“She’s—I found a photo album a little after I moved here. In the garbage. She’s in a lot of the pictures.”

I’d wondered why someone had tossed away such precious memories like trash. This woman hadn’t thrown it out. Whoever stole her home had taken care of that.

The woman, no longer the young bright-eyed girl or always-laughing young woman whose photo I had looked at countless times, slaps the plexiglass where Sydney’s hand is, her hand pressing hard as if she might touch Sydney through it. I recognize the expression in her eyes—it’s the same way Kavaughn looked at me.

Desperation.

A cry for help.

She points at the tubes in her arms, starts making wild gestures I can’t understand.

“They said they were going to open a research center, and they have.” Sydney’s voice is quiet, but when she looks up at me her eyes are wide and terrified. “This is Doris Payne. The woman whose house you took.”

Chapter 23

Sydney

I LOOK UP AT THEO, THE HORROR I’M FEELING SO OVERWHELMING that I might black out. Doris is caged. Caged like an animal. She’s always been so prideful about her looks, and they have her in here looking like this.

“The day of the tour, your girlfriend was looking at the Payne house.” I’d registered it as I slammed my door in Theo’s face, but hadn’t remembered it and what it meant until now. “It’s like what Bill Bil said. They want a house, and they take it. Doesn’t matter if someone else lives there.”

“I had no idea about any of this.”

I’m starting to wonder how it’s possible for him not to know about any of this.

“Why did you even go on that tour?” I ask him, as my body shakes. I feel like every cell in my body wants to fly off in a different direction. “So Kim could play some fucked-up game? Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a brownstone by—by kidnapping and torturing?”

Doris looks at Theo, but she has no reaction to him. Not fear or anger or recognition. Her gaze drifts back to me, unfocused and awful and pleading.

She used to sell Avon products and had slipped me samples of Skin So Soft in the summer when the mosquitoes were biting. The gentle scent has always reminded me of her, but now the smell in this hallway makes it impossible to even recall.

Theo doesn’t touch me, but he moves closer. “Kim told me that her dad had bought us the tour tickets and that it would be a good way to check out the neighborhood, since we were looking to buy.”

I turn away from the window, away from Doris, and my gaze lands on the door beside her small room that contains only a cot and a bucket. The door has an electronic code reader on its heavy-duty lock. The chart on the wall next to the door says Test Subject 3 and nonviable is scrawled beneath it in Sharpie.

I try to collate all of these facts, make them make sense, but my brain can’t process this horror.

“Sydney.”

I ignore Theo and stalk down the hallway, weaving from one side to the other as I inspect each room and each chart.

Test Subject 1 is a dark-skinned man I don’t know who lies on his cot without moving.

Nonviable.

Test subject 2. Miss Wanda, dammit, Miss Wanda, frail and hunched over, scratching at her neck.

Nonviable.

“Sydney.” Theo’s harsh whisper is drowned out by the buzz in my mind.

Test Subjects 4 and 5 are strangers, a man and a woman. Maybe the woman is the one Amber mentioned, who supposedly got snatched down a subway grate. Or maybe that woman is already dead.

Number 6 is Abdul. His cell is a bit different—he’s on a gurney, hooked up to machines that monitor his vitals.

I run down the hall now, heart pounding in my ears, the unfamiliar and familiar faces blending together. Stranger, slapping at his own head. Jamel Jones, who I just saw a couple of days ago, knocked out and with an IV in his arm.

The corridor seems to go on forever, the rooms and their inhabitants in various states but almost every damn room occupied. They’re soundproofed, I realize at some point, so the strangled cries I hear echoing in the hallway are my own.

Test Subject 18. Mr. Perkins sits on the edge of his gurney, staring at the floor. He looks so thin compared to just a few days ago, the wrinkles on his face hanging like heavy pleats in fabric.

I tap frantically at the window and he slowly raises his head. He stares at me, no recognition on his face, but stands and shuffles toward the glass.

His movements are jerky; his head lolls to the side.

And then he lunges at me, beating his fists on the window. I can’t hear him, but his mouth stretches wide in a scream and his spit flecks the window. His eyes are full of rage—I’ve never even seen him angry before.

A siren sounds in the hallway, but I stand there frozen. Even when arms close around me and haul me back into the recessed doorway of the room across the hall, I hold Mr. Perkins’s rage-filled gaze.

The double doors that cap this wing open slowly with a prolonged whoosh, automated, and two white women rush into the hall, one brunette, one gray haired. They’re dressed in jeans and T-shirts, but wear white lab coats. The gray-haired one, who has a short pixie cut, swipes her ID against the lock to Mr. Perkins’s room, and they rush in. As they do, his wails fill the hallway, and I hate that I recognize his voice in this cry of pure pain.

Key, Theo mouths, and he slips past me, giving me a firm press back against the door that’s an order to stay there. He didn’t have to do that—I can’t move. The horror of everything has wrapped me up tightly, strapped me down like I’m on that gurney instead of Ms. Gianetti’s lifeless body.

He stalks toward the room, tucking into a crouch and then peeking around the door frame. I expect him to just burst in but he waits. And waits. Fury starts to build in me as Mr. Perkins’s howls fill the hallway, but then I remember.

“My aim isn’t as good as yours.”

He’s waiting to make a clean shot.

He doesn’t want to hurt Mr. Perkins.

The howling subsides and the first woman steps through the door and back into the hallway, and then the second. Before they let the door swing shut, Theo stands up behind them and says, “Don’t move.”

Both women freeze, but the brunette’s hand keeps going toward the bulge in her pocket. Whatever constraints were on my body immediately release as I instinctively recognize the motion—she’s reaching for a weapon.

I step out from the doorway and shoot. She grabs her stomach and falls to the floor, screaming in pain, sounding not so different from Mr. Perkins.

“Oh my goodness. Julia!” the older woman calls out, and Theo rushes up to her, stripping the ID from her and searching her for weapons.

I pat down the woman on the floor and she clasps at my hand.

“Help me,” she says as tears well from her eyes and course into her hair.

I shake her hand off and search her for weapons—I’m second-guessing myself, wondering if she’d gone for her phone and I’d just shot someone for no—no, it’s a gun.

With a silencer. Like the one Theo took from Con Dead.

“Don’t let me die here, I have a son. A husband.” She grasps at her stomach and then cries out in pain.

Pity and guilt spear me, and I remind myself that all the people locked up here have families and lives, too.

“What did you do to Mr. Perkins, Julia? To all these people?”

“Mr. Perkins?”

“Test Subject Eighteen,” I grit out.

She coughs, averts her gaze from mine. “. . . My job.”

“Which is?”

She starts crying in earnest, locking her gaze on mine. “Please help me, it hurts so much!”

I want to cry, too. I did this to her. Does she deserve it? Did Ms. Gianetti? Who was I to decide? What if I was wrong?

My vision starts to swim and I suck in a breath.

“I’ll help you when you tell me,” I say through gritted teeth. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just need to know what’s going on here. I can’t help you until you tell me.”

“We’re researching how to cure opiate addiction,” she says quickly, hope glinting in her eyes. “We needed test subjects, and federal regulations make true progress too difficult. There’s a methadone clinic near here, we picked up people there. And the others—”

“Shut up, Julia,” the older woman says, then yelps as Theo tightens his hold on her.

I tug at Julia’s collar to draw her attention back to me. “Why like this? You already won the bid for the new research center. Why do things like this?”

“New research center? Not new. You mean official.” Julia’s words are sluggish, and when she smiles, her teeth are sheened with blood. “And we do it because we can.”

I back away from her, holding the gun, and she writhes on the floor and screams. “Help me, you bitch!”

“Go start unlocking the doors,” Theo says from behind me, handing me a key card. “Start at the other end of the hall.”

“But—”

He takes her gun from my hand. “Go.”