“Stop talking about yourself in the third person,” I said, glowering at him. “I know it’s you!”
He didn’t reply to that. He just shrugged indifferently.
“If it’s not you, prove it,” I said, crossing my arms. “Speak. Show me that you’re a different guy with a different voice and I’ll drop the subject.”
He remained silent. Filled with a sudden rush of adrenaline, I lunged forward and ripped the mask right off his face.
It wasHunter.
“I knew it!” I said, jumping to my feet and shoving him in the chest. “You psychotic freak!”
He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me back toward the bed. “Stay the fuck over there,” he said through gritted teeth.
My chest heaved with anger. “I should’ve known from the very start,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “When I saw the guy in the parking lot the other night, my first thought was that it was you. I figured only you would do something like that to scare me. It was only when the guy spoke and sounded different that I started to think it was something else. Like the secret society from the legends. Then the other guys showed up, so I ran with that theory. Literally.”
“The first guy you saw was Asher,” Hunter said, staring down at me with unbridled hatred in his eyes.
That made sense. I’d never spoken directly to Asher or paid much attention to him, so I didn’t know his voice very well, let alone anything else about him. I probably couldn’t even pick him out of a lineup.
“So you got your nasty little Prince buddies to help you kidnap me?” I said, lip curling with contempt.
“Just Asher, Elijah, and Justin.”
“And they thought it was totally normal to chase someone with stun guns, drug them, and throw them in a cell?”
“They don’t know you’re still here,” he replied. “They thought it was just a prank to scare the shit out of you.”
“Like the prank you pulled on Friday the 13th?” I asked, putting the word ‘prank’ in air quotes.
He smirked. “Yes. Just like that.”
I waved a hand around the room. “So where am I? What the hell is this place?”
“It’s one of the old wine cellars,” he said, glancing around the space. “When Adam was a kid, he decided he wanted to play the drums. Mom didn’t want him to bother the housekeeping staff or make Dad angry with all the noise, so she arranged for one of the cellars to be turned into a soundproof studio for him.”
“That’s what the padding is for? Soundproofing?”
“Yeah. So you can scream and cry all you want. No one is ever going to hear you.”
“What if Adam comes down here?”
He snorted. “He won’t. He lost interest in the drums after three months, and he hasn’t been down here since then. Neither has anyone else. No one even noticed I put a deadbolt lock on the other side of the door.”
“So I’ve really been a prisoner in your fucking house this whole time?”
“Underneath it, yes,” he replied. “All the cellars are on a basement level, for obvious reasons.”
I swallowed thickly, wondering how close my mom was right now. Hunter seemed to know exactly what I was thinking, because he smirked again.
“Your mom worked here yesterday. She cleaned the floors right up to the doorway where the cellar stairs start, so she was only a few yards away from you,” he said. “I really wanted to tell you, just so I could hear you scream your head off, but then you would’ve known who I was right away. So I kept it to myself.”
“You sick fucking bastard,” I muttered.
Hunter’s cold smirk widened. “Adam’s here too,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the ceiling. “Just a couple of floors up. He’s actually the one who broke into your phone for me.”
My heart skipped a beat. “He wouldn’t do that to me.”
“He didn’t know it was yours. I put a different cover on it and told him it belonged to a friend of mine, and they forgot the code after changing it while they were drunk. He broke in, disabled the code and gave it back to me. Totally unaware.”