“No,” I gasp, struggling against the cuffs. “Let me go. Please. Whatever you’re going to do, please, don’t.”
I’m not firing on all cylinders, though, because it takes me too long to realize that I need to scream for help now that his handisn’t over my mouth. Sucking in a deep breath, I open my mouth to alert Celeste or the other massage therapist, Susan, that I need help, but something slaps over my mouth before I have a chance.
When the sound leaves my throat half a second too late, it can’t penetrate the thick, sticky tape sealing my scream inside.
The man leans over me, his face coming into view. Unless I’m completely hallucinating, it’s not Eddie. But I do recognize him, the breath leaving my nose so hard I’m sure there’s snot on the tape.
10-42. Blue eyes that chilled me to the bone. Wyatt in his face. All the guys standing behind him. Nate and Liam throwing him out.
The man who shoved his chair into me.
“Ah, you do remember me.”
It pleases him to know this, the smile sliding into place on his face reminding me of a psychopath from the movies. The only place people like this belong. There’s something deranged and unfocused in his eyes, yet he appears sharp, like he knows exactly what he’s doing.
I scream behind the tape, willing someone in one of the other rooms to hear me, pulling at the restraints on my wrists. When I kick my feet to hit him in the back of the head, my legs only move an inch off the bed. Something is holding them down, biting into my pants and skin. Something thin and unforgiving.
“Had a feeling you’d try that,” he says, moving towards my feet.
I lift my head and watch him reach over me, dropping something on the opposite side of the bed, then kneel to bring it around under the bed. A second later, he stands again, a wire cable in his hand. He repeats the process, wrapping it around me and the bed, tying me down.
“These beds make it real easy with the metal table legs,” he says nonchalantly, as if he’s making normal conversation on a Monday afternoon. “When I came for a massage a couple weeks ago, I got your coworker at the other end of the hall—asshole move, by the way, your room used to be down there and this one was hers—”
He pauses to glance at me, head shaking. Susan and I switched rooms after Eddie.
“—I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw how these electric tables are put together. Just a little loop-de-loop through the metal legs with the cable—” He pulls everything tight, and I suck in a sharp breath when the wire digs into my ankles and legs. “—and it makes it harder to get off later.”
Straining my neck to look at the clock, I whimper. There’s still half an hour before Celeste expects me to be up. Half an hour is too much time. The amount of horror he could inflict…
Another loop around my midsection, my attention comes back to my captor as his hand skims over my hip bone with the wire.
“I’d love to take my time with you all tied up on this bed, but this part needs to be quick.” My blood runs cold when his eyes find mine. Cold, dark eyes. “I suppose you’d do it for me in a pinch, but it’s the fire that really makes my dick hard. And it’s about to be a rock.”
Fire.
He gets off on fire.
The arsonist.
We were wrong. It was never Eddie. It was him. This sick fuck.
I buck against my restraints, desperate to be out of them. It’s futile, I know, but I also know that whatever he has in store is going to be worse than bruises from fighting the cuffs and wire.
The man hums as he makes another couple of loops aroundmy body and the bed. “Maybe I was wrong. Watching you thrash like that is hot. Maybe I should have planned for longer in here. Too late now.”
I’m not sure which part makes me stop fighting, but I lie still, my chest heaving with breaths through my nose. It doesn’t feel like any part of my body is getting enough oxygen, every inch of my skin prickling with pins and needles.
When he gets to my chest, he pauses, resting a hip against the bed. Taking a deep, long inhale, he slowly lets it out with a groan of satisfaction. “I can smell it, Bryn. Can you smell it yet? It won’t be long. Fire travels fast once it gets going.”
My eyebrows pull together as I sniff. Then sniff again. Longer the third time. That’s when I catch it. It’s faint, but unmistakable. Like the lingering smoke that hangs in the air at the end of a campfire.
Or the beginning of one.
“You know that vacant space beside the clinic? The one on the other side of the room you should have been in?” he asks, my stomach bottoming out when he scowls at me. “That space came in real handy for me. Some accelerant on the walls, some fuel on the ground, a well-timed phone call to dispatch from building maintenance to put the building on disregard so when they got notification that the sprinkler system went down, they wouldn’t send anyone to investigate.”
He chuckles to himself. “Do you know how easy it was to impersonate building maintenance? Too easy. They’re probably going to rewrite some rules after this because of me.”
The laughter morphs into a snarl, and he leans closer to me, his eyes going wild. I want to dissolve into the bed, away from him.
