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I glance at the damn book. There’s an airplane on the cover.
If you told me I’d stay alive, I’d read that book cover to cover every day.
My stomach growls again, the gurgle painful. I look at the bedside clock.
Seven minutes have passed since I last looked.
My eyes drift to a tiny, fuzzy gray thing behind the clock. It looks like a piece of velvet, stretched tight. It’s the color of my old cat, the color of ashes mixed well from a wood stove. The gray is buried in wires from the clock. Whatever it is, I can’t reach it.
Someone in the other room shouts. All the blood drains out of my hands. My heart speeds up like a scared horse.
They’re going to kill me with fear. Not their hands, or other body parts, or weapons.
Good old-fashioned fear.
What are they doing? How can I leave a clue for Drew? I start to move toward his nightstand. Hopefully he has a pen and something I can write on. My breath draws in and out, like the wind on dry corn husks. I curl the back of my tongue so it doesn’t sound so loud.
As if on cue, Stellan walks in, that creepy half grin propping up one side of his face. He’s movie-star famous, but I can’t see it. When someone abuses you, all objective thought disappears. No matter how attractive he is, he’ll always trigger disgust in me.
But I have to pretend.
“Hey beautiful, look at you. Studying hard?” He looks at the book with genuine curiosity. Mocking laughter fills the room. “He reads this shit for fun? What a boring ass. All that work trying to outsmart us, and he thinks reading books like this will help?” He looks at me, his smile fading. “He won’t be reading anything for much longer. Just the walls of a prison cell after what we do to you.”
“What?” I shouldn’t react. I can’t help it. What is he talking about? Why would Drew be in prison?
“Don’t you get it, Lindsay? Why do you think we’re here? In Drew’s apartment?”
“Drew would never join with you assholes. Never,” I counter. Some part of me just decided. Made a split-second decision.
Apparently I have more fight left in me than I realized.
“You think he’s part of us? No. Hell, no,” he says with a soft, creepy laugh. “He’s too soft. To easy.”
Soft and easy are the last words I’d use to describe Drew. Ever.
“We’re setting him up.”
“For stalking?”
“You really are stupid, aren’t you? No, not for stalking.”
“Then for wh -- ”
Oh.
I get it.
Oh, God.
“For your murder, Lindsay. Poor paranoid stalker Drew went over the top and killed you.” He smirks. “At least, that’s what the headline will say tomorrow.”
I let out a laugh, a sound like tinsel being dragged through teeth. “You’re planning to kill me and leave my body here, to make it look like Drew killed me in his apartment?” I go cold. So cold. My shoulders and gut tighten and I start to shake involuntarily.
But I laugh.
“We fought about it,” Stellan says easily, like we’re talking about a policy debate, or which Georgetown Thai restaurant is best. “I thought we should set up a murder-suicide, but we have other reasons for keeping Drew alive.”
Keeping Drew alive.
