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I’m pulled up from the ground as roughly as I was put there and sat on the ground. There’s dirt all over my face and clothes thanks to these assholes. I look like a fucking mess.
The guy in charge is an older man, maybe in his late forties. He has salt and pepper hair, the sort of square face that makes me think he was stamped out of a mold, and what they call military bearing, meaning he’s so straight-backed and square-shouldered he looks perpetually at attention. He also has an old boy Texas-style twang. Maybe it would be charming, if he wasn’t letting his men treat me like a piece of meat.
“You’re Briarlee Smith, right?”
I don’t answer that.
“I want my lawyer.”
“You’re not under arrest.”
“Okay, then I want you to fuck off.”
His eyes narrow at me. He doesn’t like this at all. Good. I don’t like it either. Daniel might take these assholes seriously, but I don’t. We still have rights. I still have rights, and they include not being harassed by goons.
“Where is Daniel Knight?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Camera footage at the store you bought this tent from showed you in his presence. Your phone sent a signal a few hundred miles from here. We extrapolated your position to this sector of the forest. I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I know more than you think I do, little lady.”
Little lady? My lip curls.
“Then you tell me where he is, because I don’t know.”
I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where Daniel went, and as strong and fast as he now is, for all I know he’s left the forest completely, maybe even abandoned me to these assholes. I don’t think he’d do that to me, but I hope he’s nowhere close. They have me, but I don’t want them to have him.
“There’s a trail this way, sir.”
One of the tree-clad men has worked out where Daniel headed out. Dammit.
“Follow it.”
Some of the men head that way. I’m left sitting between two guys, faced by my interrogator.
“Start talking,” he says. “Tell me how you ended up out here.”
“Well, I mean, that’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time.”
“I guess it started when I was born. August twenty-third. Back of a tractor.”
“Not that far back,” he growls. “Tell me how you came to accompany Mr. Knight to these woods.”
“He came to my apartment a few days ago,” I say. “He seemed, I don’t know, excited, or maybe upset? It was hard to tell. He said he wanted me to come on a trip with him.”
The guy nods. “Did he say why?”
“He said we needed to go down to the woods. And he said we needed disguises.”
“Disguises? What kind of disguises? Why?”
“Let me think,” I say, biting my lower lip, as if in thought. “Okay, so. He came to my apartment, and I was cleaning up. My dishwasher isn’t working. I mean, it is, but it’s leaving sediment on the glasses, and frankly, I don’t think those tablets actually work. I mean they say that they’ll leave your glasses spotless, but mine usually look like they’ve been at the beach. Where does the sand even come from?”
“Quit stalling, Miss Smith,” he says, utterly unamused.
“Okay, so Daniel came over. We’ve been friends for years, you know. We went to our first dance together when we were kids. It was a flower festival, but it turned out he was allergic to the pollen in my daisy chain, and a bee flew out of Melissa Spencer’s roses and stung him, so we ended up in the nurse’s office the whole time…”
“What did he say to you?”
“Mostly ow, my nose. It stung his nose.”
The guy grits his teeth. He is not happy with me. Not at all. I guess this isn’t how their interrogations usually go.
“What did Daniel say to you when he visited you at your apartment?”
“Oh, right. Well, he said we needed to go down to the woods. Today. Had to be today. I mean that day. You know. He said there would be a surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“A big one!”
He leans in a little, thinking I’m on the verge of revealing something important.
“He said… what was it.” I furrow my brow. “Okay, yes, I remember. He said we had to go to the woods, I mean, down to the woods. And we had to wear a disguise, and also be ready for a surprise. Because if we went down to the woods, we would see…” I pause and frown again. “What was it?”
I have his attention fully now. His eyes are locked on my face, taking in every word.
“Right, no, okay, I know what it was now. He said if we went down to the woods, wearing a disguise, ready for a surprise, and if we went down to the woods that day…”
