The door creaks open instantly, like she’s been waiting in the hallway this entire time—hearing my screams but doing nothing. She closes the door carefully, making short eye contact with me before focusing on her son. She looks afraid, agitated.
She’s hardly changed from the image in my head.
“Do you remember me?” I ask her. I’m unemotional now, to the point. “I’m Imogen. My mom was Alice. She lived next door. We met years ago—when you first moved here.” My voice edges. “Your son has tied me up. Please. Go get help.”
But the entire time I’m speaking, I’m being drowned out while Parker gives her unintelligible instructions, whispering aside my pleas. I am mere background noise to his commands.
“Thank you, Mother” is all I hear him say.
She isn’t here to save me. She’s here because she’s part of this.
She ignores me, silently exiting, closing the door behind her.
“What did you tell her?” I say, frantic. “What is she doing?”
Parker plants a hand on my knee. He’s an emotional roller coaster.
“Imogen. Darling. Calm down,” he says, as though I’m a child throwing a tantrum. “Everything is going to be okay. I have you. I’ll keep you safe. Nothing else matters.”
“I don’t want you to keep me safe! I want to get as far away from you as possible!”
I can’t play along. My body and my mind won’t let me. All I can do is repel him—no matter what that means for me and my personal safety. My rage is boiling over; I can’t calm myself down. Never have I wanted to make someone suffer until now. If my hands were free, there would be bloodshed. I would fight to the end to cause him pain.
Meredith appears in the doorway again, holding a long mint scarf. She hands it to Parker and swiftly leaves the room again.
“Wait! Why are you helping him?” I wail as the door closes. “Please!”
“Stop resisting. You know this is right,” he says, fussing with my tied wrists. For a moment, I think he’s untying me. But my body is jerked backward. The scarf slides between my hands, knotting me tight to the bedpost.
I crane my neck to bite his shoulder. Instead, he slams it into my jaw before I can bite down, pain ricocheting through my teeth. I kick at the wall with a sharp crack, hoping to spring off it and into him. But it only spins me sideways, dumping me in a twisted heap across his lap.
He caresses my flailing body for a moment, planting a kiss on my head, fondling my hair. Using the shift to his advantage, he slides a hand into my pocket and pulls out my cell phone.
“Just in case you’ve enabled voice text,” he says. For good measure, he snatches my keys from my jacket pocket. “When you’ve calmed down, I’ll be back.”
I scramble upright as best I can, the bedpost against my spine. “Where! Is! My! Sister!” I scream so loud it shreds my throat.
Parker bites his grinning lip and closes the door behind him.
44
AMELIA
I crawl on my hands and knees toward the sofa, worried I might spook the figure draped across the couch. Is she alive? She looks awfully still. I move slower, afraid I’m inching toward a corpse.
The carpet is sharp under my body, like it hasn’t been cleaned recently. The room around me is midsized, matching the living room, sporting unfinished wood-plank walls and thoughtlessly strewn furniture, creating the sad illusion of a second living room. No bed, no bathroom. Then I notice an orange bucket in the far corner, a square of cardboard balanced over its mouth like a makeshift lid.
A toilet?
My stomach turns.
This isn’t a room. It’s a cell. Parker Lane’s dungeon.
My mind sends out a useless telepathic report to Wes, as if hecould somehow hear me from his apartment in Seattle, somehow know what is happening to me. I do the same for Imogen next door.
I reach the sofa and hover over the still figure, seeing the delicate rise and fall of her chest.
She’s alive.
