Page 50 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

For a split second, it was like a movie.

I saw the knife flash. I watched his skinny fingers flex and thrust, plunging the blade into my stomach.

His gloat of triumph burst over me even before the pain, like a surfer riding the crest of a huge, unfolding wave.

When it hit me, it was searing, blinding.

I think I cried out. I staggered back, and clutched my side.

Theo picked up the shovel, I’d dropped, a murderous gleam lighting his hollowed-out face.

“Kate,” the name sounded like a curse, “is learning what happens to people who fuck with my father.”

I stumbled into a fallen tree and braced myself on the log.

“You buried her. You buried her alive.”

“An eye for an eye.” He spun the shovel like a showman at some deranged circus, while still holding the knife wet with my blood. “She did the same thing to him.”

“She—what?”

I could barely hear him, could hardly focus on his sick, gleeful energy.

The stab wound throbbed with white hot electricity, keeping me firmly within my own body the one time I wanted to be anywhere else.

I felt his intention the second before he brought the shovel crashing down, and rolled away from the brunt of the blow, catching the edge of the metal with my leg.

Kicking, I caught him in the knee and he buckled.

I went for the knife first—this little felon wasn’t stabbing me a second time—and got him by the wrist. He swiped with the knife and punched the butt end of the shovel at me.

I dove at him, sending us both to the ground hard.

He grunted and wheezed. Stars exploded in front of my eyes.

Sweat poured off me, but I knew one thing: I’d landed on top.

I bashed his wrist into the ground until I was ready to vomit. Finally, he let go of the knife and I shoved it away. Every movement felt like I was going to pass out, but it also kept me in my own head, reminded me who I was and what I needed to do.

He tried to hit me, his pathetic fist driving into my shoulder with all his hundred and thirty pounds. I wrenched the shovel out of his other hand and brought the handle down on his neck. He sputtered and turned red, then purple, grabbing wildly for air.

“Do you like it? Do you like suffocating? Should I put you in the goddamn ground?”

It wasn’t until he stopped fighting that I threw the shovel aside. It hit the base of a tree with a crack and he heaved, turning to his side and choking on the oxygen he was desperately trying to inhale.

I pulled his arm behind him, trying to hold him still as he fought for breath. Every jerk of his body sent pain ricocheting out from the stab wound in my side.

“How long has she been underground?”

He didn’t answer. I wrenched his arm higher up his back.

“Not long,” he bit out, coughing into a pile of dead leaves. “We were still shoveling when we heard you.”

We .

The image rushed in, seeping into the corners around the pain. His father. His mentor. The man who’d sculpted him in his own image, down to every last sadistic detail.

“He came to you. You nursed him back to health. The two of you planned this for months.” The memories leached out of him and into me, polluting my head.

The father’s rage. The son’s subservience and quiet greed.

They’d stalked mother and daughter, watching them from the shadows, memorizing their habits and schedules, deciding when they would be most vulnerable.

I saw Kate jogging alone through the countryside, Valerie sleeping through her bedroom window.

The curl of anticipation, the rush of adrenaline.

Throwing Kate into the back of her own car, driving next to a state trooper while she sobbed and beat against the trunk.

He got off on it, all of it—the power, the control. Bile rose in my throat.

“Take me to her.”

The knife wavered in and out of focus on the ground. I reached for it and grabbed dirt and leaves, tried again. Max. I needed Max. Where the hell was he? I tried to reach past the rancid pile of emotion to sense anyone else in the woods, but the more I opened up, the more of Theo that oozed in.

“Get up.” I didn’t know who I was talking to anymore. I staggered to my feet, pointing the knife covered in my own blood. The boy’s eyes were black holes, sucking me in. The pain in my side seized, my gut twisted, and I fell back to the ground, vomiting.

By the time I looked up again, Theo was gone.