“Summer, look.” Hope turned and pointed to a corner of the room.
She turned to see what had captured her friend’s attention and caused the look of abject horror on her face. A body lay on the floor. A man. He was on his stomach with one arm stretched out above him.
“Is he dead?” Hope whispered.
Not sure she really wanted to know the answer to that, Summer nonetheless crept over to the man, Hope close at her heels.
“Is he breathing?” Hope asked.
“I don’t know, I can't tell.”
“Check to see if he has a pulse.”
Summer grimaced. If the man was dead, she didn’t want to touch him. She had never touched a dead body before, and the only time she had even been this close to one was when she had killed her husband. Tentatively, she reached out a hand and curled it in between the man’s shoulder and jaw to reach his neck. She pressed her fingertips to his throat and felt the weak thump of his pulse.
“He’s alive,” she told her friend.
“Summer, look at his hand.”
She followed her friend’s pointed finger and saw that the man’s hand had been nailed to the floor. She didn’t even want to think about that or the possibility that the same thing could happen to them. “Let’s see who it is.”
Together they took hold of the man’s shoulders and rolled him over. They both gasped when they saw him. Partly because his face and mouth were a bloody mess, and partly because they recognized him.
“Isn’t that …?”
“My neighbor,” she finished her friend’s sentence. The man lying on the floor in a cabin, nailed to the ground, with his face a bloody mess, was her next-door neighbor, Henry Peyton. “We have to find a way out of here.”
Hope nodded, and the two of them turned their backs on Henry and went to explore the room, searching for their friends, a way out, and anything that would tell them who had kidnapped them and why.
While Hope went to try the door, Summer’s attention was drawn to a large wooden box sitting in the middle of the floor. Still unsteady on her feet, she stumbled over to it. It was bigger than her and had a small opening in the lid at one end. She lifted the lid, inside it smelled of human waste and vomit. On the inside of the lid were scratches and dried blood.
Someone had been locked in there.
“The door is locked,” Hope told her, crossing to stand beside her. “What’s that?”
“I think someone was kept in there,” she said a little breathlessly. Given how her husband had kept his victims in a box similar to this one, this was all hitting a little too close to home. She was quickly feeling overwhelmed.
Who had drugged them?
Was it the same person who shot at her house?
Why not bring Chance and Aggie?
Why her?
Why Hope?
Who hated either of them enough to want to hurt them?
All of a sudden, the cabin’s door was thrown open, and Chance stepped inside.
“Chance.” Hope threw herself at her fiancé.
Summer froze.
Chance didn’t look drugged. She was dizzy, sick to her stomach, and so tired she felt like she could sleep for a month.
“Hope, get away from him,” she told her friend, scanning the room looking for anything they might be able to use as a weapon.