The lights cut out abruptly. Complete darkness engulfs the room, swallowing everything in an instant. Disoriented, I reach out for Artemis, but I recall she is no longer beside me.
“Tattoo!” I call out to her using her nickname, especially surrounded by these men.
Panic rises in my throat as muffled gasps and confused murmurs erupt around me. Then, I'm violently shoved backward, my champagne glass shatters somewhere at my feet. My hands instinctively reach out to brace myself and a man's chest pressing against my spine, his arm snaking around mywaist. The scent hits me first, a fragrance that triggers a fear response.
"Boo!" A voice chuckles against my ear, breath hot on my neck. “Hide, Sara.”
I try to scream, but the man’s hand clamps over my mouth, fingers digging into my cheeks, and before I can bite his fingers down, he spins me and releases me into the pitch dark, stumbling forward with arms outstretched. The darkness presses against my eyeballs like thumbs, and my pulse hammers so violently I can feel it in my teeth. Sweat breaks cold across my skin as my mind spirals into a panic.
“Tattoo!” I scream out loud, but I don’t hear her, just the hammering of my heart.
Liam's voice crackles urgently through my earpiece. “Sara, what’s happening?”
A surge of adrenaline floods my veins like liquid electricity, making my fingertips tingle and my vision sharpen despite the blackness. I have to get back to him.
I either choose to be preyed on by these repulsive monsters or run, run as fucking fast as I can.
Thirty-Three
Sara
My head spins in this underground nightmare, but I force myself to backtrack, remembering the hallway entrance is a few feet from where I stand. Once I make my way through it, small emergency lights help me glimpse the narrow corridor around me.
“Liam… the electricity just shut off. I—I’m lost,” I say into the earbud. “I think I’m in the hallway I came from but — shit!”
“What is it?” Liam’s voice crackles with concern.
“It splits. I don’t know which way to go. I never noticed that on my way in. Damn it, Artemis is still in there.”
“Just keep—” His voice cuts off.
“Liam?” I demand, panic tightening my chest. The connection sputters, and my heart hammers.
Of course, this is just my luck. My sense of direction is as good as a goldfish and I'd lose connection with him right when I face a literal fork in the road—just like us, fighting to stay apart, only to end up colliding anyway. I’m going to have a heart attack. Keep going, Sara. You’ll find your way.
I sprint, cursing my mom’s red-bottom heels soaked with spilled champagne. She’s going to kill me, but if she does, it means I come out alive. So, that’s good news.
I take a left, praying to whatever deity might be listening that it’s the right choice. The hallway slopes downward, steeper than I remember. I’m descending some place I haven’t seen before. Definitely not the way I came in from. Now… this is not so good news.
The emergency lights grow dimmer the further I go, replaced by an eerie red glow bleeding from under a doorframe ahead. My stomach drops when I reach it. It’s not an exit, but a large open space beneath the main floor, bathed in crimson safety lights that tint everything like blood.
“What the hell?” I whisper, the words echo in the cavernous room.
It feels like a warehouse down here, with concrete floors and exposed pipes overhead. Shadows slide on their own. I swallow and feel my blood run cold when I see the walls lined with metal doors, at least a dozen and each with a tiny window at eye level. I can’t bring myself to peek inside or imagine what happens in those rooms.
The realization hits like a punch to the gut that this is where they keep the girls, the missing ones from Liam’s list. My breath stutters. The implications are too horrific to process, but I force myself to memorize the layout because we have to come backand save them. I want to believe my intuition led me here, not impending death. I want to believe that everything I’ve surmounted gives me the strength to pay it back somehow.
A sound behind me makes me tremble as footsteps pound closer. Tyler running behind me and suddenly the reality slams into me. I’m stuck underground with him, and I’m pretty sure he wants to hurt me.
I can barely breathe when metal music shrieks at a volume that feels like it’s splitting my skull to explode my eardrums.
Fuck!
The waves of noise punch through my body, liquefying my thoughts. I scream through gritted teeth, but I can’t hear myself and now my eardrums feel seconds from rupturing. I cover my ears, desperate for relief, and then the words I never said to Liam, the three words, hammer into my mind. He may never know how he pieced me back together when I broke, may never understand that between our fights and whispers, I became his. His. Sometimes it takes being so afraid to know exactly where you belong, in his arms.
My legs shatter beneath me. I slam against the concrete, tearing into my knees, pain stabbing up my spine. This isn’t disorientation they’re trying to accomplish; it’s calculated destruction of the human mind as a torture tactic.
My vision blurs, consciousness fragmenting. I bite my lip, tasting copper, and force my body to regulate through the assault. Crawling forward on bleeding knees, I drag myself until something yanks me up by my hair and jerks me back with such force, I swear my scalp might tear.
