Chapter 24
Grace
I’m shoved into the back of a car and the door slams shut. “Now don’t make this hard, Grace,” Vince says from the seat beside me. Some small amount of sunlight gets through the hood and I can make out vague shapes: the headrest of the seat in front of me, the shape of the driver, and not much else. I look over and Vince is barely a blob as the car pulls out and we hit the road.
It doesn’t take long to reach the Sandtrap. When the car parks, Vince grabs my wrists, wrenches them behind my back, and wraps them in a zip-tie. I gasp in pain as the plastic bites into my skin, and Vince opens the door and shoves me out. I land on the concrete in a heap and bang my chin against the cold ground.
“Get up,” Vince growls as he hauls me to my feet and drags me forward. I can’t see much, only shifting shapes, but I get the vague sense I’m being led around the side of the house to a quiet entrance based on the shadows and the lack of steps leading up to the front. I hear some beeps, and a door opens, and I’m led into a dark hallway as all my remaining sight disappears. I’m tugged, shoved, and dragged, then practically thrown down a staircase, until finally I’m pushed into a chair.
It’s quiet after that. A door opens and closes. The air’s cool and humid so I’m guessing I’m in a basement, which is relatively unusual in California and I wouldn’t have guessed that the Sandtrap had one. The chair is cold metal and I don’t move for a while as the zip-tie digs into my wrists and the distant hum of machinery keeps intruding into my thoughts. I keep picturing Calvino, and Riley, and Damon, and Diego, and all the girls at Crystal Lake, and I wonder how many of them are going to get hurt because of me.
This has to be the end. If I wasn’t dead before, I am now. Vince isn’t the kind of man that would suffer a spy like me, and all I can do is choose the way I go. I can let him kill me while crying and begging for my life and telling him everything he wants to know, or I can try to keep my head held high and my mouth locked shut and go out with some shred of meager dignity.
If I talk, Calvino will pay. There’s no doubt about that. He’s the center of all this and Vince will attack him the second he realizes that Calvino put me up to spying and digging for information. I don’t even know why I care—Calvino didn’t tell me about Riley’s killer right away, although in his defense, the deal was to wait until my task was over—and it seems crazy that I’d consider getting murdered just to protect him. And yet some strange part of me is grateful for what Calvino did, because without him, I never would’ve gotten this close, never would’ve gone this far, and never would’ve experienced everything I’ve experienced in the last few weeks.
He gave me something I’ll always cherish: life, desire, fun. Before him, my days were bleak and depressing, but with him it was like I was learning how to breathe and walk and run all over again.
Now I’ll lose all that, but at least I had it for a while.
A distant door opens and closes and footsteps echo off stone. I hear another chair scape against the floor and stop a few feet away. I look around, trying to see through the cloth, but there’s nothing, and my pulse is pounding in my guts and I feel like I need to get away, get away as fast as I can, but there’s nowhere to go.
“Hello?” I ask and I swear I can feel someone breathing. I want to scream, but I wrestle with myself to keep it together. “Is someone there?”
My hood is suddenly ripped from my head. A bright light above blinds me and I have to squeeze my eyes closed as I grimace away from it. Vince chuckles and he sits across from me.
“I apologize for the delay, Grace. I had to be upstairs while everyone else was getting up so nobody suspected anything was going on. But I’m here now and it’s time for us to talk.”
I keep blinking until Vince slowly resolves from a blob of formless nothing into himself framed by light. I test the zip-ties keeping me bound but they’re tight as ever.
“What do you want?” I ask and struggle to maintain my calm. I’m on the edge of panic.
“I want you to tell me the truth about who you are and what you want.” He leans back, arms crossed, and shrugs a little like this is no big deal. “It’s that simple.”