by Stella Hart
“That yours?” Dwyer asked, looking down at it once I found it.
“Yes. Alex, uh… he stole it from me,” I said, not wanting to admit that it was actually originally a gift from him. Dwyer would really think I was insane if I told him I wanted to keep it in that case.
When I went to put the bracelet in my jacket pocket, the photo of Evangeline slipped out. Before I could put it back in, Dwyer picked it up, staring down at it with furrowed brows.
“How and why do you have this?” His head jerked back up. “Did he tell you about her?”
“No. I found it a while ago. There’s more photos of her in the other box. Do you know something about her?”
He sighed heavily, then checked his watch. “We still have a few minutes, and you’re going to hear this eventually anyway, so….” He nodded toward Alex’s computer chair. “You’re going to want to sit down.”
I did as he said, my stomach churning with anticipation.
“This is Evangeline Gibson,” he said, holding up the photo. He paused, and I nodded, already knowing that much. “She vanished a long time ago. I remember working the case. But she was never found. Not until... until today.” He swallowed hard.
My brows shot up. “Today? Is she alive?”
He crouched before me and put one hand on my left knee. “No,” he said softly. “Magnusson has more than one property. We searched the other two first, seeing as they were closer. A sniffer dog led us to a shallow grave in the backyard of one of them, and we unearthed a young female skeleton. At first we thought it was you, and that we were too late. But our forensics guy on the scene said it looked like it’d been there for a while; too long to be you. Obviously DNA takes a long time to come back with results, but dental records show that it’s almost certainly Evangeline Gibson. Marks on the bones show that she was stabbed repeatedly. That’s likely how she died.”
I stared at him, my eyes wide with horror. It felt like the study walls were caving in on me. This was it. Confirmation that Alex really did murder the other girl. My suspicions were correct all along.
“We’re so lucky, Celeste,” Dwyer went on. “If we didn’t find you in time….” He broke off and let the words dangle in the air, not needing to finish the sentence. We both knew what he meant. If they didn’t find me in time, I could’ve ended up just like the other girl, stabbed to death and buried in an unmarked grave.
I clenched my hands into fists, digging my fingernails so deep into my palms that I was sure I would bleed. “Please get me the fuck out of here,” I said in a ragged whisper.
Dwyer nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said softly. “Let’s go.”
Before we left the room, I took the photo from him and stuffed it back in my pocket. Evangeline looked happy in the picture—it was one of the pictures taken before she’d been seriously abused. Perhaps her family would like to see it one day. It could help them believe that she’d at least had a few happy moments during her captivity, before she was killed.
I couldn’t stop crying as Dwyer led me back outside and toward the car. Not because I was traumatized, but because I’d been betrayed. All this time, despite my distrust of Alex, a part of me had remained steadfastly attached to him, hoping and wishing that I was wrong. It was the part of me that had fallen in love with him; that wildly irrational part of me that wanted to believe him against all odds. Wanted to believe he was exactly who he said he was, and that he loved me back and would never hurt or kill me.
All that hope had just been extinguished.
Dwyer and West misread my tears, and one of them stopped and patted me on the back. “I know how hard this is. There’ll be plenty of trauma counselling available for you once you’re home safe. But you should remember that—you’re finally safe.”
I nodded through the floods of tears and let them help me into the back of the car. Dwyer held up his phone and muttered a few words into it, and then he nodded at West before looking over his shoulder at me. “Ready to go?”
I nodded. “Yes.” I wasn’t, not really, but what else could I say or do?
“How are you feeling, Celeste?” Agent West asked, craning his neck to look at me as Dwyer started the car. “You survived. You should feel proud.”
I stared bleakly out the window as we headed down the driveway. “Yeah. I feel great,” I replied. “Just great….”
19
Alex
With a yawn, I finished the last dregs of my crappy black coffee in the doctor’s lounge before pouring another. It was only seven, but I felt totally and utterly fucked. The surgery had run overtime, due to a couple of complications, and after standing up for so long, I was stiff and exhausted. The coffee might be shit, but at least the caffeine might help me get off my ass and home in time to cook dinner for Celeste.
At ten past, I finally got up, grabbed my stuff and headed down the hall. On my way, I ran into a scrub nurse, a young blonde named Zoe. “Oh, Dr. Magnusson,” she said, batting her lashes at me in a weak attempt at flirtation. “I think someone was looking for you a while ago. Glenda at the nurses station mentioned a weird phone call earlier. Did she tell you yet?”
I shook my head, my brows furrowing. “No. Who was it?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. All I really know is she said it was kinda strange. The guy asked where you were, and it was while we were in surgery. So she told them that, and also said that you’d be here for a while yet seeing as it was running overtime. Then she asked who was speaking. I think they hung up then. You’d have to ask her if they said anything else or mentioned why they were looking for you.”
My frown deepened. I had no idea who might’ve been looking for me today via the nurses station. I wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone in particular, and most people who needed me contacted me directly. I figured it was probably a patient’s family member or a doctor from another hospital who needed my opinion on something (perhaps they simply didn’t have my contact information) but still, I had an odd sense about it. Something about what Zoe said wasn’t sitting right with me, a creepy, oily feeling coiling inside my guts. Why wouldn’t the person identify themselves, unless they didn’t want me to know who they were and subsequently be able to contact them in return?
“Thanks, Zoe. I’ll speak to her now,” I said curtly.
“I’ll walk with you. I was about to go back that way anyway.” With a simpering smile, she joined me on the way to the nurses station, and I tried my best to ignore the inviting side-eyed glances she kept throwing at me. I couldn’t stand when women tried to flirt with me anymore. There was only one woman I was interested in, and it certainly wasn’t Zoe.
Halfway to the station, my phone began to chime loudly. My heart plummeted. That particular sound could only mean one thing, and suddenly, the odd feeling from earlier made perfect sense.
Slipping my phone out of my pocket, I clicked it on and stared at the screen, immediately confirming that my worst nightmare had come true. Someone had breached my security system. It was probably the same person who called the hospital earlier, and they did that to make sure I’d be indisposed while they broke into my place.
Shit. Celeste….
My heart racing, I clicked into the app that let me remotely view the footage from the security cameras I had set up around the exterior of the house. There were two angles: some cameras faced the house, and others faced outwards. It was grainy and black and white, but from the front-facing footage, I could see a dark car right near the porch and a man standing near the front door with a gun. He’d just kicked the door in, which must’ve been what triggered the alarm.
I had no idea who the hell the guy was, but this obviously wasn’t fucking good. If Celeste didn’t hide in time, he’d find her. She’d have gotten a bit of a head start when the power went out along with the alarm—I set it up to do so—because she knew the house better than the intruder. She could possibly find a dark place to hide out in until I could get back, but I couldn’t bank on that. She might not even want to hide.<
br />
I took off down the hall as fast as my legs could carry me.
“Dr. Magnusson?” Zoe called after me. “Don’t you want to talk to Glenda?”
“Sorry! Got a family emergency,” I called back to her by way of explanation before racing out the door and heading for the main exit.
As I dashed through the wet parking lot, my legs felt like they were made of lead. I had to get to my girl, but she was still so far out of reach, and no matter how fast I tried to run, it felt like it was never enough, as if I were trying to run through heavily-sinking quicksand.
Finally, I made it to my car and gunned it out of the lot. I left my phone on the passenger seat, screen switched on so I could see what was happening on the live security feed as I weaved my way through traffic on the way out of the city. I was lucky enough to get mostly green lights, but when I finally reached a red, I leaned over and took a closer look while I waited.
A second man had joined the first one at the front of the house, presumably after casing the rest of the place. The men put their heads close together for a minute, seemingly discussing their next move. If I had to guess, I’d say they were cops or FBI, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were.
One of them finally went into the house. Through the windows on the screen, I could see the glow of his flashlight moving throughout the dark rooms, checking them out one by one.
Fuck!
I stepped on the gas and screeched my way through the intersection, but it didn’t matter how fast I went or if I ignored every damn light. Even though I’d been speeding along the frustratingly potholed roads for ten minutes now, I was still twenty miles away from home, and by the time I got back, Celeste might be gone.
I gritted my teeth. Please don’t take her. Don’t fucking take her, I repeated silently in my head as I finally turned onto the main road leading down to my property south-west of the city. I drove in silence, my heart dropping every time I turned my head to glance at my phone.
When I was still fifteen miles away, I saw Celeste on the footage for the first time. She was by the front door, talking to the two men. They appeared to be comforting her, patting her on the shoulder and checking her out for injuries. Then she turned and went back inside for some reason. Two more miles down the road and she was back outside and willingly getting into their car, or so it seemed.
“No! Don’t fucking go with them!” I shouted pointlessly, slamming my hands down on the steering wheel.
But of course she did. She’d made it very clear she wanted to get the hell away from me, and now she was apparently being offered a free ride out of the place. She wouldn’t turn that down, no matter who was offering.
I pounded my hands on the steering wheel again as I watched the car pull out of view on the footage. By the time I got back there, they’d be long gone. The cameras only had views of the house and its very close surrounds, so I had no way of seeing which way they went once they turned out of the long driveway.
Adrenaline spiked in my system, and my chest hurt like hell from my quick and heavy breathing. All I was doing was driving, speeding along a dark backroad, but it felt like I was running a fucking marathon.
The irrational, hopeful part of my brain told me this was all some sort of terrible nightmare—I could wake up to find myself napping in the doctor’s lounge, and when I went home Celeste would still be there. The logical part of me knew it was an impossible, ridiculous fantasy, and that was confirmed ten minutes later when I tore down my driveway to find the dark car gone and the front door swinging wide and ominously open.
I was wide awake, and Celeste wasn’t here.
Still not wanting to accept reality, I dashed inside and checked every inch of the place before checking the shelter and the greenhouse as well. I even ran down and checked the fucking creek for some reason, as if I actually expected to find her crouched on the ice, waiting and begging for me to take her instead of the men.
Finally, I sank down onto a snowdrift and rubbed my temples, hardly daring to believe it could be true.
But it was. She was really gone.
I barely had time to process the awful thought before a bright light pierced my vision. Squinting, I stood up to see what it was. My stomach churned at the sight. It was the headlights of two cars coming down one of the little side roads that led onto my property from the south. My pulse still racing, I looked left, back toward the house. Two other cars were coming down my main driveway as well, little specks of yellow light in the distance.
Shit. This time, they were here for me.
I dashed back up to the house and got into my car, tearing around the back before they could reach me. I left my lights off to make it harder for them to figure out where I was.
I turned right and took off through the snow, heading for an old track that led through a patch of woods and off the property on the north side. Whoever the fuck these guys were, they didn’t know about that little road, or else they’d have sent a car to block me from that end as well.
When I was out and onto a proper road, I looked in my rearview mirror, my heart still pounding crazily as I made out little specks of light in the distance behind me. The cars were clearly doing their best to follow me, but they didn’t know these winding backroads like I did. I could lose them if I was careful enough.
I steered around the sharp turns and snaking bends almost robotically, my mind elsewhere. Celeste. Wherever the hell she was, wherever the hell these men had taken her, I was going to get her back. I wasn’t letting go that fucking easily, wasn’t giving up on her. No way.
She was mine.
20
Celeste
My stomach twisted into knots as we headed down a dim road. I thought I’d feel better with every mile we put between us and Alex’s place, but instead I felt worse and worse with every minute that passed. My insides felt like they were quivering, and somehow I felt too hot and too cold at the same time as my mind replayed the harrowing events of the last few months over and over.
I could barely believe my narrow escape, and I could barely believe what Alex really was. But the evidence was right there for everyone to see now, as told to me by the FBI agents sent to save me. Alex wasn’t just a serial killer punishing a ring of disgusting sex offenders… he was a man who kidnapped and murdered innocent girls too.
Even though I’d suspected it over the last few weeks, with parts of me even believing it at some points, I knew I would’ve never fully accepted it unless I was shown evidence by someone else. Now that had happened. Now the logical side of me knew for sure that one day, Alex would’ve killed me too.
And yet I still didn’t want to believe it. I still wanted to believe that somehow, the FBI had it all wrong about him. Somehow, he really did love me, and he never lied, and someone else had planted Evangeline’s dead, battered body in his backyard along with all the photos and mementos in his house.
But even as I thought it, I knew how ridiculous and impossible that was. I needed to accept that I’d given my heart to the wrong man. I’d fallen in love with a psychopath who lied and killed without remorse.
I twisted my neck and peered out the back window, my eyes darting all over the place as I checked the horizon for any headlights. The coppery taste of fear scratched at the back of my throat as I imagined Alex’s car right behind us, gaining on us so he could run us off the road and finish what he started with me.
Agent West must’ve seen what I was doing, because he spoke up a moment later, making me jump. “Don’t worry, we’re taking quiet backroads, and we’re going a long, roundabout way, just in case. No one’s following us, and we’ll be back in the city in under an hour,” he said. I swallowed hard and nodded. “Things are going to get back to normal as soon as possible. Just keep taking deep breaths,” he added soothingly.
I let my hair fall in front of my face and pretended to scratch behind my right ear, hoping the movement hid my fear that life would never, ever be normal again.
I wanted to keep cr
ying like I had earlier when Dwyer led me out of the house, wanted to scream and wail and weep buckets of tears. But I resisted the urge. If I started sobbing again, I might not be able to stop this time. I had to do something to distract myself instead.
I straightened myself in the back seat. “Where are we?” I asked in a small voice.
“About halfway between Burgettstown and Hickory,” Dwyer replied. “Thirty miles out of the city.”
I nodded slowly. I knew where the area was in relation to the city. Back in middle school, we had to take a trip out to this area to visit a small organic produce farm. It was near Burgettstown, so it was probably only a few miles from where Alex had kept me in captivity.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
Dwyer looked over at West and grinned. “I’ll let him answer that. It was his dedication and hard work.”
West smiled back and turned his head over his shoulder to face me again. “It started with your friend Samara, like I said earlier. She came in and begged me to look for you. She and your neighbor had filed reports with the police, but they assumed that you.…” He coughed and shifted in his seat. “It was assumed that you ran away.”
“Oh.”
“Samara didn’t believe that, and neither did I once she told me why. She said you’d been worrying her lately, telling her that you thought you were starting to remember something. We both figured that perhaps you’d started to remember seeing the Heartbreaker’s face, from when you were a kid, and perhaps he’d figured that out and taken you to stop you from telling anyone. That is why he took you, isn’t it?”
No, that wasn’t true. I never actually saw Alex’s face the day he killed my father, only his eyes… but he did take me because I was beginning to remember things from my childhood. Things about the Circle that might help him track down more members so he could kill them. That was the real reason he took me, and yet, I didn’t want to tell anyone that particular truth right now. Somehow, after everything, I still felt a fucked up sense of loyalty to him and his mission against the depraved Circle.
