“Now she has a room upstairs. Freedom to move. She kills well. She entertains well.”
He steps toward me again.
“You had the same opportunity. You chose to fight. You chose to be difficult.”
His eyes harden.
“You could have been upstairs. You could have been like Sophie. Instead, you pointed a gun at me, you ran, and you made yourself a problem.”
He gives a short, dismissive nod, already bored.
“So you’ll go back to the basement. You’ll sit in the dark. You’ll get bigger and more tired and more desperate. You’ll stay there until we decide we are ready to play with you again.”
He looks at Enzo.
“Take her back.”
Elliot picks up a pen from the desk, already done with me.
The study door closes behind us. The warmth of the room vanishes into the colder hallway.
Enzo drags me back down the stairs. Each step sends a line of fire through my back. By the time he shoves me onto the concrete, my vision has started to blur.
The light buzzes overhead again.
Miles lifts his head. “Brooke?”
“I’m fine,” I lie.
I shift onto my side, drawing my knees up as I wrap my arms around my stomach. My face burns from what I just said upstairs. My chest aches from how much I hate myself for saying it.
I begged, and he still sends me back to the basement like I am nothing.
Something inside me sags under the weight of it. The humiliation. The hunger. The dull ache in my stomach that I can’t stop thinking about.
Maybe Seth will find me. Maybe he won’t.
Either way, I am not going to end this place on my knees.
I am not going to become Sophie. I am not going to learn their rules or play their game.
I press my forehead to the concrete and try to breathe through the pain twisting in my stomach.
Seth has to find me.
If he doesn’t, I'm not going to survive much longer.
Chapter 19
Seth
The low-fuel light had been on for fifteen miles, somewhere between Silicon Valley and Fresno. We're running on fumes and adrenaline, and only one of those is renewable.
Travis squints at the dashboard. “Yeah, we’re stopping. I’m not pushing a luxury car through rural California.”
“We should’ve stopped twenty minutes ago,” I mutter, shifting to ease the pressure in my shoulder. The ache is deep and insistent now, a reminder that I'm still stitched together by rage, willpower and Oxy.
He takes the next exit and pulls into a gas station that looks abandoned. A squat concrete box wedged between a sagging chain-link fence and a sun-bleached billboard. The canopy light flickers overhead, bathing the pumps in a jaundiced glow. Two pumps. One cracked glass door. One security camera mounted crookedly above the entrance, its casing yellowed with age.
