“What is it?” Gage asked, feeling a spark of panic go up his spine. “What’s wrong?”
“Another’s girl’s been taken,” Fiona whispered, her eyes still glued to the television even a weather report had taken over the story.
Gage sprung up from his seat. “By…by him? The Knife? Are you sure?”
“I can feel it,” Fiona said, her voice still not rising above a whisper. “I just know it.”
Gage was silent a moment, staring as Fiona’s hands started to shake, her fingers visibly trembling even from a few feet away.
“That means Tori’s dead, or she’s about to be,” Fiona murmured before stooping to the ground to pick up the broken pieces of the coffee mug she’d dropped a moment earlier.
Gage straightened up, feeling all of his blood pump more powerfully through his whole body, readying him for war.
No more wasting time fucking or thinking about fucking or dreaming about people who couldn’t ever come back to him. Now it was a race against the clock. “It’s time to fix it,” he murmured to himself, repeating Abby’s words from his dream. “It’s time to save her.”
Chapter Fourteen
Fiona’s brain wasn’t working right. That was the only thing she could think as she bent over to clean up the scraps of the mug she’d broken. That and the details about the new missing girl revolved around in her mind. This latest victim was older than the other ones, 18 years old. She was an athletic track star and a good student at the nearby high school, a rival public school to Tori’s private institution. Maybe they even knew each other.
But even though her whole body had started shaking as she thought of the new girl tied up in a basement somewhere, being tortured alongside Tori, her brain kept going back to the sex from the night before. What the hell had she done—to Carl, to her new relationship? What was she going to do?
The sex had been wild, totally and completely uninhibited. She felt like she cast off every last useless layer of her flesh and got to the beast beneath, the animal inside of her that didn’t care about anything other than satisfying the most basic, base desire of her heart. It was nothing like what she had with Carl. When they had sex, it was simple, safe. It was…a little bit boring, honestly. It was always the same, but even after years of having regular sex with Gage, she never knew what to expect.
But Carl….Carl was a good man. A boring man, maybe, but stable. Predictable. Trustworthy. She knew where she stood with him. He was like a rock, a solid foundation on which she could erect her new, shiny, deceptive life, a life where she didn’t have to be the little girl in the basement who’d been so scared for so long. In contrast, Gage was a flame, hard to touch, hard to contain. But he thrilled her. He filled her with light and warmth and power. Fiona didn’t know how she could be simultaneously attracted to two entirely opposite men.
Fiona shook her head, trying to dislodge all thoughts of her romantic quandary and focus instead on the missing girls. Nobody else was going to find them. It was on their shoulders and theirs alone. They couldn’t afford to waste time with their own stupid relationship drama when lives were at stake. We’ve already wasted time, Fiona thought, thinking back on the beautiful, amazing, terrifying night she had with Gage merely hours before. What if The Knife killed Tori while I was fucking Gage? I’ll never forgive myself. I’m dirty. I’m wrong. I’m dirty. I’m so bad.
“We’ve failed her; we’ve failed her already,” Fiona said out loud, dropping the broken pieces of the mug into the trash.
“Don’t say that,” Gage said, but his tone wasn’t particularly convincing. It was like they were thinking the same thing, feeling the same disappointment and failure and despair.
“Well, what should I say?” Fiona asked, her irritation seeping into her voice. “Huh? What’s the situation here, Gage? We’re fucked. Let’s just be honest. We’ve got no fucking leads, and there are two girls out there, trapped with a psychopath. What the hell are we going to do?”
“We’re going to keep our shit together, Fi,” Gage said, closing the distance between their two bodies. “We’re not going to fall apart. We’re going to keep fighting until we find them.”
Fiona wanted to argue with him, wanted to scream and break things and push him away, but instead, she found herself folding into his body, hugging him as close to her as she could.
“We’ll be okay,” Gage whispered, rubbing the back of her head. “We’ll be alright.”