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Ryder’s phone sounded loud in his pocket, cutting through the sobs. He paused, his brow arching as he fished it out and glanced at the screen. “It’s my sheriff’s line,” he said, his voice dropping to serious for once. “Hold that thought and don’t kill him yet. I want that tooth.”
Jett straightened, wiping the blade on the guy’s jeans like it was a napkin while Ryder thumbed the answer button and stepped toward the basement stairs, already lifting the phone to his ear. “I’m here,” he said casually as he climbed, disappearing up into the house, the door clicking shut behind him.
The prisoner sagged in the chair, his chest heaving with ragged, wet breaths as his head lolled forward, his eyes glassy and unfocused.
The muttering started low, barely audible over the drip of blood on concrete, slipping from his busted lips.
“Breathe the deep…feed the deep…”
The words slithered through the basement, quiet but insistent, repeating like a fucked-up mantra.
“Breathe the deep…feed the deep…”
I froze, every muscle locking tight as the chant sank in.
Fuck.
Those were the exact words we’d heard from the last guy. It was the same rhythmic lilt, too, the same empty, reverent drone, like he was calling to something hungry in the dark.
Jett went rigid, his blade still gripped in his hand as his eyes snapped to mine, and a dark, loaded look passed between us.
Ryder jogged back down the steps with heavy footsteps, his usual cocky grin wiped from his face, replaced by something grim and serious.
“That was one of my deputies,” Ryder said, halting at the bottom of the stairs. “A group of teenagers were out drinking at the old quarry… They found Kelsey’s body dumped there. Her throat was torn out, like something mauled her.” He swallowed. “Darby estimated she’d been dead for at least a few nights.”
“Kelsey?” Jett said. “Shit.”
Babs’s waitress who’d been a no-call, no-show. That explained it.
A few nights ago…
It had most likely been the night of the pulse. The night I’d handcuffed myself to a bed because the gas had been so strong… Someone else had succumbed to it, gave in to their urge.
The prisoner’s chanting faded to static in the background as we stared at each other.
Jett’s gaze dropped slowly to the severed hand on the floor, the gnawed wrist staring up at us like an accusation that knew our names. “Did she happen to be missing a hand?”
Ryder shook his head. “Both hands accounted for.”
Silence swallowed the air as the implication of that settled between us.
There was someone else killing out there.
And they were inside Blackwood.
CHAPTER 37
SIENNA
Someone whispered my name.
It threaded through my sleep at first, soft and coaxing, the way a lover might murmur to pull you closer without startling you awake. It slipped in through the cracked window on a breath of cold night air, curling around the edges of my dreams until it reached in my chest and wrenched me awake.
“Sienna.”
My eyes flew open.
The room swam into focus. I was in Sterling’s room…in his bed without him, and the faint scent of him was on the sheets that were tangled damp around my thighs. Moonlight crept across the floor, shadows gathering where it couldn’t quite reach. I turned my head toward the nightstand, where red digits on the clock glowed 3:02 a.m.
