She’s about to laugh at this thought when suddenly her forehead is singing with pain. Somehow she tripped so badly she managed to cross the entire room in no time at all. It feels like the floor itself rose up under her feet and threw her. Her first thought is earthquake. They’ve had a bunch in Oklahoma over the last several years. Or maybe she just tripped on one of the boxes. She’s still trying to tell up from down, realizing she’s actually fallen to her knees against the wall, when a viselike grip around the back of her neck draws her backward and slams her head into the wall again. Every muscle in her body reacts to this terrible awareness that the forces suddenly controlling her limbs are not the miniature chaos of a freak accident. They’re organized, human.

The pain throbbing in her skull sweeps down her spine, almost strong enough to mask the more focused sensation of a pinprick in the side of her neck. Then she feels a kind of timelessness that reminds her of waking up from surgery.

She’s lying flat now, and there’s a weight in the back of her throat.

She’s blinking against the force of a bright light. For a second, she assumes it’s the overhead fixture in her guest bedroom, but it’s too bright. If it’s not the guest bedroom ceiling, where is it? Someplace with a very hard floor, because whatever surface is under her back is not the soft carpeting of her guest bedroom. And that means the weight on her jaw isn’t the result of books spilled from boxes knocked over by her fall.

Not a fall, a rational voice reminds her, a throw. You were thrown.

Falls don’t pull you back and slam you against the wall a second time. Falls don’t make a pinprick in the side of your neck.

Something is on my face, she thinks with a dullness that suggests the pinprick she felt earlier released some sort of drug into her system, a drug that’s slowly wearing off. Something is on my face and it feels wrong. Then she tries to swallow and feels something lodged against the back of her throat. At first she thinks its phlegm, but the way it only slightly bucks at the force of her swallow sends fear jolting through her. The thing in her throat isn’t natural. It isn’t flesh. It didn’t come from her. And it’s very hard.

It was put there.

When a man leans forward into the light’s blinding glare, she recognizes him instantly. He’s the guy in the waffle-print coat and baseball cap who stopped to stare at her right as she exploded at her boyfriend in the middle of the food court, and he’s caressing her face. He’s got light stubble and eyes like knife slashes on either side of his big, broken-looking nose. At first, she thinks he’s whispering something to her, then she thinks he’s trying to soothe her, then she realizes that he’s shushing her with a gentle, sustained hissing sound.

“Easy,” the man says quietly. “Easy, Zoey Long. Your silence is your strength. Forget everyone who’s ever told you otherwise.”

II

9

Waxahachie, Texas

The first time she used the catheter felt like an unacceptable surrender; the second, the hazard of doing business with serial killers. She’s never had a nervous bladder, so unless her system’s been aggravated by whatever Mattingly drugged her with back in Richardson, both events suggest she’s been in this cellar almost a full day.

Charlotte’s still astonished she managed to sleep, but after he left and the blinding lamp shut off, plunging her into darkness, it seemed less like a choice and more like she’d been gassed. Maybe it really was the latter, but she doubts it. She’d feel groggier and out of sorts, not just thirsty and hungry.

The darkness is impenetrable. Whatever structure is sitting above the storm cellar is windowless, or the storm doors she heard open earlier are sealed down to the last centimeter. Not even a thread of light has appeared during the hours she’s been down here, not a single sound from the outside world has reached her ears.

Over the course of two operations, she’s never been confined for this long. She’s been tied up, held down, treated like a piece of meat, drugged. But she’s never been left in total darkness for what feels like hours on end. Throughout, she’s kept her mind occupied by trying to puzzle out what this phase of the process means when it comes to Mattingly’s modus operandi.

So far, she’s been able to stave off panic by reminding herself she’s not truly alone. Aboveground and close by, Luke is sitting in his armored Cadillac, awaiting a signal from Kansas Command. Much farther away but in a similar predicament to hers, Cole and his team are also underground, waiting for Mattingly to do something other than store her like cargo. Hell, for all she knows, Cole might have some technology that can brighten the images coming from her TruGlass.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s not alone.

She’s not her mother. Not yet.

Based on how far away the storm doors sounded when Mattingly opened them earlier, Charlotte figures the cell must be about ten or twelve feet deep. It also sounded like he climbed a ladder on his way out. If the cellar’s as deep as she thinks it is, she can’t imagine him carrying her down that ladder all by himself. Maybe he’s got an accomplice here, but nothing about Mattingly’s speech suggested as much. He seemed possessive of her and inordinately proud of the face mask and gag he’s placed her in. More importantly, mentioning accomplices, if there were any, would have been a great way to frighten her into silence, and her silence seems especially important to him for reasons ranging from the practical to the pathological.

These questions, however difficult they are to answer in this moment, keep imaginings of her mother’s final hours in the Bannings’ root cellar from doing anything more than knocking at the door to her mind.

The wood beneath her starts to shake, a steady quiver. Some sort of machine or engine has shuddered to life close by.

A vague pulse of light divides the blackness overhead, providing answers to one of the questions that’s circled in her head for hours. Yes, they are in fact a set of double storm doors, and no, they’re not perfectly sealed. The illumination isn’t daylight. It’s red. It has to be coming from the taillights of a vehicle—probably the truck he bought that started all of this. The fact that no pulse of daylight preceded its approach suggests the structure above has no windows at all. Or it’s night again.

The double doors make the same sound they made earlier when Mattingly left her. In the vague illumination given off by the taillights of the truck parked overhead, Charlotte can see her surroundings for the first time. A narrow concrete-walled storm cellar, accessible by a ladder attached to one wall, a ladder Cyrus Mattingly is descending in a different outfit from the one he wore to her abduction. He smells conventional and clean, like Old Spice mixed with Irish Spring, and somehow this sickens her worse than her confines. There’s something on the wall closest to her feet. At first she thinks it’s another ladder, but before she can be sure Mattingly is standing over her, blocking her view.

He places one palm against her exposed cheek, then her forehead. Again, she notes the absence of any sort of perverted desire in his touch. He seems like he’s just checking her temperature.

When he sees her eyes are open, he unfolds the bunched-up edge of the fabric hood covering her skull, turning the extra fabric into a blindfold. Then she hears him mounting the ladder again.