Truly, he’d never talked with anyone as much as he’d talked with Sabrina that day.
“And your favorite holiday is Halloween,” he said quietly, proving he knew her as much as she knew him. “You and Cooper always trick-or-treated together.”
She smiled softly. “Coop was great at coming up with cheap costumes. He could make a toga from an old bedsheet and a witch’s hat out of papier-mâché.”
“Your favorite comfort food is chicken and waffles ’cause it’s what the lady who ran the diner down the street fed you when your parents forgot to bring home groceries,” he added. “And your first memory is fallin’ out of the tree in your backyard and breakin’ your arm. Cooper rode ya to the hospital on the handlebars of his bicycle.”
He watched her rake in a deep breath before she shook her head. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? The poster children for how kids shouldn’t be raised.”
They were a pair, he mused now.
They’d always been a pair.
Copacetic from the jump because they knew what it was to carry the scars from childhood that lived under the skin and couldn’t be scraped away.
Suffering recognized suffering.
Like recognized like.
Two storm-beaten ships who’d found safe harbor with each other.
That thought had a flicker of a smile tugging at his lips, but it didn’t last. Not when the weight of what was to come in the next handful of hours sat so heavily on his heart.
12
Location Unknown
Sabrina had never known the sheer agony of thirst.
Sure, she’d been dehydrated. Parched even. But this…
This was something else entirely.
Her need for water had started out in the usual way. A thick tongue that stuck to the roof of her mouth. Dry lips that cracked and threatened to split. A throat that felt raw and hot, like it was sunburned from the inside.
But as the day had dragged on, and afternoon gave way to evening, her need for hydration had gone from discomfort to a clawing torment. She no longer knew if her head pounded from the drug or from her body’s slow breakdown as her cells shriveled up like dry sponges.
Despite the heat inside the old building, she was no longer sweating. Her body hoarded the last of its water reserves. Her heart fluttered as it worked to maintain her blood volume. And her brain had been hijacked, her attention narrowed to a single, unrelenting desire.
Water.
Cold Water.
Warm water.
Dirty water.
Any water.
She lifted her chin from her chest and stared out the broken windows to the east.
She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious after her wreck or where her captors had taken her. But if they’d brought her back to Chicago, Lake Michigan was somewhere out there. Lake Michigan, with its sixteen thousand miles of shoreline and millions of megaliters of cool, crisp water.
She could drink it all. Just open her mouth and swallow and swallow and swallow until the whole thing was empty and she was filled up.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Remnants of rainwater falling in through the sagging roof taunted her.
