I left him.

Sharp pain stabs my hand. I curse and dust the dirt off my palm to inspect the cut, my gaze trailing to the offending object protruding out of the ground. “Shit.”

With an unsteady hand, I swipe at the mushrooms, knocking off their pinkish-brown caps to expose the rich soil. Not just any crop of mushrooms—ghoul fungus—the kind that grows over dead things.

My breath stalls as I catch sight of the bleached bone.

A terrifying realization that this bone doesn’t belong to an animal seizes me, and as I look around, I know exactly where I’ve stumbled.

This is a graveyard.

What’s left of Alex’s subjects that couldn’t be dissolved by chemicals lie here, waiting for the earth to decompose their remains. An ill feeling sweeps through me as I realize I would’ve been next.

With sheer willpower, I’m back on my feet and running toward a thick row of trees. I reach the other side and, nearly falling to my knees, I find a black truck. Oh, my god. There’s really a fucking truck. I get the door unlocked and hoist myself into the driver’s seat. My hands shake as I key the ignition.

The engine cranks.

I close my eyes in relief. One second to center myself, then I drive the truck through the cut of the forest.

Once I’m free of the woods, I steer onto a paved road and a frantic laugh tumbles free. I have no idea where I’m going or where this road leads, but it’s not important. For the first time, there is absolutely no plan—just the desire to keep going.

I drive until the last wave of adrenaline is depleted from my system. I sense a hard crash coming on. My eyelids are heavy, my body is beginning to ache. Every cut, bruise, and injury makes itself painfully known. I turn the stereo on to find a song to keep me awake and distracted.

I always liked music. It was entertaining. Although I never understood how people were so moved by it they invested so much time and energy into learning to play an instrument, or became emotional enough to cry…

An ache builds behind my eyes as the sorrow in the woman’s voice bleeds through the speakers. She sings about loss and heartache, and my own proverbial heart pangs in sync with the beat. My chest tightens, my throat clogs, and I tap the brake to slow the truck.

I pull off to the side of the road. “Jesus Christ, Blakely. What the hell?”

The song crescendos, and I grip the wheel, my fingers throbbing from the pressure. I see Alex’s face right before the flames engulfed the room. I feel the anguish he felt as I told him his experiment had failed. A searing flame thrashes my insides with an overwhelming surge of…guilt? Remorse? What?

Some savage emotion rocks through me, and the only thing I can do to make it stop is scream. When I finally stop, my breaths ragged and chest on fire, the cab of the truck becomes eerily quiet.

I rest my head against the steering wheel. No. No, I am not responsible for his death. I continue to repeat this, yet, this tiny voice inside me questions what would have happened had I admitted the truth under that waterfall. Is this regret?

“That is seriously twisted logic.” Shit, he abducted me and tortured me and would have killed me in the end. I’m just exhausted. I need sleep. Or to eat. Or… I hit the dial to shut off the fucking song.

A drop of wetness hits my cheek, and I wipe at my eye. I stare at the tears on my fingertips and a tremor of fear takes hold.

I can deny what I felt on that cliff with Alex. I can claim it was temporary lunacy. A side effect. An infection of my brain.

But it rocked me to my core.

Whatever I experienced with him, it was terrifying and awakening and it changed me. I have to leave it behind at that waterfall if I ever hope to be sane again.

I put the truck in Drive and swerve onto the road.

The farther I get from Alex, the farther away from these emotions I’ll be, and the more I will start to feel normal.

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23

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AFFLICTION

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BLAKELY

I check news stations daily for any mention of Alex.

So far, there’s been nothing. No account of a man gone missing. Not even a press release of the fire. Which someone had to see, had to report.

I’ve combed the Internet, searching all the local sites in New York for an obituary of a John Doe. Nothing has turned up citing anyone dying in a freak fire in the middle of the wilderness.

I’ve spent the past few days in a state of staggered wonder, questioning if I was somehow gaslighted, if the whole thing had even happened at all. Did I imagine a cabin combusting into flames? Did I really spend almost a month chained in a basement, being experimented on by a mad scientist? It sounds absurd even in my head.

Which is why I haven’t said any of this out loud. To anyone.

After I escaped, I drove Alex’s truck as far as some one-stop town before it ran out of gas, then I used a tow truck driver’s phone to call Rochelle. In the middle of a highway, wearing filthy clothes, barefoot, and having zero access to money, she was the only person I could think of to call.

I explained away my circumstance as a “scheme gone wrong,” to which she laughed and gave the driver her credit card number and told him to rent me a limo.

There were no limos to rent at two o’clock in the morning in bumfuck, New York, so he very suspiciously but courteously called for a Taxi.

When I made it to the city, I went directly to my apartment and, after the super let me in, showered. I ran hot water over my body for as long as I could tolerate. Then I buried myself under a mound of blankets and slept hard.

At some point, I emerged from my apartment to purchase a new phone. I had three voicemails. There was this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I realized I had to return calls and try to explain my disappearance.

The first message was abrupt. Jeffery Lomax—the divorce lawyer I use for referrals—had a client for me if I was interested. The second voicemail was from Rochelle. She had left a cackling message thanking me for tanking that “little twat” and her brand. And the final message was from my boss at Lucy’s data processing job. I was fired for repeated no-shows, no-calls. Which, he said, wasn’t too surprising for me.

That was it. No frantic calls trying to locate me. No worried voices urging me to contact them, whoever them—the people who cared about me—were.

Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t bother me. It’s how I lived my life. Alone. And I preferred it this way. I liked my solitude and didn’t need intimate connections from friends or family. I had always deemed those a burden.

Still, what if I had died during Alex’s torture treatment? What if I never came back? How much time would have passed before someone noticed…and cared?

I tried to shrug off the unease and concentrate on the next steps I needed to take to recover my life, but the thought kept resurfacing, manifesting in a physical symptom, like something akin to homesickness. A queasy feeling I’d heard described by others, but never experienced myself.

So I went to see Vanessa.

My request to stay a few days with my mother was met with a stunned look. Although to be fair, the Botox prevents her facial muscles from displaying varying expressions. But what she said couldn’t have been more clear.

“You’ve never once, in your entire life, asked me for anything, Blakely. Are you ill? Do you need me to make an appointment with Dr. Westfield?”

“I’m not sick,” I told her. At least, I didn’t think I was physically sick. “I just… I think I want to come home for a while.” I had been fiddling with a loose string on my shirt and it snapped. “Have you missed me…at all?”