. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

“Then you can let me go. Right now.”

He smiles, but there’s nothing behind it. It’s just muscles moving. An imitation of feeling. “I’d like to,” he says. “But I respect you more than that, Kezia Claremont. You could have let this go, and you didn’t. You wanted justice for those girls. I did too.”

“We’re nothing alike,” I say, and I mean it down to my last drop of blood. “You let Prester die.”

“Not me,” he says. “Sheryl. She could have called an ambulance. Maybe saved him. But she didn’t.”

I feel a real surge of bitter, electric rage. “You’re not just some god hovering overhead. You were there, or you were close. You could have stopped her. You could have saved him. And you didn’t.”

He tilts his head, and it looks like a praying mantis taking in its prey. “You should understand what I’m doing.”

On-screen, Gwen’s outline is moving. I note that in my peripheral vision, but I don’t focus on it. I want him to focus on me right now. If he’s telling me the truth, if he doesn’t intend me any harm . . . keeping him fixed on me will let Gwen move more freely.

“Your sister died,” I say. “I know that. You tried to save her.” He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t blink. “You never found the man who did that. I understand how that can make somebody—”

“Crazy?” he says. Too calmly.

“Desperate,” I say. Behind my back, I’m sliding my fingers up and down the pipe, trying to find anything to work with. I could have dealt with the zip ties, I’ve had training on precisely how to break them, but now I have the handcuffs to contend with. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. “Desperate to get justice.”

“You think you understand me,” he says. “But you don’t. You really don’t.” He pauses for a second, and slowly blinks. “Sam did. A little. He was one of the only people who ever came close to the truth.”

What truth? I don’t know what he’s saying. I can’t work it out. And then it doesn’t matter, because something’s happening on the screens.

“If you make another sound,” he says, “I’ll kill your baby.” It’s such a calm, quiet threat. I feel it shudder through me, and it leaves behind a horrible conviction that he means it.

Jonathan turns away from me. I hear a slight metallic jingle, and when I look down, I see he’s got a small metal carabiner clipped to the belt loop on his blue jeans.

Keys. That’s a ring of keys, and even from here I can see a handcuff key on it.

Get him over here, I think.

But not yet. He’s completely absorbed in what’s happening on the screen . . . and as I focus on it, too, I feel the same magnetic force draw me in.

Oh God, Gwen. Oh my God.

We should never have come here.

25

GWEN

There are more rooms, he said. I think about the implications of that as I walk through the processing room. There are other exits from this room, seven of them. I ignore the big doors he dragged me through before; those lead to the warehouse, to the trap where I last saw Kez.

I have blood on my hands. On my clothes. And I am not really rational.

It feels oddly fine.

“Which door?” I ask Jonathan. I know he can hear me. He’s played this game before, with many people. How many, I can’t really know.

“You choose.”

I do. I pick one at random, and I move past the silent, stinking fish conveyors. This door is smaller. It leads to a hallway running right and left. More choices. I go right. “You going to give me any clues?” I ask Jonathan. “It’s not much of a game if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You know,” he says. “You’ll know when you get there.”

I’m not surprised to find that lights are working now. He’s kept the power on, of course he has. He controls the building, probably from whatever room he’s hiding in.

We’re playing hide-and-seek.

“Would you rather be rich or poor?” he asks.

“Neither,” I tell him. “Just not afraid.”

“That’s not how it works. There are only two choices.”

“That’s why the game is wrong,” I tell him. “Because humans aren’t binary creatures. We’re confusing. We’re flawed. We’re—”

I stop talking because there are three doors in the hallway, all on my left. The doors are shut. All have glass windows, but when I stand in the middle, I realize all the blinds are closed. No way to tell what’s inside.

“Three doors,” he says. “Three choices. Two are empty.”

“What’s in the third one?”

“A tiger who hasn’t eaten for months.”

I know this one. It’s a logic puzzle. A tiger who hasn’t eaten in months is dead. It doesn’t matter which door I open.

So I do it methodically.

The first door is an office with an empty desk, two filing cabinets, and a vacant office chair. It’s eerily tidy, like it’s waiting for a new employee to arrive.

The second door is the same.

The third door holds the monster, but as he promised in the riddle, the monster isn’t a problem anymore. I stare at the old, desiccated corpse. I can’t tell race, sex, anything; it’s just old skin, hair, and the outlines of bones now. The place reeks. The carpet’s absorbed decomposition like a bloated sponge. It isn’t immediately obvious how this person died—no severing of arms and legs,