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They were out the door a second later, boots pounding down the hallway, the cold air slapping them in the face as they burst into the parking lot. The sleet had turned back to icy drizzle, slicking the streets with patches of silver.

Somewhere out there, Polly was alone—and whoever had killed Tate Emery had just made their final move.

Chapter Fifteen

Polly woke up shivering.

Where was she? What had happened?

It took a minute or so to shake the miasma that clung to her senses. Then the details started filtering into her brain one by one. Her breath was a cloud in the chilly air, yet…she was inside. She squinted her eyes to bring the ceiling above her into focus—sagging tiles stained brown with water, and one big, black gap of nothingness where the ceiling tiles had fallen away. A row of windows sat in rusted frames on the tall walls, each pane of glass cracked, painted over with graffiti or opaque with grime. She felt the chill of the metal bed she lay on through a wafer-thin mattress that barely deserved the name.

She raised her hand to push her hair from her face and swallowed a cry of pain. Her wrists ached. They were bound tightly together by zip ties that cut into her skin. She sniffed the pungent remnants of the chloroform her assailant had used to subdue her on her coat sleeves and clutched her hands back down over her stomach.

Attacked.

Kidnapped.

Alone.

Fear blended with tension to clear the fuzzy aftereffects in her brain. She needed to assess the situation. Figure out where she was and how long she’d been here. She needed to find her phone, find a way out and get the hell out of there before whoever had taken her came back.

As her vision cleared, she could tell she was in a warehouse. The black holes in the ceiling revealed rusty support girders. Oversize windows would let in light if they were clean and clear. More precisely, she was in an office or break room within a warehouse.

She rolled onto her side to see two doors—well, two doorways. The doors were long gone. One led into the darkness of what she assumed was the rest of the warehouse. Through the other she could make out a pedestal sink with a cracked mirror above it.

But she couldn’t hear anyone else here with her, only the wind squealing through the cracks in the windows and the sound of something scurrying through the wall behind her. Shivering at the noise, she turned the other way to make sure there was a wall between her and whatever little critter she’d heard.

But what she saw in that corner of the room made her stomach lurch.

Someone had swept it clean and erected a shrine—to her.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

A folding table along the wall was crowded with candles, their wax puddled and hardened into creamy lakes. Between them, pinned to a bulletin board and scattered about were photos of her—laughing with Ashley outside Pearl’s Diner, walking Luna, stepping from her car at St. Luke’s, walking her homeless friend Gerald and his little dog, Smudge, out the front door of the hospital, even a blurry photo of her with Daniel and Pirate with Daniel’s face scratched out. In front of the photos, she saw the items that had gone missing from her life. Her mug from the hospital. Her missing toothbrush wrapped in a ribbon. A partially used tube of hand cream, the exact brand she kept in her locker. On the bulletin board, she saw a lanyard with an old badge from the clinic. She’d thrown it out because the clasp had broken.

The weight of being known—watched—through every facet of her life pressed at her ribs.

All these weeks—these months—of feeling like she was under a microscope, like she was a toy someone was playing with, she hadn’t imagined it.

But if Tate Emery was dead, and she had no ex-boyfriends to worry about, then who…?

And then she saw it. Salvation.

Her phone. It sat on her backpack, right beneath the altar.

Polly sat up, ignoring the nausea in her stomach as she swayed back and forth. She visually swept the room again while she got her bearings, then pushed to her feet and staggered over to the table. She’d text or call for help. But even if she couldn’t risk being caught or overheard, her security-obsessed stepdad had put a find-your-phone app on her and Ashley’s phones after the trouble Ashley had run into a few months ago. She just needed to make sure it was on, and he could track her.

She powered it up and grabbed her backpack. The medical supplies inside held scissors and a disposable scalpel blade. She could cut herself free and arm herself.

The slam of a car door echoed in the cavernous warehouse space outside the office. Then she heard footsteps shuffling across the gritty concrete.

Oh, hell. She didn’t have time to call or text anyone.

The footsteps were coming this way. She didn’t have time to run.

After waiting seconds that ticked by like hours for her phone to power up, she turned it to silent mode and jammed it deep into the pocket of her coat as she stumbled back to the bed. She sat on the edge and shoved the backpack behind her feet as a man paused in the doorway.

She recognized the outfit if not a face. Jeans that had seen better days. Stocking cap. Hoodie. Scarf tied around the lower half of his face.