In the second I had to think about it, I contemplated running. Would he really go after Amber and Cookie? Of course not. He’d come after me. But what if he caught me? What if I didn’t make it? In that case, I had no doubt whatsoever he’d come back to fulfill his promise. And I would be dead in the parking lot or the alley, unable to stop him.

About one-point-five seconds after Amber closed the door, I felt a sharp pain explode in my head for approximately the third time that day, and I knew the decision had been made for me.

* * *

“Dutch.”

I heard Reyes’s voice from a distance. I tried to reach out and take his hand but found that my own was like smoke, a swirling white mass. “Reyes.”

“Shhhh,” Earl Walker said as I jerked to consciousness, not that he was actually trying to keep me from screaming. He hadn’t taped my mouth, hadn’t gagged me in any way. He’d just warned me.

After he’d dragged my limp body to a chair and fastened my arms and legs to it with cable ties, it occurred to me that I could be in trouble. “Have I mentioned how much I hate torture?” I asked, fighting for every consonant.

He put the gun on the end table to his left and scrunched my face in his thick hand. Which really wasn’t so much torturous as annoying. “Here’s how this is going to go,” he said, speaking softly, slowly, so I would understand. “I cut, you bleed. You can scream if you think it’ll help, but the first person through that door will die. Your pretty little receptionist’s throat will be slit before she even knows I’m here.” He leaned closer, his hot breath sour against my face. “And who will come running in next?”

Amber. He didn’t have to say it.

“Amber.”

Or maybe he did.

“And let me make something very clear.” He leaned in farther so he could whisper in my ear. “Hurting children makes me happy.”

He’d probably had a really bad experience as a child.

Twenty minutes later, he was proving how skilled he was with the scalpel, one slice at a time. I couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t become a surgeon.

A sharp burn shot straight to my core as he cut me again, this time on the inside of my thigh. Jeans. No jeans. He didn’t care. I welded my teeth together, my eyes rolling back in my head as I felt the nick he’d placed along a tendon. The cut was deep that time and very near my femoral artery. Or right on it. I could no longer see. Blood from the wound on my scalp was streaming into my eyes and clinging to my lashes.

“One more time,” he said, seeming a little annoyed.

Well, join the club, buddy.

“Why were you looking for me? How did you know I was still alive?”

I wanted to answer him—I really, really did—but I couldn’t seem to push my voice past the crushing pain. I knew if I opened my mouth to answer, I would scream. Cookie would come. Amber would follow. And my world would cease to exist.

Once again, I had placed the people I loved most in mortal danger. Maybe my father was right. Maybe I needed to give it up, become an accountant or a dog walker. How much trouble could I get in then?

Reyes was always here for me, but I’d bound him. I’d kept him from killing himself and killed myself instead. It was a sad testament to my ineptitude that I could hardly go two weeks without needing him to save my ass.

“Your choice,” he said, a microsecond before I felt a fiery slash on the underside my left arm.

I felt tendons snap apart that time, and my head fell back as I bit my tongue to keep from screaming. But the pain overwhelmed me. My eyes rolled heavenward as I tumbled back to Reyes.

“Dutch,” he said from somewhere in the darkness. “Where are you?”

“Home,” I muttered, fighting to stay with him.

“Unbind me,” he commanded breathlessly, and I had the distinct feeling he was running. “I won’t get to you in time. Charley, damn it.”

“I don’t know h—”

“Say it!” he ordered through gritted teeth. “Just say the words.”

“I’m sorry.” Helplessness washed over me as I felt myself leaving him again. For the first time in my life, I believed I was going to die and there was nothing he or I could do about it.

The scalpel sent another shock wave skirting over my nerve endings. I blinked past the blood pooling in my lashes as a jolt of the most unimaginable pain I’d ever felt brought me skyrocketing to the surface again. I breathed in deep, as if coming up for air from the bottom of the ocean.

Walker had sliced up my rib cage, the scalpel running along the bones like a kid with a stick and a white picket fence. Shaking so hard I wondered if I was seizing, I clutched the chair and forced my teeth to stay locked. But trying so desperately to stay in control of certain bodily functions had me losing control of others, and I felt the warmth of urine seep between my legs and pool underneath me, mingling with the blood already there.

He bent over me and was poking around the cut on my thigh. Then he turned, looked right into my eyes. I could barely focus, but he was frowning, studying. “Reyes,” he said, and I blinked back to him. “You’re like him. You heal like he did.” He pressed the scalpel against my cheek, readying for his next strike. “What are you?”

He didn’t wait long for an answer before blood was streaming into my mouth and down my throat. I tried to spit it out, but that would require the unclenching of my jaw, a risk I wasn’t willing to take.

“I wonder what would happen,” he said, prying my hand off the arm of the chair, “if I took a finger.”

Just as he started to do that very thing—the sharp sting of metal slicing through flesh becoming mind shattering when it hit bone—we both heard someone running up the stairs in the hall.

“Finally,” I heard the monster say. He smiled and turned back to me. “It’s our little escaped convict, isn’t it?”

Half a heartbeat later, the door crashed open and the silhouette of a large man stood framed in the doorway.

Reyes. No.

Before I could say anything, before I could think, the gun went off. Walker had been waiting for him, knowing he would come. And I closed my eyes and stopped the spin of the Earth on its axis.

When I opened them, the bullet was inching through the air halfway between Walker and Reyes. It crawled forward, and I struggled with every ounce of my being to keep my grip on time, but it slipped through my fingers like smoke in a summer breeze.