Like Gravity(98)

“Go ahead, Brooklyn,” he said. “Scream all you want. There’s no one around to hear you.”

A chill raced down my spine as my suspicions were confirmed.

I was alone. Help wasn’t coming.

“Lexi.” My voice sounded weak; clearing my throat, I tried again. “Lexi will notice if I don’t come home,” I said, trying to reason with him. “If you let me go, I promise I won’t tell anyone about this. It’ll be our secret.”

“Oh, Brooklyn,” he said, shaking his head in a show of disappointment. “I wish you hadn’t lied to me. There’s a price for lies, you know.”

“I’m not lying,” I whispered.

Abruptly, his arm flew out from behind his back and he backhanded me across the face. The force of the blow rocked my whole body backward, it’s motion only stopped by the rope tether binding my hands. Stars swam in front of my eyes and tears leaked down my face as pain ricocheted from my smarting cheekbone to my ravaged wrists and back again. My wrist bones had nearly snapped under the strain of the hit; the skin felt raw beneath the ropes, chafed, bloodied, and stinging painfully.

“There’s a price for lies,” he repeated flatly, returning his hands to their clasped position. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes. I was just about to discuss our plans for the afternoon. You didn’t have anything scheduled, did you?” He chuckled.

I didn’t respond.

“I assume you didn’t, given the fact that Lexi is off with her boyfriend for the weekend and you’ve put an end to your own dalliance with Finn.” He sneered Finn’s name with contempt, the most emotion I’d yet to see from him; even when he’d struck me across the face, he’d seemed only clinically interested, his impassive nature untouchable.

He spoke with perfect annunciation and diction, his grammar perfect and his tone practiced, as if he’d rehearsed these words countless times. He probably has, I realized. He’s been planning this for years.

“I must say, Brooklyn, it made me very happy when you broke off that relationship.”

Well, he might’ve thought he knew everything about me, but at least he didn’t know Finn and I were back together.

Wait…Finn!

I’d been so preoccupied, what with being abducted and strung up by a psychopath, that I’d completely forgotten he was coming over at eight. Hope flared to life in my chest. I had no idea what time it was now, though I suspected it was midafternoon; eight was likely still hours away, but if I could just hold on till then…

Why hadn’t I agreed to let him come over right away? I lamented internally, hating myself for telling him to wait. By the time he got to my apartment, saw the photos, realized that I’d been taken, and called the police, it may well be too late for me.

Plus, there was the fact that I didn’t even know where I was.

The hope dwindled to embers, then died out.

By this point I’d realized that he hadn’t simply been watching me or spying on me; he’d been listening, learning, picking up every scrap of information he could find. He’d probably bugged my apartment with listening devices and cameras – it would certainly explain where he’d gotten the photos of me in the shower and my bedroom.

What I didn’t understand was why. So I asked him.

“Why?” he echoed, as if the question was incomprehensible to him. I could see, beneath that veneer of calm, that I’d thrown him off balance. I didn’t understand; it should have been the simplest question in the world for a normal person to answer.

That’s when I realized: I wasn’t dealing with a normal person.

I was dealing with a sociopath.

This wasn’t a revenge mission, driven by passion or vengeance or nearly two decades of anger. It was a cool, calculated meting out of justice; his way of evening the score. And he would eliminate me as easily as a king taking a rook off the chessboard – with meticulous concentration and well-planned moves he’d thought out far in advance.

My sense of hopelessness grew as I realized what that meant.

He likely hadn’t been sloppy when he’d put this plan together, insuring that nothing was easily tied back to him. Emotions didn’t drive him, and therefore couldn’t be used to manipulate him into making mistakes. And he would have no qualms when it came time to kill me.

“Can you believe I only served twelve years before they let me out? I see from your face that you can’t.” He laughed. “You’ve gotta love that trusty old California legal system. Good behavior gets you a long way with the guards. And when I went before that parole board with tears in my eyes and told them all about how I’d found the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he’d guided me from the dark path of substance abuse and violence, out into the light? Well, I must say, just about every damned one of them got misty-eyed.”

I stared ahead impassively, trying to show no reaction to his words.

“I should’ve gotten a damn Oscar for that performance,” he said, smiling at the memory. “Instead, I got paroled and sent back out into the world, a changed man. That’s what they want to believe, you know – that prison fixes us, takes out all the bad tendencies and swaps ‘em for goodness and a healthy respect for authority. It’s what they have to believe, otherwise they wouldn’t sleep at night – but it’s not the truth.”