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It was no use, though.
That was chloroform that had been used on me.
And thanks to my morbid curiosity about such things, I knew a lot about it. Like the movies had it dead wrong; you didn't pass out immediately from it. It took a good five minutes to kick in. Then you were out for about as long as the rag was over your face, give or take a bit.
Then you woke up sick and cold about half an hour later, usually with a headache that would last for the rest of the day.
I woke up without the rag anywhere near me, but that wasn't exactly helpful. He could have kept the rag on my face for a long drive. Then only took it off when he'd gotten me in the basement.
I wanted to believe we were only twenty to thirty minutes away from the NBPD station, but I had no way of knowing that since I didn't have my phone with me, and there were no clocks or windows in this room I was in.
Forcing my eyes to scan around even as doing so made my stomach roll again, I realized with what small bit of amusement that I was shoved in a dusty old utility room, and there was the faint sound of a cricket chirping somewhere across the space from me.
Harry's distant relatives.
I needed to trudge through the sludge in my brain and think.
Think and plan.
I didn't see another way out of this.
How would anyone know I was missing?
And even if they did find out in time, who the hell would point a finger at Blake?
For fuck's sake, I'd never even seen any signs of him being a psycho. I mean, yeah, sure, he liked true crime a lot. But so did a lot of us.
Maybe I'd missed signs. Maybe he hadn't just been morbidly fascinated by the cases. Maybe he'd been studying them. Maybe he'd been trying to plot the perfect crime himself. And what better way to get insight on how to do so when you surround yourself with people who knew every facet of crimes, all the ways various killers and rapists had been caught in the past?
Why me, though?
Why, if your goal was to get away with it, would you target someone close to you? Why would you go after someone who was as well-known as I was? People would be looking for me. A lot of people would be looking for me.
It was a stupid move.
So, no, maybe it wasn't just a compulsion toward crime.
This made more sense if it was personal.
And the problem with a lot of these guys who go all psychotic about women is they have concocted some giant fairy tale in their heads about how they are "meant to be together" and crazy shit like that. Then, when they are faced with a rejection—whether outright or imaginary—they lose their shit. They decide if they can't have you, nobody can.
Could that have been the trigger?
Me deciding we really weren't compatible?
Or was it because I started seeing Finn?
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Finn.
A low, pained whimper escaped me as I pressed my hands to my face again.
How could I have been so fucking blind?
Not only was Finn a serial killer, but Blake was a crazy stalker dude?
What the hell was wrong with me?
How could I have missed all those signs?
I was supposed to be good at this. I was supposed to be able to read people, to know what red flags to look out for.
If I made it out of this basement alive, and this shit about Blake and Finn came out, I was going to lose all credibility in my community. I'd have to learn to bite my tongue, so I could go back to bartending.
Shit.
Shit shit shit.
I needed to focus.
My brain felt like scrambled eggs.
No.
It was worse than that.
They felt like scrambled eggs left out until they molded.
I needed to focus.
On the present, not the future.
Staying smart and sharp was how I was going to stay alive.
I knew Blake.
Clearly not as well as I thought I had, but I knew him. And knowing him gave me at least a little insight that might help me rationalize with him, or maybe even trick him. Just enough that I could find a way to get free, to take him out if I needed to.
I'd accepted many, many years ago that I was a woman capable of killing. Not for fun. Not for no reason. But for self-defense? Abso-fucking-lutely. If it was you or me? Well, motherfucker, you were going down.
I was not going to be some picture on a true crime documentary one day. Or if I was, it was going to say I clawed and spat and kicked and bludgeoned my way out of a bad situation.
I was not going to be taken down by someone like Blake.
