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Setting up.
Preparing.
For the hours and hours of torment he had in store for me.
Knives. Pictures. Assaults of every single kind.
My saliva was acidic, each swallow burning down my throat as I continued counting, and trying hard not to think of the things that could happen to me.
I didn’t hear any footsteps, but the trunk clicked.
Reaching down, I wiped my sweaty palms against my pant legs, knowing a pen would be useless in them if they were wet.
I sucked in a breath so deep it burned to prevent myself from gasping or crying out when the trunk was wrenched suddenly open. The last thing I wanted was for him to know how bone-achingly terrified I was.
Surely, that was what he got off on.
The power that fear and pain gave him.
I had to do everything in my power not to give it to him.
No matter what he did before I could hurt him back.
That deep breath coughed out of me, though, as I looked at the opening between the bars of the cage, and saw not a ski mask, or a stocking-smushed mess, but the real face of my attacker.
Somehow, it was even more chilling to see his features, even as the little true crime podcasts were playing on a loop in the back of my mind about how they only showed you their face if they wanted to murder you.
Of course he wanted to murder me.
He’d murdered those two other poor women.
And he was just so… painfully average.
Regardless of knowing better, some part of us always want the bad guys to appear bad.
That just simply wasn’t the case.
This guy wasn’t exactly ugly, but he wasn’t attractive either. He had the kind of face that you saw in a crowd and immediately forgot about. Oval face, average nose, lips, and cheeks. His eyes were a little wide-set, but not glaringly so, and again, just an average brown shade.
Utterly forgettable.
Yet… there was this little niggling feeling of familiarity.
It spread until it was this rock in my stomach, this solid certainty that I knew him from somewhere, that I’d seen him often enough to remember his unmemorable face.
That made sense, of course.
Wells had insinuated as such when he’d asked for a list of all the places I frequented.
Men like this, they obsessed. That fit the profile. They watched, longed for, planned, bided their time, and then acted.
I’d seen him somewhere. Over and over.
It was driving me a little crazy that I couldn’t place him.
Which, I guess, was good. Because it kept me from being focused on my fear.
Glancing down at me, locked in his little cage, a sneer spread across his features, twisting them uglier with each passing second.
