Reid looks over his shoulder and smiles before saying, “I know.”

He doesn’t look afraid. That alone would be enough for me to suspect he was crazy. The other things I now know make “crazy” seem like too mild of a word.

“Your phones won’t work, by the way,” Reid says. “I have a machine to block them.”

“I said I wouldn’t call the police,” I remind him.

“I know, and I want to trust you, but . . . you were with someone else, Eva. That hurt me.” He watches me expectantly, like he thinks I should apologize.

The lights from Nate’s truck shine into the car, and I hear his truck engine. I take a steadying breath and say, “Just take me to Grace, Reid.”

“I am. You can trust me, Eva.” Reid turns the key in the ignition and pulls onto the road. “We have about an hour to talk.”

For the next forty minutes, I listen as he tells me about his father, about his mother killing his father, about how he’s had to hide that his whole life, about how his grandmother made him lie about them, about how he’s prayed to know the right choices. He tells me about ha**ng s*x with Amy in some strange attempt to get closer to me, about how he remember “locking gazes” with me and knowing that I meant for him to speak to me through flowers. He tells me about parties where he watched me and how he was “faithful” to me aside from Amy the past year—and how he knows that I know she doesn’t “count” because she was really Amy-Eva, a girl who adopted my “impure” needs so I could stay untainted.

As he talks, I try to record all of it. I might not be able to call the police, but I can get at least some of his confession on record. I’m not sure if my phone can record conversations this long. I think the app claims to be unlimited, but I’ve never recorded more than quick memos to myself. I’m not looking away from Reid to check if it’s still recording either. I can’t. I watch him with my gun aimed at him. I realize as he talks that he’s far less stable than I thought. He still sounds like the boy I’ve always known, but the things he’s telling me are horribly wrong.

The more he speaks, the more I’m grateful that he doesn’t really want a conversation. What he apparently wants is to tell me everything. He even explains that we can “keep” Grace at our home after this. He has a plan for this too. “I’ll let you shoot Bouchet, and then you and I can get married,” Reid explains. “Grace is like a sister to you, so she can be your sister-wife. The way my father did it was wrong. He tried to hide things from my mother. That’s why it all went wrong.”

We pull off the road onto a dirt path, and the bumps shake me enough that it’s hard to keep the gun trained on Reid. “She’s unhurt though, right?”

“Of course!” He meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. “I was careful because I knew you’d want that. That’s what no one else understands: I’ve only done things you’d want or that would teach you. Everything has been for you, for us. They just don’t understand us. They never will.”

I feel like throwing up, and I’m certain I may never sleep without nightmares after this is all over. Right now, though, I need to get to the point when it is over. I need to get to Grace. Then, I can deal with coping with the after.

DAY 15: “THE PIPE”

Grace

I WAKE ALONE. AT first, I think he’s in the other room, but when I get out of the bed and walk around to see if I can find some sort of weapon, I notice that the padlock is no longer on the hinge inside the door. I’d love to believe that means he decided to leave the door unlocked and leave, but I suspect it simply means that the lock is outside, where it was when we arrived here. I start to walk over to check, but I can’t reach. My leash isn’t long enough to reach the door.

Tears fill my eyes at the reality of where I am now and what will happen if I can’t get free, but crying isn’t going to help me. I need a weapon or a way to escape, preferably both.

This could be a trap of some sort, a test to prove I’m not trustworthy. He seems a little obsessed with building trust. How he expects to do that after kidnapping, chaining, and drugging me, I’m not sure, but I don’t want to know how his mind works. He killed three girls. I’m not going to become number four.

“Reid?” I call out. I stay still and listen. No sounds of any sort greet me. That’s about the best I can do right now. If he’s here and watching, I guess I’ll deal with it when he reveals himself.

“Right then,” I mutter. Somehow talking to myself seems to help keep back the weight of the silence.

I start by feeling the collar around my throat. It takes only moments to determine that it is, in fact, padlocked onto me. I won’t be getting that off easily. I follow the chain to the water heater. The end of the chain is looped around a thick pipe that stretches into the ceiling.

“Don’t suppose you left a saw anywhere, Reid?” I force myself to snort at the ridiculousness of that possibility. I won’t cry again. Sarcasm is better.

I push on the pipe, examine the chain—which is looped around the pipe and padlocked—and don’t see any solution there either. The chain slides up and down the pipe, but I don’t think that’s helpful.

I sit, grab the chain with both hands, brace my feet on the water heater, and tug. It feels like it bends a bit, but bending it doesn’t help. Bending isn’t the same as breaking.