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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHARLOTTE

I sit in the damp, overgrown grass, my hands draped over my knees, staring at the fence as it crackles and hums in the dark. I’ve already walked around the perimeter and confirmed that it does, in fact, encircle the entire property, hemming me in with the house and with Jaxon’s dead body.

I never found the car keys, but I did find Jaxon’s car. My one consolation is that it’s all scraped up from when he rammed into me on the highway. He clearly managed to drive it home, but it needs to be fixed. I hope he can’t afford it.

Something tells me he can, though, if he can afford to build a fence like this. It looks like the sort of thing you’d find around a prison.

I stand up again, the hair on my arm tingling from the electricity pulsing through the air, and walk over to the garage for the third time tonight. My flashlight’s in the grass from where I threw it thirty minutes ago in frustration.

The reason for that frustration is that the fence has a gate big enough for a car to pass through—but it’s locked with a digital keypad. And I can’t figure out the code.

I punch numbers in randomly like I’ve been doing for the last hour. The keypad lights up a sickly green and buzzes every time I get the number wrong. Then a digital feminine voice chirps out, “Incorrect key. Try again.”

Part of me hopes that if I try enough times the system will send some kind of message to the police, but I know how dumb that is. There’s no way Jaxon would have this thing linked to law enforcement. I certainly wouldn’t, if I was him.

When I hear, “Incorrect key. Try again,” for what feels like the billionth time, I screech and whirl away from the gate. The house looms up ahead, a dark silhouette against the star-smeared sky. A thin, weak light on the porch seems to create more shadows than it does anything else. There’s a bug zapper, too, glowing pale blue.

Electricity , I think.

Maybe that’s my way out of here. If I can cut the power, then the fence won’t have electricity anymore, and maybe I can crawl over the thing.

I grab the flashlight and shine it over the fence, taking a good look at it again. It’s tall, maybe seven feet, and topped with loops of barbed wire. If I climb over it, I’ll probably cut myself. Assuming I can even get to the top. I’m not exactly the world’s most athletic person.

But I really don’t have much of a choice, do I?

For the first time since I looped that chain around Jaxon’s neck, I feel like I have an actual plan and am not just reacting on some long-buried instinct. I’m still buzzing with old adrenaline and there’s an ache in my arms and fingers that reminds me of what I did.

And Jaxon’s face keeps flashing through my thoughts, too. The way he grinned at me when I realized what he was doing. The way he didn’t even try to fight back.

That—that unsettles me more than anything.

I tell myself not to think about it, that there’s no point. My only goal now is shutting off this absurd fence.

Fortunately, I find the electrical breakers fairly easily—there’s a panel of them in the garage. I shut off everything, snapping the breakers to off one after another. But when I go back out to the fence, it’s still humming and coursing with power.

“Motherfucker,” I say.

It must be powered by a generator or something. Some outside source. I didn’t see anything obvious when I walked the perimeter earlier, but I try again anyway, sweeping the flashlight around so that it illuminates the swamp in blurry patches: a rough glimpse of trees, a spray of palms, a burst of tall, rippling grasses. The fence keeps humming, mocking me.

But then I come up on the shed I could see from my window. It squats like a toad, the windows two black eyes that reflect my flashlight beam back into my face.

Something about it gives me a queasy feeling in my stomach, like what I felt after I attacked Jaxon.

After I killed Jaxon.

I peel away from the fence and approach the shed, light dancing over its side. The door has a huge padlock with another keypad. No surprise there.

But there’s also a small, bare bulb shining with light. This shack still has power.

I stop and listen for a generator. All I can hear is the buzz of the fence, the howl of the wind?—

A man screams.

I freeze, my skin prickling. Did I imagine that? It happened so quickly that I can’t say where it came from. The swamp? The house?

No, it couldn’t have come from the house.

My heart thuds furiously in my chest. I move cautiously away from the shed, swinging the light around, listening for a generator. Here, the fence disappears into the swamp, and I’m wary of going into the overgrowth in the dark.

“Shit,” I whisper, turning back around. This is pointless. I can’t do anything in the middle of the night. Even with the flashlight, I can barely see a few inches in front of me.

That’s when I hear something.

Not another scream. A rustling. Almost like?—

Footsteps?

Fear clenches in my chest, and I dive back over to the shed, pressing up against its cool, metal wall. Then I listen.

Definitely footsteps. Slow, quick, careful. But they’re coming from the direction of the swamp.

I switch off my flashlight and edge carefully around the side of the shed, hardly daring to breathe. The darkness creates monsters out of everything, and the fence’s constant, steady hum is the loudest sound in the world?—

More rustling. And voices. Low. Soft. Male.

I freeze, squeezing my hand tight around the flashlight. Why the fuck did I assume Jaxon was acting alone? Why hadn’t I realized he must have someone else working with him, someone who?—

The humming stops.

It takes me a second to understand what I’m hearing. The fence’s electrical hum had become such a constant that its absence suddenly sounds enormous. And then the implications rush through my head.

Someone turned it off.

The footsteps. The voices.

“Clear,” a man says. “Cut it.”

I take deep, shuddery breaths. Cops? Did the cops track me down somehow? Or did they know about Jaxon, and I just got lucky?

Are these even cops at all?

Who else would they be?

I peer around the corner of the shed, adrenaline pumping through my body. It’s too dark for me to see much beyond flurries of movement. But I can hear everything. The click of snapping wires. The rustle as two shadowed figures slide through the fence that had me, five minutes ago, completely confounded.

“Crazy motherfucker,” one of them says.

“Stay alert,” says the other.

Guns? Do they have guns? I’m delirious with confusion. But at the same time, this looks like a rescue.

“Hello!” I shout, stepping around the side of the shed and lifting my arms overhead.

The men jerk toward me. Two red dots dance across my chest.

“Don’t shoot!” I shriek, my voice ringing out into the chilly night. “He kidnapped me! I?—”

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the men says. Then, to this partner. “Who the fuck is this?”

“He kidnapped me!” I say again, panic pounding in my head. “Jaxon. He’s a murderer. He—” I falter as the two men come toward me, their guns still pointed at my chest.

They definitely aren’t cops.

They’re dressed all in black, wearing balaclavas and dark gloves. Their guns gleam in the moonlight, the barrels dark and gaping as they close in on me.

“Yeah,” one of them says. “Yeah, we know he’s a murderer.” His voice is icy. Dangerous.

“Are you here for him?” I keep my eyes fixed on the guns. “Because I—I had to get away from him. I?—”

“Who are you?” the man says. I can’t tell the two of them apart, not with their faces covered. They’re the same height, same build. They even have the same Texas drawl.

“You mean my name?” I still have my hands up. And they still have their guns trained on my chest.

The man nods.

“Charlotte Careta.” My voice wavers. “I told you, Jaxon—the man in this house—he kidnapped me. I escaped. I don’t know who you are?—”

“We’re here for Jaxon ,” the other man snarls. Then he says to his partner, “This is a problem, isn’t it?”

Me. He’s talking about me.

“Jaxon’s dead!” I blurt out. “I killed him! That’s how I escaped!”

Both men turn to me, their eyes pale behind the black shadows of the balaclavas.

“You killed him,” the man on the left says flatly.

I feel dizzy, especially every time I glance down at those sleek dark guns. “Y-yes,” I stammer out. “He’s in the upstairs bedroom. You can go see.”

The man on the left studies me for a long time. I don’t move, even though my heart is racing furiously. Then he barks out, “Watch her.”

“You can’t be serious!” his partner hisses. “You believe her? That she killed that fucking psycho?”

“I don’t know what I fucking think,” the first man says. “But we came here to take care of Jaxon Doucet. And I’m not leaving her alone until I know for sure he’s dead.”

Then he stalks off, leaving me along with his partner, who tightens his grip on his gun and steps toward me. His eyes glitter from behind his balaclava, and I keep my hands up, my breath tight.

“You know what he did?” the man says.

I shake my head.

“How’d you end up here?” he asks. “Why are you still alive? Everything we heard, Jaxon Doucet doesn’t leave people alive.”

Who are you? I want to ask, but the man still has his gun pointed at my chest. Funny, how I could be so brave around Jaxon but absolutely terrified in this moment.

Of course, Jaxon straight-up told me he wasn’t going to kill me.

And he didn’t.

The man’s still staring at me. Waiting for an answer. I swallow and glance over at the house. The porch light has come back on. The house must be connected to a backup generator.

“Well?” The man’s voice is as sharp as a knife. “Better make it good. If I can convince my partner to feel sorry for you, maybe we’ll let you live.”

I jerk my gaze back to him, and he laughs, cold and cruel. Even in the dark, even though I can only see a faint gleam where his eyes should be, there’s something leering about the way he looks at me.

And I realize the truth I had been avoiding—that I escaped one trap and walked into another.

“I-I don’t know,” I tell him, lowering my arms cautiously. He doesn’t say anything about it. “He ran me off the road. Knocked me out. Brought me here.”

“He’s crazy,” the man says. “Completely batshit fucking insane.”

I think about the mummified corpses in his living room. That’s not something a human like you should have ever seen.

The way he didn’t even seem to care that I was choking him to death.

“I know,” I finally say.

The man snorts. “You know what he did? Killed Dennis Randall in his own home. We figure he’s working for someone. The Eclipse Brotherhood, maybe.”

I have no idea what this man is talking about, and no idea why he’s telling me any of it. “I don’t know about any of that,” I finally say. “But I know he’s killed people. He has bodies in his liv?—”

I don’t get to finish speaking, though. Because gunfire explodes behind us.

And then the screaming starts.