“They kept me for around four months. Back then they were still new at this and were making a lot of mistakes. The ringer was one of them. The hatch was looser, and it sat half a millimeter proud because the hinge pins were cheap and the screws had been in and out too many times. When the van moved, it made this tiny tick-tick sound.”
I don’t say anything.
Rhea leans back against the wall.
“I found the ring by accident,” she says. “My shoulder shifted when the van hit a pothole, and my hand dragged along the wall. I felt cold metal, just the edge of it under the panel seam.I pressed my knuckles into the corner until it flexed. The cover popped up just enough to get a fingertip under it. Eventually I could slide my hand into the gap.”
She pauses, eyes unfocused like she’s watching it happen again. “Inside was a cavity between the panels. And the ring,” she continues. “I was tied up, so it felt like a Hail Mary. I hooked the edge of the zip tie against that burr and I dragged it back and forth, back and forth, over and over. That’s how I got this.”
She lifts her hand and points to the scar on her wrist.
“Holy shit,” I mutter.
“There was another gap at the back of the cavity,” she says. “A passage for wiring that ran down toward the rear door frame. I couldn’t open the doors from inside, but the latch still had a cable. I reached through, found it, pulled, and the door popped open.”
Her eyes lift to mine, and for the first time there’s something in them that isn’t detached. She looks kind of like me. The thought lands wrong, but it’s there anyway. Like we’re cut from the same awful cloth, both hauling demons we never asked for.
My eyes burn. I blink fast. “So what happened then? How the hell did you end up back here?”
“Yeah,” she mutters. “That’s the lame part. My brain just kind of wanted to delete this place, I guess. I fell out of the van while they were still driving and ended up on the outskirts of a small town.”
My wrists itch where the zip ties bit earlier, and I fight the urge to scratch them raw.
“I thought if I could just get far enough from the road, I could pass out without being visible,” she says. “I thought I could sleep for ten minutes and then stand up. I thought a lot of stupid shit.”
I don’t correct her. I don’t call it stupid. Because I’ve been there, when thinking becomes survival, and survival becomes lying to yourself just to keep moving. It’s a thing.
“What happened?” I whisper.
“Someone found me a couple days later, thinking I was dead.”
“Who?”
“A local woman.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Anyway, I ended up in a hospital with a brain injury and memory loss.” She claps her thighs, sharp like she’s trying to shake it off. “So here’s the butt of the joke. When I met Talon and tried to move on with my life, I started remembering bits and pieces. You wanna know when it finally all came together?”
“When you died?” I guess. It’s wild, but death seems to scrub some things clean.
“Yup.”
I blink, trying to make that land. Beyond fucked up doesn’t even cover it. What kind of bad luck does someone have to have to get grabbed by monsters and then forget the important shit?
“How the hell did they find you again?” I mutter.
“Oh, they were looking,” she says. “This son of a bitch is really fucking relentless. That’s why he has to die. There’s no other way. I know it. Even if he’s somehow caught and sentenced to prison, he’ll find a way to do this again. I don’t fucking know how. He’ll act like an angel behind bars so they release him early, and then he’ll kill again. He’s sick.”
Unfortunately, I’d already landed on the same conclusion. There’s something about him that feels like a missing wire, a dead space where a human connection should be. Like he isn’t a person at all, just a machine built to churn out violent thoughts on repeat. When I first met Cassian, Talon, and Nathaniel, their actions terrified me. Now I know the difference between doing something bad while still having a moral code, and being rotten all the way through.
When I see Nathaniel again, I’m going to make him shout it from the rooftops until he believes it. He is not a bad man. I don’t fucking care anymore about his sins. Not in my eyes.
I push myself up and walk over to the hatch. Just like she suspected, the ringer is gone.
“Mhm, great…” I turn back around. “At this rate, the guys are going to have to find him when I’m already dead. It’s a surprise he hasn’t killed me yet.”
“That’s not his style,” Rhea says.
