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She doesn’t wait for me to answer before she powers on, talking as though she’s leaving me to study—not to die in the shallow grave she dug next to a woman she gutted.
Tears are still leaking from my eyes, trailing a river down my temples into my hair. My face is going to beall over the news. I’ll be a missing person—for how long?
I want to scream.
I can’t scream.
“I’m going to put this tarp over y’all now. It’s a mercy, really. It’s a shallow grave, by design. I want him to find you. I want him to find you and be too late.” She smiles, but it’s twisted with something that looks like regret and malice. She doesn’t want to do this to me, but she wants to do it to him more than she wants to let me go. “You’d suffer more with the dirt alone. There’d be pockets of air. It would prolong the inevitable. But with the tarp, it’ll be heavy on your face. You can’t move, so you can’t fight it. You’ll fall asleep. It’ll be painless, mostly.” She crouches down, and her fingertips are cold as she runs them almost tenderly over the side of my face. “I tried not to like you, but I did. I tried to make it fast and painless, but you held on. You kept holding onto him.” She pulls her hand back, and I do my best to plead with whatever shreds of humanity she has lurking inside her with my eyes. “It has to be this way. He must believe you suffered. That you were afraid. That he’s the reason you took your last breath like this. Agonized and alone. Like he made her.”
The tears roll faster now. I’m so close to the end, I can feel it.
She stands and reaches for the tarp again butstops. “I almost forgot.” She pulls my phone from the band of her leggings. “I’m just going to tuck this right here.” She sets the phone at the very tip of my fingertips, knowing I can’t shift, can’t force my body to move enough to grasp for it. To save myself.
This is torture. Agony.
She’s cruel.
To even have these thoughts. To manipulate this way, by such twisted design—she must be evil. There’s no other explanation. Nothing.
“There. A picture of devastation.” Her hand touches her chest as she takes in her work. “It’s poetic, really. He’s going to find you like this. A call away. God, he’s called so much. He’s overbearing, really, I don’t know how you stood for it.” She shakes her head in disgust. “Anyway, he’s going to find you like this, knowing you suffered. Knowing you knew you were surrounded by death, pulled under by death and there wasn’t a thing he could do to save you.”
“Whaa—”
She leans down, arched brows raised. “Hmm?”
“What a-re you g’do?”
“What am I going to do?” She touches her chest again. “How thoughtful of you to ask. See, you really are nice. Sucks you had the shit sense to get messed up with Cash Jagger.” She makes a disgusted sound. “I’m going to save my sister. We’re going to go somewhere better than here. Somewhere we can start over andbuild our own family. Maybe we’ll have our own child—of course not our own because that’s impossible—but there are so many kids with crappy parents. So many sad faces. I see them every day. Me and Alyssa could be better for one of those kids.” She gives a small lift of her shoulder. “She’s always wanted to be a mom, and kids go missing every day. The police hardly even look for them. They become just another file, ya know?” Her brow furrows in thought. “Really, it’s a sad world we live in.”
She’s going to kidnap a child. This murdering psycho is planning to kidnap a child—for her sister—so that she can be a mother.
She’s batshit crazy.
I suddenly want to fight her. My fingers twitch again.
“Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do, so don’t you worry your nice little mind about me. And we both know what you’re going to do.” She gives a small chuckle, wrinkling her nose. “Bad joke. Whoopsie.”
How could I have ever thought we were friends?She’s always been unhinged. There were so many signs I should have seen that I swept under the rug, excused away.
“It’s lights out now.” She sings as she folds the tarp over my body, my heart pounding a drum in my chest that echoes in my ears.
When the first shovel of dirt connects with my belly, I think I lose all the air in my lungs right there.
I’m being buried alive, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing I can do to save myself.
Another shovel follows by another and another and another. I’m gasping for breath now, desperate. When the dirt connects with the tarp over my face, I feel as though I’m being waterboarded. Already, I can’t breathe.
Terror bubbles in my lungs as I open my mouth wide to drag in breath. My head is already angled slightly to the side—the side where the dead woman lays with her wide unseeing eyes on me. I have to turn my head to the side if I’m going to survive this. If I can just wait this out long enough to use my limbs—to claw myself free. It’s going to be made so much harder to do that, I realize, because the tarp acts like a tomb, encasing me in.
Panic blurs my vision, or maybe it’s lack of oxygen now. Or even the weight of the earth on my chest, pressing into every inch of my body.
My mind goes wild. Images of earthy claws bursting from the deep of the ground beneath me to slice into my flesh, hooking taloned earth covered bone around the bloody handles of my ribs, pulling me down, down, down.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I will away the fear—the delusions I know aren’t real but manifestations of myterror, and I concentrate. I put every effort into twisting my head just that much to the side, so that my face is sharing air with the dead woman. At least, for now, thereisair.
But it’s only a matter of time. I know it like I know if I were cut, I’d bleed red.
The air will run out.
