The cabin lacked light and warmth—especially in the cellar. To be honest, it was downright dull too. The place could use sprucing up if the owner planned to “entertain” other guests in the future.
I held my breath as a spider made its way across the cracked cement floor. All eight of its hairy, demonic legs pumped in jointed coordination, giving it a creepy gait that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
It got close enough that I could see it was the one I’d named Harold, with its distinctive markings and striped legs. Thankfully, it didn’t break the two-foot bubble of comfort that would make me sweat. The spider stopped, and its beady, black eyes crawled over me.
After a second, the beast moved on.
I let out the breath I’d been holding and sagged back against the hard, wooden chair.
Yes, ex-CIA agent Branson Grinley would need to work on his hosting skills if he planned to entertain more kidnap victims in his deceased family’s cellar.
Downtime ran rampant when kidnapped. I’d know. It’d happened to me a handful of times before. I’d been kidnapped so many times now, I might begin to need a second hand to keep track.
For a week, I had seen nothing other than this derelict basement and the multitude of spiders. With nothing better to do, my thoughts had done nothing but spiral about my life up to this point.
Whenever I recalled my childhood, I always wondered if everything happened by my own fault. A grown adult—soon to be twenty—I shouldn’t believe that. I was the victim. I would never blame another victim for being victimized. But… my subconscious didn’t want to listen to me, like a rock in my shoe, prodding at my hope until it morphed into a festering, infected mass of despair.
If I wasn’t to blame, how could so many terrible things have happened?
Take, for example, Kazimir Ivanov. Little Kaz was the product of a monster, but children weren’t shaped by anything at so young of an age, going about with innocence in oblivious joy. Kaz was a sweet child, despite his father, Nikolai Ivanov. The twine bracelet he made me was my most cherished possession. He was the light through four very dark years of my life.
Then Nikolai had him killed.
Thinking about that horrible day brought me to my original thought.
If I didn’t cause things to happen, why did these things keep happening around me?
How could one person have such a bad hand in life? It was enough to make me believe in reincarnation. How else could I have built up enough bad karma to get the sad excuse of an existence that I had?
My mind traveled back to that time in the bedroom—uh, Payton Emerson’s bedroom, that is.
Emerson told me his team wanted to be with me, and I wondered if I hadn’t had bad karma all along. Perhaps I’d just been paying the price to reap the rewards of eternal bliss later on in life.
However, after a week here, tied up in this cabin in the middle of nowhere... I had to go back to my previous belief. I must have been a serial killer in a past life. Maybe I ate puppies for breakfast and knocked old ladies’ canes out from under them as they hobbled along.
Because, despite the physical pain I was in, the emotional pain was much worse. Grinley stayed away most of the time, and I had nothing to keep me busy. The spiders only provided so much distraction, and my mind would replay my last few seconds with Emerson. He’d looked so pale and ashen, bleeding out on the floor.
When Grinley showed up, he asked the same questions over and over and over again: Where was Nikolai Ivanov? How could he get to him? What would it take for me to turn on Ivanov? What did these fifteen numbers mean to me? They weren’t coordinates; who sent them?
I gave the same answers over and over again.
Where was Ivanov? I didn’t know.
How could Grinley get to him? I wish I knew.
What would it take to get me to turn on Ivanov? I always was and always would be against Ivanov.
What were the fifteen numbers? I’d never seen them before.
If I’d never seen them before, how should I know who sent them or what they meant?
Grinley would show his distrust of my answers in a very physical manner, then storm out.
Rinse. Repeat.
The process repeated in an endless loop, cyclonic and torrential as it tore up my psyche into