(Do Not Read Back Up Copy)

Chapter XI

Hailey

I’d dehydrated myself from crying. I didn’t think I could.

Sobbing to the point where my tongue stuck to my teeth wasn’t something I was used to.

Then again, neither were dead bodies.

I could still see his feet.

Red-speckled black oxfords over black socks.

Blood trails all over the concrete.

The air smelled like pennies—like sweaty palms chock-full of copper.

The scent could make you sick if you breathed it in long enough, but a mouth full of my old blood was worse than the smell. Tasted a lot like pocket change. The cuts on my lips were deep enough to stick my tongue into and stung enough to make me dizzy. I let my chin hit my chest and shut my eyes until the spinning stopped.

God, I was really starting to look the part. Black-eyed and busted lipped—portrait of a modern black dahlia. If I ended up freezing to death, they’d find me grinning too, flipping my kidnappers the bird with frostbitten middle fingers.

I laughed for the first time in twenty-four hours. It felt good enough to cry about. Picturing my front page New York Times debut was worth wasting the oxygen over. My sense of humor, morbid as it was, kept my mind off the cold.

The wires around my legs and arms were the first to freeze. Cillian had me strapped so tightly to that chair that every time I moved, the cables rubbed my skin raw. Bad day to wear shorts.

The sheriff wasn’t much better off than I was. All the blood on his pant legs had frozen the pleats in place. His skin must’ve been blue by now, judging by the frost forming all the way up to his utility belt.

His gun was missing.

I checked a second time. They’d definitely taken it. God willing it wasn’t Liam, but given how the day was going he would’ve also probably gotten a hold of the sheriff’s—

Keys.

The full set was peeping right out from under his empty holster.

Enter Hailey Houdini. If there was one thing I was good at, it was falling over. So I started rocking until I did just that.

The chair hitting the concrete was too loud, but I wanted those keys too much to realize it. My arms were loose. I’d loosened the cables a little. You never know when a little water weight will come in handy.

Moving was the hard part. I couldn’t feel my hands, so I figured I’d caterpillar my way over to where the sheriff was. With a good deal of effort I guessed it would probably take me about fifteen minutes to work around how terrified I was, ten minutes to try and defrost my fingers, and five minutes to get myself close enough to grab the keys.

I didn’t even have thirty seconds.

When a girl falls in a room, and four men are there to hear it, is she safe and sound?

“Who let the kitten out of her cage?”

Liam’s voice cut straight through the cold and I got this, dull, gnawing sensation all of a sudden—the kind that eats away at the lining of your stomach. My body tensed up, a subtle warning to brace myself. I was on my own.

Liam wasn’t.

“Where were you planning on going, love? There isn’t a door in this house that’s open for you.”

Before he’d even finished speaking, Cillian picked me up by my hair and brought me over to Liam. He looked different. Like the crow’s feet around his eyes had quadrupled since the last time I’d seen him up close. One of his arms was hanging in a makeshift sling. Glad to see Rusty had leveled the playing field.