They rode up the same elevator as just a few days ago, right before Logan and those other two guys had pulled guns on them and called her traitorous aunt on the video chat.
Sarah’s fists filled with crawling bugs from the plastic zip ties cutting off her circulation as the elevator ascended and the floor pressed up on her feet.
She should have turned around and left that night.
Blaze had wanted to.
Maybe he had been picking up vibes instead of being contrary like she’d thought.
If they hadn’t walked out of the elevator and into Logan’s apartment, if they’d just kept going, maybe to Florida or somewhere exotic like Louisiana, Aunt Mary and Logan wouldn’t have found them.
They’d be safe.
Instead, here they were again.
Full circle.
Total disaster.
The elevator bobbled to a stop, and the doors slid back like lips baring a snarl.
“Out,” Nemesis said from behind them.
A cold metal rod pressed on Sarah’s spine between her shoulder blades.
She stepped out of the elevator into the hallway carpeted in beige and lighter beige below white walls, as boring as those Instagram city folks who painted everything in their houses shades of washed-out mud.
Even the Amish decorated their houses with pretty pops of color amidst the natural tones.
A plain wood-and-metal plaque beside the door read 24B.
Nemesis hesitated and scowled at the two before lifting his fist in front of the door, hesitated, and knocked.
A couple of seconds later, Logan Bell opened the door and frowned at all of them. “What took you so long? Did you hit traffic?”
“Red lights,” Nemesis said as he shoved her.
Sarah tripped over her toes and stumbled forward, fall-running before she steadied herself because she couldn’t use her hands for balance.
Logan saw her trip, his gaze flicking down to her feet and then back to Nemesis as he flipped the locks on the door. “Get those zip ties off them and take them to the bedroom at the end of the hall to the left. It locks from the outside.”
Interesting that Logan had a bedroom with a door that locked from the outside. The only people Sarah knew who had a room like that in their house were the O’Reillys, and they had a kid with autism so profound that he was nonverbal and attacked people in a desperate attempt to escape the flashing-crashing harshness of the world around him.
Nemesis held out his hand to Logan, their phones captured in his fist. “Tristan King put the spy app on them. We will hear everything, see everything they do. Blaze Robinson will need his phone to make arrangements for weapons that Dr. Bell wants.”
Logan’s eyebrows pinched as he looked at the phones like they were hog manure. “If she wanted them to have the phones, why didn’t she give them back?”
Nemesis shrugged. “I would not ask.”
Logan grabbed the phones from Nemesis’s fingers. “I said to get those zip ties off of them.”
Nemesis unfolded a wicked pocketknife and walked around behind Blaze.
Sarah held her breath for a minute until Blaze’s shoulders flipped forward, his hands released, and he rubbed his wrists.
Nemesis moved behind Sarah, and she could hear him fiddling around back there with his knife.
Would he also like the way she wiggled if he impaled her with his curved blade?
