by Stella Hart
It was torturing him just as much as it was torturing me.
With a soft sigh, I turned my head away and closed my eyes, settling my head into the pillow so I could prepare myself for another idyllic fantasy where Nate and I were a happy couple on a trip together. Tonight, I could pretend we were on an island together, sleeping in a small but cozy hut on the beach as strains of music echoed from a party somewhere nearby. The party would have tiki torches, dancing, and overflowing drinks, and the music would be smooth and mellow.
Just like the song Nate was softly humming right now.
A ghost of a smile curled up my lips as I started to hum along with the tune. Then my eyes snapped open, and I sat up straight. Nate wasn’t humming. The music was playing again, drifting into the bunker from the storage cupboard six feet away.
I sprang up from the bed and crept closer to the cupboard to confirm what I was hearing. Then I hurried back over to the bed and tapped Nate on the chest.
“Are you awake?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t blow up at me for touching him when we weren’t having sex.
His eyes opened. “Yes,” he muttered, sitting up slightly.
“Do you hear that?”
He frowned. “Hear what?”
“Come over here,” I said, motioning to the storage cupboard.
I opened it up so that the extremely faint strains of music were slightly louder and clearer. Nate got off the bed and headed over to me, brows furrowing.
“See? I told you I wasn’t just hearing things!” I said, throwing my hands up. “You can hear that, right?”
Nate nodded as he stared at the brick wall at the back of the cupboard. “Yeah. That’s definitely music.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
He slowly shook his head, mouth set in a grim line. “I have no idea. But I’m going to find out.”
25
Nate
I pulled my clothes and shoes on and stepped out of the bunker, mind whirling as it searched for answers.
All this time, I thought Alexis was batshit insane and hearing things in her head—or simply making things up to get under my skin—but I was wrong. I couldn’t deny the faint, lilting strains of music emanating from the storage cupboard.
There was something on the other side. Or someone.
I initially thought about getting a sledgehammer and knocking the bricks out of the back of the cupboard, but then I figured it would be quicker and easier to go out and find what was almost certainly a second bunker on the estate. I had no idea where it was, because I’d never heard of such a thing existing on this land, but I knew the entrance and main body had to be somewhere nearby, or else the music wouldn’t drift through to the first one.
Once I was outside, I sealed the hatch and turned on my phone’s flashlight app. It was so dark in these woods that the light died only inches from the narrow beam, and the harsh winds rustling through the trees were freezing, making my bones ache. Obviously, it would be better to wait until daylight before beginning my search through these woods, but once my interest had been piqued, there was no going back. I wouldn’t be able to sleep until this mystery was solved.
I found a big stick and held it in my spare hand, using it to brush up layers of leaves, stones, twigs, and pine needles in the hope that a hidden hatch would suddenly reveal itself below the detritus. As I tirelessly worked away at that, my mind continued to race with questions.
If there was another bunker on the grounds, why had no one in my family ever told me about it? They had no problem with me playing in the other one when I was a kid who thought old war stuff was the coolest shit on the planet.
It could be that they thought that the bunker I played in was the safer, closer one, so they decided to only tell me about that, and then they forgot to mention any other bunkers when I got older, seeing as it wasn’t exactly an important issue. Or maybe they simply didn’t know about any other bunkers on the grounds. If that were the case, though, how could anyone be using the mystery bunker right now?
Could a random trespasser have found it and decided to use it? If so, how did he or she find it? What were they even doing here in the first place?
Another option that crossed my mind was that no one was using it at all. Perhaps there was an old record player down there, put in when the place was blocked off from the main tunnel system and refurbished into a bomb shelter, and it played by itself from time to time when the generator turned on and off for whatever reason.
As soon as the idea occurred to me, I realized it didn’t make any sense. Why would the generator down there switch on and off all by itself? The one in the other bunker didn’t—unless it ran out of fuel, it was always on and capable of providing power. So unless there was someone using the generator in the mystery bunker, there was no reason for it to ever run out of fuel. It wouldn’t turn back on afterwards unless it was refueled, either, which had to be done manually.
Also, as far as I knew, record players didn’t play music just because the power had turned off and on again at some point. There had to be someone there to make it happen.
I kept searching, moving slowly in a grid pattern so I didn’t miss anything as I swept the ground with my stick. Night birds called to each other as I worked, and every so often I heard the scrabble of claws as squirrels dashed to the top of nearby trees, frightened by the sound of my feet crashing over dead branches and leaves.
Frustration boiled up inside me when my phone beeped at me, alerting me to a low battery. The clock said it was almost three in the morning. That meant I’d been searching these grounds for almost two hours, and I had nothing to show for it. I knew there had to be something out here, though. There was no other explanation for the music that Alexis and I heard earlier. Not unless the rampant sex had melted our brains and turned us both insane.
Folie à deux, the French called it. Madness shared by two.
I remembered it from a documentary I watched in class in my junior year of high school. It was a condition in which delusional beliefs were somehow transmitted from one person to another. Sometimes those delusions included auditory or visual hallucinations.
Just as I was starting to worry that Alexis was driving me crazy—literally—I stumbled over a tree root and crashed to the ground. My hands shot out to break my fall, and my phone flew several inches away and landed on its side. The bright white light from the flashlight app caught a strange silvery glint several feet to my left.
Heart thudding with anticipation, I hurried over to the spot and pushed piles of leaves and twigs to one side until a large metal hatch was revealed.
It was nothing like the hatch on the other bunker. The other one looked old and rusty, and it locked from the inside to protect occupants from the outside world, so the only way I could keep Alexis trapped in there was to add my own chains and padlock to seal it off when I left.
This new hatch looked far more modern with barely any grime and no rusted parts, and it had been designed differently, with a twisting lock mechanism in the middle that could only be manipulated by a person standing outside.
That meant it wasn’t designed to keep the world out. It was designed to keep someone—or something—inside.
“What in the fuck?” I muttered to myself as I stooped lower to twist the locking mechanism. The small metal wheel on the main component was a bit stiff, but it opened easily enough once I wrenched it around to the left a couple of times.
I lifted up the hatch and peered downward. The steps leading into the mysterious shelter were dark and silent. There was no light or sound spilling out from farther down the passage, either. I knew the music had come from somewhere in here, though. Nothing else made sense.
I picked up my phone and used it to light the way as I trudged down the steps. So far, it looked the same as the other bunker.
Halfway down the passage, I found the main light switch on the left wall. Above it was a hook with a large silver key hanging on it.
Frowning, I wondered if I s
hould turn the light on or leave it off to give me the element of surprise. Fuck it, I finally decided. This bunker lay beneath land that belonged to my family, so I had every right to poke around inside.
I flicked the switch upward and looked around as light flooded the passage. “Anyone in here?” I called out toward the main room.
No answer.
I slipped my phone back in my pocket, leaving both arms free in case of a confrontation. Then I headed down to the end of the passageway. At the end lay a large rectangular room, just like the one Alexis was currently trapped in.
As I looked around the new space, adrenaline flushed through my system, and my muscles went rigid.
There was a man on the other end of the room, chained to a bunk.
26
Nate
I took a tentative step forward, hardly believing my eyes.
The man was asleep on the bunk with his head at the top end, so I couldn’t make out much detail, but I could see that he was relatively tall with messy shoulder-length hair, which was dark brown with streaks of gray. He had a thick mustache and scruffy beard as well, and the deep lines I could see on his forehead made me think he was at least fifty years old.
His left ankle had a thick steel cuff around it, joined to a chain that was attached to the base of the bunk. It looked like it was several feet long, meaning the man would be able to access every corner of the room while he was awake, including the toilet and shower in the right corner and the kitchenette on the left. It wouldn’t stretch as far as the passage, though, so he was permanently confined to this space.
Shock and confusion roiled in my guts as I took another step forward.
Who the fuck was this guy? Why was he locked in a bunker on my family’s property? How long had he been here?
Before I woke him up and demanded answers, I did another quick sweep of the room to see what I was dealing with. There was a TV on a small cabinet opposite the bunk, and one of the open storage cupboards appeared to be full of books. The other cupboard door was shut, but judging by the pile of trash pushed into one corner of the room, I was willing to bet that it was filled with food, water, and soda.
I looked back at the man. Clearly, he hadn’t been left down here to die. Not unless the person who locked him up wanted it to happen extremely slowly.
I cleared my throat loudly. The man jerked awake and sat up, bloodshot eyes widening as he caught sight of me standing in the entryway.
Despite his wild, unkempt appearance, which didn’t square with anything in my world, something about his face was deeply familiar. I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen him before, but I felt like I knew him all the same.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He didn’t answer my question. He just stared at me through narrowed eyes. “Nate Lockwood,” he finally said in a low voice. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Who are you?” I repeated.
The man sat up straighter. “You really don’t recognize me?”
I shook my head slowly. “No. Should I?”
He scoffed. “You always were a self-centered little asshole, weren’t you?” he muttered. “What are you doing here, anyway? How’d you find me?”
“Tell me who the fuck you are first,” I shot back.
The man lapsed into silence and stared at the opposite wall. There was something flickering in his blue eyes; an emotion I recognized easily after spending so much time with Alexis.
Fear.
Whoever this man was, he was afraid of me and what I might say or do to him. He wasn’t going to talk again unless I made him feel like he had no other choice.
I took a step back and raised my palms. “Look, whoever you are, you’re obviously in a bad situation,” I said, dipping my chin toward the chain and cuff attached to his foot. “I’m going to call the police to get you out of here.”
I actually had no intention of calling the cops—not while I had Alexis trapped in another bunker less than fifty yards away from this one, anyway—but I had a feeling that a simple mention of them would be enough to get this man talking.
I was right.
“No!” he roared, making the chain rattle on the concrete floor as he jumped off the bed. “No cops!”
I didn’t flinch as he lunged toward me. He couldn’t reach me where I was standing. “Why?” I asked. “Don’t you want help?”
“No.” The man dropped back down on the bunk again. “Your mother will get in trouble for keeping me here.”
A heavy feeling appeared in my stomach. “My mother is the one who put you down here?”
He raised a palm. “You don’t understand,” he said. “She’s a good person. She saved me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re clearly a prisoner.”
“No. Just listen, Nate. They were coming after me. They were going to kill me!” the man said, eyes bulging. “Annalise took me in and kept me hidden here. It’s been ten years now and she’s still keeping me safe. I’m only chained up so I don’t get any ideas about trying to leave. It’s too dangerous, but I don’t think I could escape the temptation.”
Fragments of old conversations floated back to the forefront of my brain, each one jolting clarity into me.
“Holy fuck,” I muttered, taking a step back. “Alexis was right.”
“Who the hell is Alexis?”
I swallowed thickly. “You know her as Alexandra. Your daughter. She changed her name to escape the public shame after you were charged with all those murders.” I paused and tilted my head to the side. “That is who you are, right? Peter Covington?”
The man went silent, and his whole body seemed to deflate. He placed his hands over his face, and for several uncomfortable minutes, I thought he’d given up speaking again. Then he finally dropped his hands and looked up at me.
“You’ve been in contact with my daughter?” he asked.
“So I’m right,” I replied, ignoring his question. “You’re Peter.”
He nodded stiffly. “Yes.”
My scalp prickled as shock coursed through my veins like electricity. “How the hell is this possible?” I said in a hollow voice, shaking my head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“I know. Your mother planned it that way, because they weren’t going to stop coming for me unless they thought I was gone.”
I shook my head slowly. None of this made sense.
“The police found some of your teeth in a national park a week after you went missing, along with a ton of your blood,” I said. “No one could ever survive losing that much blood. So how the fuck did you do it?”
Peter opened his mouth and pointed into it. “Your mother yanked two of my molars out with plyers and dumped them up in that park so she could make it look like my body was there at some point.”
It was too dark in his mouth for me to see the missing teeth, but I nodded anyway, wanting to hurry his explanation along. “And the blood?”
He grimaced and rubbed his right arm. “When she paid off the guards and broke me out of that prison, she started taking blood from me right away. She did that for a whole week, taking more and more every day. I almost died by the end of it. It was too much to handle. Had to be done, though, to make it look like I really died up there.”
“So she saved up several pints and then dumped it in the national park to make it look like it all came out of you at the same time?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” I rubbed my temples, unable to believe what I was hearing.
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“No shit. Why was my mother involved in any of this?”
Peter looked down at the floor. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” he said. “It would take hours.”
“Just give me the shortest possible version,” I said through gritted teeth. If I didn’t find out what the fuck was going on soon, I was going to lose my shit.
His brows furrowed. “You know what I used to do, don’t you?” he asked.
&nbs
p; “Yes. You were a journalist, and you taught classes at Blackthorne.”
“That’s right.” He nodded slowly. “I started working on an investigative piece ten years ago. I was looking into something that was happening here on Avalon. Something that the police didn’t seem to care about, even though I brought it to their attention multiple times.”
“What was it?”
He let out a short sigh. “It’s a long story, so I can’t tell you every detail, but the short version is that there was an underground criminal organization operating here on the island. They were doing some very sick and twisted things, and I wanted to expose them to the world.”
“How did you find out about them?”
He waved a hand. “It’ll take too long to explain that part,” he said. “Just let me tell it my way.”
“Okay. So you were working on the exposé, and then what?”
“The group somehow found out that I was onto them. They decided they had to get rid of me before I destroyed them, so one of them killed all those kids at Blackthorne, and the rest of them framed me for it. They were going to have me killed in prison later so I’d never be able to tell the truth about what I knew.”
My brows rose as he spoke, and my stomach clenched as it all sank in. Every word confirmed what Alexis had believed her whole life—a shadowy criminal organization had operated on Avalon over a decade ago, and they took Peter Covington down when he tried to expose them.
All this time, I thought she was fucking crazy, but she was right.
“So what happened then? My mom swooped in and took you?” I asked.
Peter nodded. “Yes. She knew what was happening, and she knew I was innocent, so she broke me out of that place and saved me. She’s a saint, Nate.”
“How did she know about it?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “Is she part of the organization?”
“No, of course not.”
“How did she know what was going on, then?”
