PROLOGUE
MOLLY THOMAS
It was a risk sneaking out to meet Eliza, but Molly needed to confess to what she’d done, the guilt all but suffocating her.
Why, why had she gone to talk to that pretty deputy? No matter how close Eliza was with Sheriff Hicks, Eliza had been adamant from the start that they couldn’t bring in the police. She was bound to be furious with Molly.
But Molly wasn’t brave or strong like Eliza. She was scared. So scared. And there was still a chance they could stop all this, they could stop it, they could . . .
No. It’s too late. Someone was going to die.
Because of you. No. No, because of . . .
Eliza.
Molly flinched, cowering from the thought, pushing it to a far corner in her mind where it couldn’t hurt her.
They were meeting by the fence like always, and Molly would confess to Eliza that she’d gone to talk to the pretty deputy sheriff, she would. She promised herself that over and over and over as she picked her way across the uneven terrain in the darkness toward the property line between their two homes. The night made the familiar path more difficult to navigate, required more concentration. That’s why the sound didn’t register at first.
And then it did.
Boot against rock.
Someone trying to be quiet.
Molly stilled. Not quite nervous yet. She was close enough to the fence that it could be Eliza who’d come looking for her.
It had to be Eliza because no one else should be out here. Molly would have noticed the car coming up from the road.
Unless the person didn’t want to be seen.
The night deepened, wrapping around Molly, but it wasn’t a comfortable weight like usual. Instead it squeezed, a vise around her chest. She tried, she tried to be quiet, to stop the wheezing, the desperate drag of oxygen, while she listened to hear if . . .
There it was.
There it was.
Someone was moving closer.
Her cheeks were wet almost before she realized she was crying. She’d thought panic looked different, but here it was, a breathless thing that came in a gentle wave instead of a crushing blow. Molly held a sob in her mouth, tucking it into the softness of her cheek so that it was absorbed by the bitten flesh.
Go.
Molly broke into a run, heading back toward the house, away from the fence, away from Eliza.
She tripped, went down on a knee.
The stench of fertilizer matched the sharp tang of fear that coated her tongue, her nostrils.
Someone’s going to die.
She’d known that. Molly just hadn’t realized it was going to be her.
No. Inhale. Hold it. Count to five. Exhale. Stand up.
She pushed to her feet.
If someone had been chasing her, they should have been there, ready to overtake her, overpower her, drag her off to that horrific forest where all the victims disappeared.
No one was there, though.
Molly flushed hot. She was letting it get to her. All of this.
This time when Molly started walking again, it was toward home. She listened for the night noises to return, the ones that had been scared off by her terror, the scampering of creatures, birds in the distance, the rumble of a far-off engine.
They didn’t come.
Instead, it was just thick silence.
No more boots, no more warnings. Just the unnatural hush that accompanied stalked prey.
As she neared the dried-up creek bed, she heard it again.
Footsteps.
Behind her.
No longer trying to be quiet.
Molly didn’t pause, didn’t freeze.
She ran.
It was dark wherever Molly was being held, so dark there was no sound, no light, no reality beyond the frantic beating of her own heart.
It was the kind of dark where Molly couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or not.
Molly focused on the whisper of eyelashes against her cheeks. That, she could feel.
Closed. Her eyes were closed.
Open. Now they were open.
She repeated it, blinking, slowly focusing on that flutter to ground her—ground her to her body, to time, to something other than pure fear.
When her pulse no longer trembled unsteady and too loud against her throat, Molly sought out the pain.
A dull throb in her shoulders.
Bruised hips.
Raw wrists.
A knife-sharp heat in her ankle anytime she moved it.
She cataloged each ache, each hurt, before trying to put it into context.
The shoulders were because her arms were bound behind her back, where they bore the weight of her body. Though she was mostly numb, her skin still screamed from the rope abrasions.
She had twisted enough so that her hips pressed against the top and bottom of the box she was in—because it was a box, she realized. Not a coffin.
Her ankle. That had been from when she’d tripped. Running from . . .
No.
Blink, open. Blink, closed. Breathe.
It wasn’t a coffin. It wasn’t a coffin.
CHAPTER ONE
LUCY THORNE
Thursday, 3:00 a.m., three weeks later
The girl in the interrogation room stared at the exact spot where FBI Agent Lucy Thorne stood behind the mirror that separated them.
She was pale, nearly translucent—white-gold hair, porcelain skin, lips that only hinted at pink. But her eyes, that was where all the color was. Deep blue, made even more startling by the contrast to the rest of her.
As Lucy met the girl’s gaze through the layers of glass, a chill sank into the marrow of her bones, a shiver rippling beneath her skin that had nothing to do with the temperature in the field office.
“She asked for me?” Lucy checked again, despite the fact that Special Agent-in-Charge Grace Vaughn had already confirmed it three times.
Some tired recess of Lucy’s brain had snagged the bit of information, and it ended up looped, the words chasing themselves—a question, then a statement, then a question once more.
She asked for me?
“By name,” Vaughn said, none of her trademark impatience obvious in the soft Georgia drawl she deployed at will.
“You think she’s legit?”
Vaughn didn’t take her attention from the girl. “Yes.”
Lucy didn’t even know why she’d asked. Vaughn wouldn’t have called her in at 3:00 a.m. otherwise, not when she’d known Lucy had been in the middle of leading a training session out in the woods at the edge of the city.
“She give her name?” Lucy asked, trying to tame her damp hair into a semblance of respectability. The forest had been muddy from the rain the day before, water still slipping from the trees’ leaves. Everyone had been soaked through by the end of the night session.
“No.”
An unidentified walk-in, then. Usually those were filtered out by the main desk, diverted to the local drunk tank or referred to a social worker. They rarely got to this point. Even if they asked for a specific agent.
The girl had to have a convincing story.
“We know nothing else, right?” Lucy asked, already heading for the door.
“Blank slate.”
Lucy nodded, then slipped into the hallway, pausing there to roll her shoulders, releasing some of the tension that had built as she’d watched the girl through the glass. Then she took a breath and stepped through the door.
The girl tipped her head when she caught sight of Lucy, her expression calm—no panic, no fear there. Her eyes slid over Lucy, pausing at the damp spots from her hair, the mustard stain at the hem of her T-shirt, the dark jeans that had a rip at the knee, the dirt that had caked at the bend of her elbow. Lucy hadn’t had much time to clean up after getting Vaughn’s urgent message and had been lucky to have a change of clothes stashed in her car.