“At the risk of being harmed for tattling, Ryan was aware of this when he first showed up at the bakery. Well, let us know it was him who robbed me. Tucker told him after getting aggressive with him.”
“Ryan—”
“They’re fucking!” he interrupts.
Swallowing, I nod. “That’s true.”
“So, you must mean something to him, right?” Ryan asks.
I shrug. “He was screwing someone at the brothel they run before me. For years, I think. I don’t know if having sex with someone means what you think it does. He considers himself broken after losing the woman he loved.”
“My son is using you?” Benito asks. “Is that what you’re saying? He uses women now?”
Not what I mean. “I don’t know if I’d say that. He’s just kind of incapable of letting people in. He might miss me for a bit if you kill me, but it won’t hit the same. I don’t think I’m what you were hoping for.”
That’s actually kind of depressing to say out loud. I’m not enough. Story of my life.
“You sound sad.”
I sigh and give a sad smile in what I believe is his direction. “What girl doesn’t want to be missed after she’s gone?”
“I know it means very little considering what’s going on, but I actually kind of like you, Phoebe.”
Yeah, that’s not really a comfort. “Thank you.”
A loud crash sounds from above us, and the blood rushes to my ears. Please don’t let me be in the basement.
“I apologize, but we must leave and take care of something. We’ll be back very soon.”
Thud, thud, thud.
Unmistakable sounds of feet on stairs. And a rolling oxygen tank hitting every step.
Just because they’re walking up a flight of stairs doesn’t mean I’m in the basement. I could be on the main floor. Or the second. There’s no guarantee I’m sitting on a bed in the basement of a house right now.
Reaching out, I let out a sob as my hand touches cold concrete. I need to focus on what I can sense. What I can feel and hear. Smell.
And I want to cry when I take in the musty scent around me I hadn’t noticed before. Musty, like a basement.
My fingers touch chains attached to my shackles, and I follow them down to the floor where they’re bolted. To a cement floor.
“Breathe,” I whisper. “Breathe, Phoebe.”
Where are my bracelets? The one Tucker made me broke at the house, but where are the others? There are just these new metal accessories.
Most houses don’t have cement walls and floors in rooms that aren’t basements. And if I’m not in the basement, what happened above us? The crash I heard sounded like someonecoming into the building. Which would be the main floor, not secondary ones.
If I don’t take the blindfold off, I don’t know for certain. It’s all supposition, and I can lie to myself. Come up with plausible explanations about where I am. Why I’d be somewhere like this.
Maybe they’re doomsday type people, and their entire house is built of concrete to withstand some type of disaster. Or maybe they renovated an old prison from the 1800s. Which could explain the chains and shackles. And cement everything.
No, I need to know. I need to see.
Lowering my head to my hands, I slowly pull the blindfold off my eyes. I look up, and my vision blurs as the panic sets in.
“No,” I gasp, feeling as though I’m being strangled. “No!”
Chapter Thirty-One
