Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,125
feel it give underneath me. Car, I’m in a car. I’m lying on a plush velour seat, I can feel the fabric. Someone’s talking. I can hear a voice. I don’t know what it’s saying. I’m scared down to my bones. I don’t know where I am, what’s happening, and until I can see and hear, I can’t act.
The car starts to move. I know this isn’t the Honda; it doesn’t smell the same. Doesn’t feel the same. I’m in another vehicle, and I have the awful feeling that it’s not Gwen who has me.
My eyes come back first, slowly painting in the world in grainy smears of color ghosted by white rings when I blink. I see the back of a seat, and the rough outline of a head. Not Gwen. The head is misshapen, disturbingly wrong on one side. Jonathan Watson.
I try to breathe slowly, steadily, and take inventory. My head aches. My ears are barely working, still buried under high-pitched noise. The gag’s tight, expertly applied; when I try to scrape my face against the seat, it doesn’t move at all. The bonds on my wrists are tight enough to hurt, and my ankles ache too. I’m in trouble.
He’s talking, I realize. But he’s not talking to me. He’s got a phone, and he’s talking into it as he drives. I hear only the sound of it, not the meaning.
Then I hear the other voice. He’s talking to Gwen.
I try to scream. The gag muffles it. I feel the car slow down and stop, and the driver’s side door opens, closes. A second later, the back door by my head opens, and light floods in on me. I blink, trying to really see him. I struggle.
He pulls me out of the car and across a long, clean concrete surface. I’m in some kind of building, and when I manage to blink and focus enough, it disorients me. Just . . . space, going up into shadows above me, with a winding steel staircase vanishing into the distance.
Lighthouse. I’m in the lighthouse.
He doesn’t pause. Next thing I know, we’re in an elevator, a large freight-size thing that moves jerkily and stops with a jolt. By this time, I can see better. Hear more clearly. And none of it helps.
I try to focus on Jonathan Watson. He seems utterly disinterested in me, other than moving me like a piece of furniture where he wants me to be. He pulls me into a corner and props me against the wall like a discarded mop, then walks away to the elevator. He slides a door shut and enters a code into the keypad beside it. I can’t focus enough to see what it is.
There’s another way down, I tell myself. Stairs.
Yeah, if I can cut myself loose. I look around. This is some kind of control center, maybe for the lighthouse itself; the consoles look new, shiny, fitted out with all kinds of touch-screen displays. I don’t see any sharp corners that I can rub these damn restraints against. There’s a single rolling office chair. On the other side from the rounded console, there’s a bank of monitors, and once I glance toward them, I can’t stop looking.
There are nine monitors. Gwen is on one of them. She’s sitting in a room with a body, a mutilated body, and though I can’t see it in detail, I can feel the horror of it. I start to squirm forward, trying to find something, anything to use.
Jonathan Watson walks back toward me and stands there, watching me. Then he shakes his head and says, “I’m not going to hurt you. You aren’t guilty of anything. But I can’t let you interfere either. This is important. You need to be quiet now.”
I want to tell him about the baby. Maybe it will make a difference. But he doesn’t seem to care when I try to talk through the gag as he takes out a pair of handcuffs. He flips me on my side, cuts off the zip ties on my wrists, and I feel one set of the cuffs going on my right wrist. He pulls me over to a standpipe that’s against one of the walls, and then the second cuff clicks on. When I lunge forward, I nearly jerk my arms out of my sockets, and have to pause to pull in painful breaths through my nose.
He’s locked me to the pipe. I’m not going anywhere.