There’s something else, she can feel. She’s right at the edge of triggering. Closer than she’s been all night. She was stupid to assume the fact that he didn’t caress her face or try to kiss her meant his madness had no sexual tint to it. Clearly he violated her while she was unconscious with some sick implement like the one currently lodged in her throat. And if Cole managed to get cameras inside this storm cellar, too, then everyone in the command center watched while Mattingly worked on her.
Not the same, a rational voice that sounds like her grandmother’s whispers. Calm down, honey. They don’t feel the same. Luanne’s ghost is right. Whatever’s been placed inside of her down there is smaller, plastic. Not as intrusive. It doesn’t seem designed to immobilize and humiliate.
It’s a catheter, she realizes.
At first, this realization seems comforting. Until she realizes that no matter how basic and utilitarian this device, it means Cyrus Mattingly plans to keep her confined like this for a very long time.
8
Tulsa, Oklahoma
When Zoey Long tosses her keys on the console table, Boris the Destroyer leaps off her sofa and streaks down the apartment’s single hallway, an orange blur across the cream-colored carpet.
Her cat’s frenzied escape doesn’t surprise her. Zoey’s too startled by how good her apartment smells, the best it’s smelled in days.
Maybe enough time’s gone by since Boris got into those nachos she stupidly left on the kitchen counter, or maybe her decision to move the cat’s litter box out onto her tiny patio was a wise one. Whatever the case, she can once more smell the little glass bowls of spiced apple and cinnamon potpourri she’s placed every few feet.
If she weren’t so stressed out from her fight with Jerald, she’d track the cat down and make him sit with her on the sofa. But right now, she doesn’t have the energy. He’ll come out after a bit, she’s sure. Probably just in time to rub against her legs and purr during all the best parts of whatever she decides to watch on TV.
Unless, of course, Jerald calls, in which case her cat will end up interrupting one of the most uncomfortable conversations of her entire life.
But Jerald isn’t going to call. Zoey’s sure of it. Not now, not ever.
It’s over.
It has to be.
She’s never spoken to him that way before. Never spoken to anyone that way, really. And she’ll need a dozen phone calls to her sister and her girlfriends before she’ll be one hundred percent convinced he deserved it.
Her sister, Rachel, will say he did. She’s never liked Jerald, not since he showed up to her birthday dinner at Prhyme Steakhouse in a T-shirt and shorts before dominating the conversation with talk of how much cash one of his ex-girlfriends was making as an Instagram influencer.
Zoey Long has never considered herself the angry type.
In Zoey’s view, anger was arrogance, plain and simple. Angry people, she would have said if pressed, were childish and spoiled and masking those truths with aggression. She wouldn’t have used the words childish and spoiled, of course, because she wouldn’t want to make the person she was talking to angry. But as far as Zoey was concerned, if you stomped your feet and slammed doors, it didn’t matter how old you were—you were throwing a tantrum, plain and simple.
And Zoey didn’t throw tantrums.
But she wasn’t exactly the sweetest of girls, either. Her friends thought she was a good listener, but her friends also knew that on most days she preferred books to people. She was different from her sister, or so she thought. Rachel could be a ferocious loudmouth when the situation called for it. Just the other day, in fact, over drinks at the little dive bar down the street from the dental office where they both work, her big sis had implied that Zoey’s lack of anger might be a weakness. That wasn’t the extent of what Rachel said, of course, but that was the part that kept ringing in Zoey’s ears afterward.
How had Rachel worded it exactly?
Zoey had recently accomplished something “pretty f’in’ monumental” and she wasn’t celebrating herself enough. Worse, she was probably staying fairly quiet for one reason. If she spoke up about her new success as an author, it would draw attention to the fact that her boyfriend of one whole year was staying pretty damn quiet about it, too.
If only she could call Rachel right now—she’d be so proud of her—but Rachel’s on a flight over the Atlantic with her husband, an anniversary trip to Paris. So, for now Zoey’s best option is quality time with her thoughts, awaiting the emergence of her jittery cat, and wondering whether she had a right to read her boyfriend for filth because he insulted the realization of one of her lifelong dreams.
Sex books, Zoey fumes, bracing herself against the doorframe because the memory of Jerald’s words is that powerful. Just don’t talk about your sex books in front of my mom next week.
A year of seeing each other exclusively, the first ever visit to his parents, and his main concern was that she stayed quiet about the first major accomplishment of her adult life. They weren’t sex books, for Christ’s sake. They were romance novels. And while she hadn’t expected Jerald to become a Harlequin junkie just because she’d made some Amazon bestseller lists, she’d expected him to give her a little more credit for all the time and hard work she’d put into them.
True, he’d thanked her for the new laptop she’d bought him with some of the royalties, but that was about it.
She’d spent ten years of her life outlining the backstories of the Roark sisters, plotting out various versions of the ancient legend that was the source of their shared supernatural abilities. She’d drawn dozens of maps of Fog Harbor, the picturesque town on the Oregon Coast that was home to their compound, written three different books in the series, all of which were rejected by a slew of New York agents for reasons ranging from the condescending to the cutting. Then one day, her online author friends in her various Facebook groups encouraged her to “go indie,” as they put it. She’d scraped together the money for editors and a cover designer, and then the miraculous happened.
Not long after she released all three books, people started reading them. And liking them. And reviewing them. Some people were nasty, of course, the internet being the internet. But only one of the one-star reviews managed to really stick in her craw. It was from Bored Reader, and the headline read, Hopefully this writer can be good at other things because it’s not writing stuff. The review’s grammatically incorrect headline was just the tip of the iceberg. The review itself didn’t have any specifics about the book. Just a string of book review clichés that could have easily been cut and pasted from another romance novel’s sales page.
But it didn’t seem to matter what any of the negative reviews said—the damn things kept selling, and the checks kept coming.
And while Rachel was right, Zoey hadn’t exactly gone around crowing about it, she hadn’t kept any of it a secret from her boyfriend, either. But now that she thought about it, his insulting words that night at dinner—if a last-minute trip to the food court at the Woodland Hills Mall because “I could fucking rape some chicken tenders right now, babe” could be considered dinner—were the most he’d ever uttered about her literary accomplishments.