Page 47 of The Lovely and the Lost

There was a long pause. “What I love about you is your ability to make a rhetorical question sound disturbingly not rhetorical at all.”

He handed me the flashlight. I took it, unsure why he was giving it to me.

“You’re not going to like this part.”

I processed that statement a moment before I steadied the flashlight and saw the opening. It was two feet in diameter, if that.

“This is the only other way out of the mountain,” Gabriel told me. “Or at least, the only one I’ve found.”

This. As in a tunnel so small that the only way through was on your stomach. The muscles in my throat clenched a moment before the wave of nausea hit me.

Trapped. Dark.

“You take the flashlight and go in first. I’ll follow.”

Bad things happen to bad little girls.

“Kira?”

The wisp of control I’d been holding on to snapped. “If I go first,” I said, the words forming in the back of my throat, “you’ll bebehind me.”

“In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have made inappropriate jokes about murder,” Gabriel replied. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” Whatever he could see of my face must have made an impact, because he stopped cracking jokes. “If I go first, and you freeze, I won’t be able to help you. But if you go first, and something happens, I can get you out.”

“I don’t…” My muscles were already going rigid. There was a roaring in my ears, an indescribablewhisper—

“You don’t need protection—check. We’ve been through this. Are you, by any chance, capable of humoring me?”

I was vaguely aware that his tone was low and soothing, like the one Mac had used with Saskia the day before.

“Okay, so no humoring. What about a bribe?” He paused and waited for my eyes to find his. Eventually, they did. “You asked me why I lied to you about the caves. In response, I deflected, rather skillfully, if I do say so myself.” He waited until he had my full attention. “You want to know what I’m doing out here, if it has something to do with my brother. Under normal circumstances, I’d deflect those questions, too. But if you dothisfor me”—he jerked his head toward the tunnel—“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Gravel and stone bit into the flesh of my forearms as I pulled myself forward. I could feel my heart beating in my abdomen. I concentrated on the visceral sensation of my flesh scraping against the tunnel floor. Pain would keep me in the here and now—pain and my awareness of another living being, right behind me.

“Why did you lie to me?” It probably said something about me that this was my first question. “Yesterday, when you pretended that you didn’t know the cave was there—”

“I wasn’t pretending.” Gabriel made good on his promise: no flippant comments about how untrustworthy he was this time. “Like you said earlier, I’ve been mapping out the caves for years. I thought they might go all the way through Bear Mountain. Ilookedfor an entrance on the northern slope. But yesterday was the first time I’d found any evidence to back that up.”

I kept a hold on the flashlight as I dragged myself forward on my stomach. The beam of light was lost in the black hole ahead of us, the end of the tunnel nowhere in sight. I focused on forming my next question. If I could think—if I couldtalk—then I could believe that the flashlight wouldn’t go out, that the mountain wouldn’t shake again.

That I wouldn’t die in the dark.

“Do you think your brother’s disappearance is related to Bella’s?” I focused on forming the question, and then I focused on waiting for his answer.

“Anything is possible, right?”

I was breathing evenly, but each time air exited my lungs, they seemed to shrink, and the next breath was harder won. I thought of the maps on Gabriel’s wall.Questions,I thought.Ask them.

“Are you looking for your brother,” I asked through clenched teeth, “or for his body?”

Gabriel stopped moving behind me, but just for an instant. “I could have left you down here.”

“You could have tried,” I returned. “Now, answer. You promised.”

I heard a faint scratching sound—not Gabriel and not me.

Bad things happen in the dark. Bad things happen to bad little girls.

Maybe I hesitated, or maybe Gabriel just sensed that he was on the verge of losing me. He started talking again and didn’t stop. “I never believed that Andrés just took off. I can buy that he might have wanted a weekend to himself, but if he didn’t come back, it was because hecouldn’t. I used to think that something had happened to him—an accident. Maybe he was climbing and he fell. Or maybe he had one of those heart murmurs you read about, and he just dropped dead one day while he was out here exploring. Maybe he ran into the wrong predator.” There was a pause, a slight one. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that the predator could be human.”