“No!” I cry, the words getting lost as another rush of water fills my mouth and my head is shoved underwater, then back up, again and again.
My despair shifts back into panic. This isn’t drowning. It’s worse.Almostdrowning, over and over again. Every time I claw forward to free myself from the water’s grip, the current seizes me by the shoulders and drags me backward, spitting in my face.
I can see calm water just a couple of yards downriver, green glass where the sun has finally hit the surface, but it might as well be a mile away.
My legs keep kicking because they don’t know what else to do, but only the river has any sway, surging around my body in a violent swirl.
“No!” I cry again, rage and desperation displacing the numbness I felt seconds earlier.
It’s like the river is on Leo’s side, holding me in place for him until he’s finished with whatever awful things he is doing to the others.
Faint, distant screams fill the air.
In my mind’s eye, I watch Leo dislodge the raft, lifting it away from the terrified women hiding beneath, exposing them. Pam, Deborah, Imani. He plunges the knife again and again, turning the water red while Allie watches helplessly from her hiding place on the other side of the river.
“No, no, no,” I choke.
It won’t even matter if one of the women manages to hurl herself into the whitewater and briefly escape, like I did. He’ll catch her, too.
It’s only a matter of time. Leo has already won.
Without a raft, without a guide, without any way to escape, all of us are already dead.
I reach for the buckle of my life jacket. It’ll be better to go under, let the hole drag me all the way down to the bottom of the river, than to let him find me like this. But my hands are useless, numb blocks of ice. I can barely feel my individual fingers, let alone find the ridges of the clips that would release the buckles.
For a moment, I almost laugh.I can’t even die right.
The sunlight finds me as the shadows shift and I whirl in place, half-alive, half-gone, my chin barely above the churn, and only when the current allows it. I steel myself tolean forward, stop fighting, and invite the water to close its hand over my mouth.
I hope it’ll be quick. Quicker than whatever Leo has in mind.
“Don’t you fucking dare.”This time, when Parker’s voice echoes through my head, it isn’t calm or steady or soothing. It’s loud and angry. Angrier than I ever heard him get while he was alive.
At first, I’m so stunned I don’t know how to react.
And then my own anger—the rage I’ve pushed down to the deepest place, where it could fester, ever since I got that awful phone call—rises higher than the river.You don’t get to tell me what to do right now, Parker! I died when you died. I have nothing left to give!
Without waiting for a response, I try to go limp, letting my head loll forward in the water and forcing the air out of my lungs.
Immediately, my chest seizes. My body bucks toward the surface, and I start coughing violently as the animal instincts in my body refuse to comply with my attempt to end things.
The tears come fast and indignant, hot on my icy cheeks.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of electric green upstream.
My stomach clenches.
It’s too late, now. He’s coming for me. And there isn’t one fucking thing I can do about it.
29
I try one last time to break free of the hole. I twist my shoulders, pump my arms, and kick beneath the water like mad, but the current only yanks me backward harder, pulling as aggressively as I push. Not enough to kill me, but enough to make me wish it would. My breath comes out in choked, coughing, pathetic sobs that sound like the end.
Because this is the end.
In a few seconds, he’ll find me like this—a fish in a barrel, waiting for the bullet.
I want to scream, but he’s the only one who will hear me. Even the thought makes me grit my teeth against the urge.
