I kept my face blank, refused to react, but something must have shown in my eyes because Cross's smile turned sharp.
"Don't worry. I didn't kill him. Not yet." He reached out, traced a finger along my jaw. I heldmyself perfectly still, refusing to flinch. "I want him alive. I want him to know what's happening to you. I want him to imagine it—every moment, every sound you make. And when he finally comes for you—because he will, men like that always do—I want him to watch me take you apart."
My throat tightened. My hands clenched behind my back, the zip ties cutting deeper into my wrists. "You won't break me again." The words came out rough, raw, but steady. "I'm not what you made me."
Cross laughed—a genuine, delighted sound that was somehow worse than anger would have been. "Oh, Tyler." He leaned back, that terrible smile still playing at his lips. "You think you've escaped. You think you've become someone new, someone strong, someone who doesn't belong to me anymore." He shook his head slowly. "But you're wrong. You've always been mine. You will always be mine. And I'm going to remind you of that—slowly, thoroughly, until there's nothing left of whoever you think you've become."
I held his gaze. Refused to look away, refused to show fear, even though my heart was pounding so hard I was sure he could hear it.
"This is going to be fun," Cross said softly. "I've been looking forward to it for a very long time."
The van drove on, carrying me deeper into the desert, further from everything I had built, everything I had become.
18
ALONE
TYLER
The van stopped after what felt like hours. I'd tried to track the journey—counting turns, estimating speeds, building a mental map the way my FBI instructors had taught me. But the hood was suffocating, the zip ties cut off circulation to my hands, and somewhere around the twentieth turn I lost count. We could have been anywhere. Mexico. California. Somewhere in the vast Nevada desert where bodies disappeared and no one ever found them.
Hands grabbed me, hauled me out of the van. My legs buckled—too long in one position, muscles cramped and screaming—but the hands held me up, dragged me forward. Gravel crunched under my feet, then concrete, then nothing as we went through a door into cooler air.
Down stairs. I counted them automatically: fourteen steps, a turn, another eight. Underground. The air changed—heavier, damper, carrying the faint mineral smell of earth and old stone. The temperature dropped with each step, cold seeping through my clothes, raising goosebumps on my skin. Wherever Cross had brought me, it was deep.
A door opened—I heard the groan of heavy hinges, felt the shift in air pressure. Then we were moving through what felt like a corridor, my footsteps muffled on what might have been carpet. Another door. Another corridor. The place was a maze, designed to disorient, to make escape impossible even if I somehow got free.
Finally, we stopped. The hood came off. I blinked against the sudden light, eyes watering, and found myself in the last place I'd expected: a room that looked like it belonged in a high-end hotel.
Cream-colored walls, tastefully lit by recessed fixtures ithat cast no shadows. A queen-sized bed with a dark wooden frame and expensive linens—silk, I realized when my eyes adjusted, in a deep burgundy that looked almost black in the artificial light. An armchair upholstered in leather the color of dried blood. Art on the walls—abstract pieces in muted colors, the kind you'd see in a corporate lobby, chosen for their inoffensiveness rather than their meaning.
A door that might lead to a bathroom. Carpet thick enough to muffle footsteps, thick enough to muffle screams.
No windows. No clock. No way to tell if it was dayor night, morning or evening. The air was perfectly still, temperature-controlled, carrying no scent except a faint trace of cleaning chemicals and something else—something floral, cloying, the ghost of expensive candles.
The silence was absolute. No traffic noise, no voices, no indication that the world outside this room even existed. Just the soft hum of climate control and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
Cross's voice came from behind me: "I had this prepared especially for you. Do you like it?"
I didn't answer. Didn't turn around. Just kept cataloging the room with the desperate focus of a drowning man counting his breaths.
One door—the one I'd come through—heavy and reinforced, with no handle on this side. Climate controlled, the air neither warm nor cold, perfectly regulated. The ceiling was too high to reach, the walls solid, the carpet too plush to hide anything useful underneath.
This wasn't a prison cell. It was a gilded cage. Cross had been planning this for a long time.
"You'll be comfortable here," Cross continued, stepping into my peripheral vision. He'd removed his sweater, rolled up his sleeves, looking relaxed in a way that made my skin crawl. "I've thought of everything. Fresh clothes in the closet. Books, if you want them. The bathroom has a shower and all the toiletries you might need."
He reached out, traced a finger down my arm. I held myself perfectly still. "You can even have meals brought to you. Anything you want." His voicedropped, turning intimate. "I remember how much you liked my cooking. I've missed preparing things for you."
The words were tender. The touch was gentle. And every nerve in my body screamed that I was in the presence of a predator.
"The zip ties," I said. My voice came out hoarse, rough from hours of silence and smoke inhalation. "Take them off."
Cross smiled—warm, indulgent, like a parent humoring a child's request. "Of course. Where are my manners?"
He produced a knife from somewhere, cut the plastic with a practiced flick. Blood rushed back into my hands, pins and needles that made me grit my teeth. I rubbed my wrists, buying time, trying to think.
"There." Cross tucked the knife away. "Better?"
