by Stella Hart
I gritted my teeth. She wouldn’t stop talking, talking, talking. Buying more time for herself. “Right. So you’re saying you have no idea where it is?”
“Not exactly. Like I said, sometimes I heard them talking about it. I know it’s a little house on a big property, quite far out. Near a forest. And I remember a guard saying the address once when they didn’t realize I was listening.”
My pulse picked up. “Tell me.”
“14 Blandess Road. Or maybe it was Street or Drive….” She shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure about the road, but it was 14 Blandess something.”
I frowned. “You’re sure about that?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Where is that?”
“I don’t know about the area. I only heard the road’s name and number,” she said quietly, before picking up the gun again. “I suppose I could have found it myself out of interest once I was free to go from the mansion, but I didn’t really want to.”
“Well, good thing we all have maps on our phones these days,” I muttered, pulling out my cell and opening an app. I glanced at Dr. Fitzgibbons to see that she’d raised the gun to the same spot where she had it earlier. “Any last words?” I said, feeling generous after all her cooperation.
She was silent for a long time. Then she raised her eyes to mine. “Part of me did feel bad for what happened to the others, but I just wanted to escape my own fate so badly. So I did what it took. But you can never really escape, can you?”
She let out a heavy sigh. Then she pulled the trigger before I could respond. Her body fell backward onto the sofa, a bloody hole above her mouth surrounded by a burn mark from the gun barrel’s proximity to her face. Her eyes were wide but lifeless.
In just a fraction of a second, she was gone forever.
I didn’t feel bad for her. Not one bit. I picked up the gun, turned around, and walked out of the house, my heart beating rapidly as I looked down at the map app on my phone. There was a Blandess Drive about half an hour out of the city in Snowden, a rural part of South Park Township. Apart from that, there wasn’t a single other Blandess road, street, avenue, or lane in the entire country.
That had to be what Fitzgibbons meant.
Snowden was far enough out that the Circle could easily have a little house on a big chunk of land. It made sense that it was the right place. At least that’s what I told myself as I sped south, following the directions from my phone’s GPS.
When I got to 14 Blandess Drive, I pulled up with a sinking feeling in my stomach. This particular pocket of Snowden didn’t seem very rural at all—it was lined with houses, none of which had big yards, let alone huge tracts of land surrounding them. There wasn’t a forest anywhere near the area, either.
Number fourteen itself was a tiny, rundown shack with white paint peeling off the exterior. It was set on a postage-stamp sized piece of land with overgrown weeds growing through the cracked cement path that led up to the old brown door.
I let myself in—it had obviously been abandoned years ago—and had a look around, the sinking feeling worsening in my guts with each room I found empty. I checked everywhere I could; I even desperately checked for any secret hidden rooms or underground cellars.
Nothing.
Searing anger filled my body again, but this time it was aimed at myself. In my state of sheer desperation, I’d fucked up and made the same mistake I made years ago when I first embarked on my killing career. I’d trusted that Dr. Fitzgibbons was giving me real information, and I let her die before I confirmed it was accurate.
The bitch fucking lied to me.
Obviously, she didn’t feel as guilty as I thought she did, even after I cracked her nerve by telling her the Circle didn’t care about her. She remained loyal to them to the bitter end and gave me a load of made-up bullshit along with a wrong address.
Celeste wasn’t here… and I still had no idea where she was.
4
Celeste
I tried to sleep while I was on the table, but it never came. Even though I felt nauseated and exhausted, the foreboding fear far outweighed that, and the adrenaline kept me wide awake all day.
The one positive about the lack of rest was that I had a lot of time to think. Not that it would do me any good. Somewhere around five or six, Dwyer would return, and I would begin to experience the sort of agony that made my TOS pain seem like a walk in the park.
I had realized, though, in all my thinking time, that there was no way Alex had been arrested. Dwyer wouldn’t have let any of his colleagues at the FBI or police know that he had the Heartbreaker’s identity (via West). He would’ve kept it a secret and organized for his Circle acquaintances or henchmen to go and detain him instead.
If he hadn’t done that, then people would be wondering where the hell I was after my ‘rescue’. They’d also be starting to wonder where West was by now, and they’d be asking Dwyer all about it. Also, Alex would’ve told everyone about the existence of the Circle if he was arrested, in a last ditch effort to eradicate them from the world, and Dwyer couldn’t have that, seeing as he was one of them.
A chilling thought suddenly shot down my spine. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Dwyer had arranged for Alex to be arrested last night when he returned home, but he’d simply paid off one of the cops or agents to shoot him dead on sight. He could never talk then. Never reveal the existence of the Circle. He would simply go down in history as ‘that serial killer who committed suicide by cop before he could ever tell anyone why he did it’.
As for the loose thread that was me… Dwyer might’ve never told them I was there, or that he ‘rescued’ me. It would explain why I couldn’t see any other police or FBI backup around when I left the house with them, and why the rescue effort seemed so casual (and of course, why he murdered Agent West—so there was no one else who ever knew I was there). He could’ve purposefully gotten to the house ahead of time under the guise of reconnaissance, retrieved me, and then given the order for the others to go ahead and swarm the place to arrest Alex. No one else would’ve been made aware of the fact that I was ever there. He might’ve even made the box of my photos and mementos in the house ‘disappear’ just so that no one would ever suspect that Alex knew me or had me there at any point.
I let out a defeated groan and squeezed my eyes shut, begging for sleep to finally come, just so I could rest my tortured mind. Every time I thought of a scenario in which Alex would be safe, I realized how unlikely it was. Deep down, I guess I already knew that the most probable scenario was that he was already dead. The thought made me sick with grief.
I’d been so wrong about him. I kept thinking he intended on keeping me locked away from the world forever, never allowed to go back to college, have a job, see any of my friends. Ever. But now I realized he did that to protect me. If I’d been out there in the world, the Circle would’ve caught up to me and killed me. Alex had to keep me away from everything for as long as it took to snuff out their existence, just to keep me safe.
All because he cared about me.
If and when he wiped out the Circle for good, I would’ve been allowed to have a relatively normal life. I would’ve finished my degree, gone back to work, seen all my friends again. Alex had even sacrificed himself by saying I could tell the police exactly where I’d been the whole time, knowing he’d be arrested for kidnapping me and keeping me in captivity, just to make me happy. As long as I was safe in the end, he didn’t care what happened to him. He felt that strongly for me.
I knew how deep my own feelings ran now, and I knew what I’d have done once he set me free. A little too late, but still… I knew. If somehow he was still alive, and he actually came to rescue me—not that I deserved it now—I would stay with him. I would never tell anyone what he did to me; how he abducted me and held me against my will. It would be our dark little secret forever and ever.
Maybe that was insane. Choosing to stay with a guy who put me through all that seemed completely crazy, but I didn’t care. He we
nt about things in a fucked up way, sure, but he did it because he cared about me and wanted to know I was safe. He loved me in his own strange way, and it was a pure, selfless love which asked for nothing in return. I felt the same way, though. I loved him back.
From the start, our relationship had a dark thread woven through it, and it always would. But it was still love. I knew that now.
Too late.
My heart ached at the thought of all the things we’d never have now. All the things we’d never share.
The door creaked open a few minutes later, and my system went on high alert again as Dwyer stepped inside with a nasty smile. He was pushing another cart with some food, towels, rope, and far too much water for me to drink, held in an enormous plastic bottle.
He uncuffed my hands and yanked me into a sitting position. “Want some water?” he asked, nodding toward the bottle.
A strange, unsettling feeling drifted into my stomach at his words, as if I were missing something major, but I nodded anyway. “Yes,” I croaked. After eight hours with zero water, I was parched.
“How much? A lot, I assume.”
“Yes.” I nodded, suspicious of his sudden generosity.
He poured some into a cup, then handed it to me and watched me with beady eyes as I gulped it down. Then he grabbed some of the food—a bag of flavored rice crackers—and gave that to me as well. “Eat,” he commanded. “You need energy.”
“For what?” I asked, stupidly. I already knew what. He didn’t want me passing out during torture. He wanted me awake and alert, processing every second.
He smiled nastily. “For our next session, idiot. I still have a lot of questions for you, and you’re going to give me answers this time.” He eyed the stainless steel tray that had been sitting near me all day, twisting his lips as his gaze fell on the blowtorch. “I came to realize, unfortunately, that I can’t melt your eyes out as I so hoped to do. As much as birds and other animals like to pick them out of dead bodies, so that it would look quite normal at first to a coroner, I realized it might leave burn marks around the eye sockets. That can’t be explained by animal predation, and we do want to make it look like a suicide in the end. So.…” He waved his hand, as if this were the most normal conversation in the world. “I need to do more invisible things to you.”
“Invisible?” I said quietly after swallowing the last cracker. My shoulders slumped slightly with relief at the realization that he couldn’t burn me or cut me. All those things would show up on an autopsy.
He saw my relief and chuckled. “There’s still plenty of ways to torture someone without it showing up on the body. Your friend, for example. I’m going to find her soon, one way or another, and no one important will care if she goes missing. No weird family history there, nothing to dig into. Just another runaway girl who wound up murdered by gangsters. At least that’s what they’ll think. So I’ll be able to burn her and cut bits off her, and you’ll just have to sit and watch.”
Guilt twisted my stomach into knots again, and I almost vomited up the rice crackers and water. If he caught Samara and hurt her, it would all be my fault.
“What do you think her screams sound like?” he mused.
I reached out to try and slap him, but he caught my arm in time and pushed it back down before restraining me again with the metal cuffs. “Now, now. All you have to do is answer my questions, and Samara will have a far easier time once she’s here. But for now, you said you wanted a lot of water….”
He picked up one of the towels from the cart and held it over my face. I screamed, but it was immediately muffled by the cloth as he wrapped it tightly around my head and under the table, presumably securing it with the rope.
Panic flooded me as he did something to the table so that it tilted back on an angle. My head and body were now lying slightly downward, held in place with the restraints. I couldn’t see what was happening, but my other senses were on high alert, and I could hear everything. Dwyer was now filling up another cup of water, and he stepped back over to me when it was done.
At first there was just a trickle of water as he tipped the cup over my face, but soon he was pouring it onto the towel fast and heavy, making me choke and gasp under the tight fabric around my face. I knew I wasn’t drowning, but it sure as hell felt like it. My airways felt like they were completely filled with water, and I could see colorful spots exploding in front of me, even though there was nothing in front of my eyes but darkness.
Dwyer pulled the towel up after about twenty seconds. After spluttering and fighting the urge to vomit, I gulped in deep breaths of air. “That was just a taste,” he said. “I have a question for you, and I want you to answer honestly. Unless you want some more of that.”
“What?” I choked out.
“Alex Magnusson. When I found you, you told me he originally took you because he was worried you remembered his face. But that’s not true. We both know it. He took you for other reasons, and you began a relationship with him, didn’t you?”
“I….” I gasped in another breath, still not fully recovered from the waterboarding.
Dwyer slapped me, making me shriek with pain. “Answer me.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, we were… together. Sort of.”
“Thought so. Now tell me, where is he?”
“Huh?” My eyes widened as the full weight of his words hit me. “You didn’t kill him?”
“No.” His nose wrinkled in a disgusted expression. “Not yet. The fucking idiots managed to lose him. They’re still looking, but he’s hidden himself well. Damn shame we can’t get the cops involved, really. He killed the only guys we had in the force years ago, like your dad, so it’s not an option unless we want to totally fuck ourselves. And there’s nothing I can personally do at the field office without raising suspicion. At least not right now.” He narrowed his eyes. “So that’s where you come in. Where is he, Celeste?”
“I don’t know.” Despite the stinging on my face and the burning in my throat and nasal cavities, I’d never been so happy in my life. I could almost see and hear golden angels singing ‘Hallelujah’.
Alex was alive!
I was right earlier—Dwyer never told the police or FBI about him. He wasn’t wanted by them, and they didn’t go anywhere near his house to try and arrest him last night. Only the Circle did, and they’d lost him like a bunch of bumbling amateurs.
I smiled to myself at the thought. For once, the twisted pricks had been forced to realize they couldn’t always be ten steps ahead of everyone else in the world, no matter what sort of power and influence they believed they wielded.
Dwyer put the towel back on my face and poured more water on me for another ten seconds. I took it happily. I didn’t care anymore. If Alex was alive and Dwyer and the rest of the Circle didn’t know where he was, then that meant he might be looking for me. I knew I betrayed him by choosing to leave him and not trust him, but surely he loved me enough to see past that and forgive me.
Please, Alex. I’m sorry.
“I fucking said: where is he?” Dwyer said, pulling the towel off again.
“And I said I don’t know!” I shouted. “But I hope he finds you and skins you alive, you sick fuck!”
That earned me another hard slap and another thirty seconds of water torture.
“You must’ve talked to him a lot,” he said after releasing my face from the towel for a third time. “You know things about him. Where would he go to hide?”
A germ of an idea formed in my head. If I played this correctly, I could pretend to give up eventually and faux-grudgingly give him fake information. I could lead him straight to a place in the middle of nowhere where I knew for sure that no one would be hanging around. That would buy me more time, and it would also buy Alex more time.
I knew the perfect place.
Years ago, when my mother was still alive and in the throes of her raging alcoholism, she’d spent a lot of money unwisely. She used to get blind drunk and commit to buying things onli
ne, and one time, she somehow managed to purchase a decrepit old hunting cabin near the state game lands just south of the national forest, despite the fact we weren’t hunters and never went near the game lands.
No one ever wanted to buy it from her, and so that little cabin had remained in our family’s name for years. I’d almost forgotten about it till now, because it wasn’t like it was going to sell at any point within the next twenty years.
“Please….” I mumbled, forcing tears to spring to my eyes. “Alex never told me anything like that. I don’t know where he’d go.”
Dwyer slapped me again. “Lying little bitch. Tell me right fucking now, or I’ll bend Samara over as soon as I find her, and I’ll ram a hot poker into her ass.”
“No!” I cried out. He slapped me again, harder this time, cracking right across my nose. I winced and pleaded with him as I felt blood seep out of one nostril. “Stop! Please! Promise you won’t hurt her.”
“Only if you tell me.”
“You have to promise me you won’t hurt Alex, either,” I said, raising my head.
“I don’t have to promise you anything of the sort, you stupid little whore. Fucking answer me. Where would he go to hide?”
I faked a fresh set of tears, and then I slumped back in mock defeat. “One time he was asking me where I thought we could go to hide if anyone ever caught up with us. I suggested… I….” I let myself trail off, as if I couldn’t believe I was actually giving Alex up to the Circle.
“Come on. You suggested what?”
I shook my head. “I can’t tell you,” I said in a ragged voice.
“Oh, yes you can.” Dwyer held up another cup of water. “Or do you want more of this?”
“Okay, okay!” I shrieked. “He probably didn’t even go there, but I told him we could hide at a hunting cabin up north if we needed to. The place has been in my family for years.”
