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I choked back another sob and then thrashed against the restraints when Drake ran a knuckle up the trail of moisture on my cheek. Pressed the knuckle into his mouth to suck off my grief at the loss of possibly the only real friend I’d ever had.
“The whole thing gave me an idea,” Drake was saying, and I had no idea when he started talking again, but I only heard him distantly as he backed away. The sound of the gunshot that took out my best friend replayed in a morbid beat through my skull in time with my pulse.
“See?”
I dragged my burning gaze up and saw what was behind him. A standing desk with two monitors on it, side by side. He clicked a button on the mouse and the screens came to life. Showing several different surveillance camera feeds from some locations I didn’t recognize… and some I did and wished I didn’t.
My bedroom at Briar Hall.
Becca’s.
The Nest.
Sanctum.
How long had he been watching us? What had he seen? And where the fuck were these cameras?
This was not the same room I was in before, I realized numbly.
It had cement walls and a cement floor like the other one did, but this one also had this desk. Outlets on the wall. A heavy but not impenetrable door in place of the solid slab of stainless steel that’d been in the other room. How big was this place?
“Pretty cool, right?” Drake was saying, continuing to speak like I actually fucking cared what he had to say. Like I wasn’t imagining a thousand ways to kill him to try to keep the tears at bay.
“This way you can watch.”
“Watch?” I found myself asking, my voice sounding unfamiliar to my own ears. Deadened. Exactly the sort of voice he wanted to hear.
I cleared my throat, lifting my chin. Refusing to give him anything.
Drake nodded, white teeth flashing. “So you can watch them all die.”
“We’re falling apart,”I sighed into the sterile hospital room, scrubbing my palms over my face as I watched Becca’s for any signs of life.
She looked so fragile lying there, with the tube down her throat and the IV in her arm and the monitoring devices stickered all over her body. She wasn’t out of the woods yet. They put her in the coma to give her body a better chance at healing, but they still weren’t sure if they’d be able to wake her up after. That would be up to her.
“Corvus lost it,” I continued as though she could hear me. “Heneverloses it.”
I lifted the Styrofoam cup of cold coffee to my lips and took a long swallow, not knowing how much longer I could stay awake.
“And Rook…”
A dark chuckle.
I set the coffee down on the linoleum tile and steepled my fingers, putting them to my lips. “I don’t know, but there’s something wrong there too. He didn’t sound himself on the phone… we’re breaking without her.”
The back of her hand felt like ice under my fingertips.
“We need you to wake up, Becca. you might be the only one who can tell us who this motherfucker is.”
I grit my teeth against the selfish request. Here I was urging her to wake up so that she could help me save her friend; meanwhile, somewhere inside of that beautiful broken body she was fighting to survive herself.
If only she’d finished the drawing we might’ve been able to avenge her, and maybe AJ, too.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you.”
The sound of a man shouting down the hall touched my ears and I sat up straighter, craning my neck to see if I could get a look at him through the window by the door.
I leaned down, feeling the outline of the gun holstered at my ankle, waiting to see if the heavy thudding footfalls of the man were headed in our direction.
