Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
“Help!” she yelled as loudly as she could. And again and again and again until her voice cracked, emerging only as a broken whisper as tears continued to stream down her face. She sobbed, yanking at the chains that held her, her shoulders throbbing along with her head, wrists now stinging and abraded. She felt moisture rolling down the side of her hand. Blood.
She collapsed back against the wall, breathing hard. In. Out. In. Out. She stared up at that small square of muted light, her lids dropping closed. The drug in her system took hold once again, and she didn’t fight it. She slept.
The sound of footsteps woke her, and she sat bolt upright, her head swimming as she listened, panicked, trying to decide whether to call out or not. A faint light shone through the window. Not the sun. A streetlight, maybe.
Her heart thundered as a key jiggled in the lock and the door swung open. He stood in the open doorway, the man in the black ski mask. Her heart slammed against her ribs, her harsh exhales mixing with the distant dripping sound she’d heard earlier. “Hello, Josie,” he finally said, closing the door behind him and stepping into the room.
“Please,” she whispered, tears sliding down her cheeks. “Please let me go. I’ll do anything.”
He laughed. “Oh, I know you will.” He came closer, knelt in front of her, his hand caressing her cheek. She shrank back, terror making her feel weak, lightheaded. He clicked his tongue. “I wish you hadn’t m-made me hit you. I didn’t want to hit you, Josie. You really look t-terrible now.”
“How do you know my name?” She was trembling, and the words came out wobbly, strangely spaced as her jaw shook.
“I know everything about you. I’ve made it my b-business to know, Josie.” He clicked his tongue again, leaning even closer.
“Why? Why are you doing this?” Her breath hitched on a sob, and the chains clanked on the cement floor as she attempted to lift her hands but then let them drop at the reminder of the heavy chains, her bleeding wrists.
He leaned even closer, and she could tell by the movement of his mask that he was smiling beneath it. “Because…” he said, “because you’re a whore and you d-deserve to be treated like one.”
His words washed over her along with his scent. It registered, memory responding. Pineapple. Coconut. Something overly sweet and tropical.
She knew immediately who he was.
Chapter One
The girl—or what was left of her—lay crumpled against the wall, hands secured behind her back with a chain bolted to the concrete wall. “Jesus,” Detective Zach Copeland muttered. He squatted next to Dolores Appleton, one of the city’s criminalists, who was snapping photos of the victim from every angle, including close-ups of her hands, feet, face frozen in a silent, never-ending scream. Pressure built in Zach’s chest. This girl had suffered. Horribly.
“Zach.”
“Hi, Dolores. Any idea on the cause of death?”
Dolores’s bright blue eyes met his. “Nothing obvious. Cathlyn will have to determine this one. But my guess? She starved to death.” She pointed to her rib cage. “A good amount of decomposition already, and rats have gotten to her, but you can tell her ribs were very pronounced even before that.”
Zach felt his lips go thin as he took in the ravaged body under the harsh LED lights the team had strung up. Rats. Fuck. They’d been here after death, which meant they’d been here before too. Had she been left in the dark in this underground space? Had she heard them skittering around, her hands tied, trapped as they brushed past her feet? The horror of what she’d gone through pressed on his chest once more, a ten-ton brick that made his lungs ache. Death was rarely pretty, but this level of suffering, this level of depravity, made his blood run cold.
He’d have to wait to hear Cathlyn’s determination on cause of death, but some sick fuck had chained this woman up in the rat-infested basement of an abandoned house and done God-knew-what to her. Then he’d possibly left her to starve to death. What terrors had she survived before her heart had ceased beating? And why?
It was his job to provide motivation for the crimes he investigated, but deep down, there wasn’t any good answer. No reason that would help make any sense of this.
“Sexual assault?” he asked Dolores, his tone harsher than he’d intended.
Dolores glanced up, tweezers suspended in midair for a moment. “The body’s too decomposed for me to make a guess.”
He moved to the side of the girl’s body and peered more closely at the chain that had bound her hands, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. This felt familiar, and for a moment he was a twenty-five-year-old rookie, standing outside a hospital room, voices drifting to him from inside—