Page 79 of Your Masked Haunting

Crunch.

Crunch.

Crunch.

The path breaks beneath his boots, mere feet away from me.

I can’t form a thought or take a breath. My body is debating how fast we can flee or how hard we can fight. Both options sound fucking horrible. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to deal with this.

It was supposed to be cute, a game of cat and mouse with Casper. But now I’m here, hiding in the dark at midnight, avoiding a man who thinks I’m trying to kill him.

Another crunch, and if I could see a single thing, I’d know he’s on the path directly in front of me. I’m tucked away, in the middle of the crop, three or four feet from where he’s standing.

Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t make a fucking sound.

Slamming my eyes closed, I bite down on my lip, holding my breath and waiting for him to continue on. But of course, that would be all too simple and too easy of a hand dealt by the universe.

“There you are,” he cheers, and by the time I hear his boot step toward me, his hand is already fisting my hair and yanking me from my hiding spot.

“Ahh!” I scream, my scalp catching fire as I slap his hands, tugging at his wrists as hard as I can. “Stop! Please!”

“You took him from me. You stole Harvey!” Spit flies with his hate-filled words. He whips me to the ground, dropping on top of me, his knees at my sides.

“Please!” I kick and scream, fighting his hands that are now wrapping around my throat. “Please! I don’t know who Harvey is! I didn’t take him!”

His thumbs press against my esophagus, and panic widens my stare, my body flailing and fighting for relief.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe!

“You won’t escape me this time,” he growls.

I try to gasp, to fight past his iron grip. But to no avail.

“Please!” My cry is raspy and dry, muffled from the pressure. It’s all I can manage to push out. One final word.

Suddenly, a burst of light strikes his face, seeping through the stalks and illuminating the thousand-yard stare in his eyes. My mind latches on to the details rather than the lightness trickling through me or the glitter in the air between us. His irises are bright blue, face weathered, and if I had to guess, I would say he’s around sixty years old. How terrifying would it be for this to be the last thing I saw?

I can feel darkness invading my mind, shutting me down slowly, agonizingly. So, instead of staring at the man who’s killing me, I close my eyes and imagine the face of the one I love. Wavy blond hair, golden-brown orbs with a ring of glitter around his pupils.

My eyes flutter open, and I swear he appears before me for a brief moment before everything around me fades away, darkness taking me into its cold embrace.

My blood races through my heart and pounds in my ears. I can’t hear the sirens that follow us or the cops yelling behind me as I sprint from my car and race toward the back of the house. All I can hear is her screams on that voicemail, playing in a tortured loop in my mind.

I pay them no attention, but I know the guys are beside me, running without hesitation toward whatever we’re about to face. I’d do the same for them. We all would.

Flashlights light our path, streaming from Bates’s and Ledger’s phones. We fly through the gate after I unlock it, rounding the corner and booking it across the massive lawn. The neon sign above the corn maze isn’t lit, but I don’t need it to be to know where to enter.

My body is numb, adrenaline calming any ache in my legs. But it wouldn’t matter if I was barefoot, running through glass. I would get to her.

“Mona!” I cry out, begging the universe to let her be okay.

We race through the entrance, and I hear it, a muffled but desperate, “Please!” as if the only voice I can hear is hers.

I deviate from the path, cutting through the stalks in a straight beeline toward the plea. The guys’ lights shine bright in the darkness, casting an eerie glow onto the crops and the beaten paths.

I’m coming, Mona.

We emerge from the thickness, bursting out into an open path, and the image before us causes everything inside of me to still. Not a weak, soft, and delicate silence. But a deadly, terrifying calm before the sky cracks and hell rains down.