Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Typical me, rushing headlong into disaster. And this time, I’d dragged Forrest with me. I was going to have to call for help. My pride hated it, but not as much as I hated the dark, dank cellar we were trapped in.
I stared down at my phone screen, stymied. No bars—not even a hint of a bar—just three dots where the bars should be. Shit.
“No signal,” I said. “Do you have a signal?”
Glancing at his phone screen, I felt more than saw Forrest shake his head. “Nothing.”
“Fuck.” As our options fell away, a sickening thought occurred to me. “Can Hawk track my phone if there’s no cellular connection?”
Forrest shook his head. “I don’t know. Fuck. There’s got to be a way to get through those doors.”
I wanted to believe him, but root cellars were designed for storage and keeping animals out. There was no reason anyone would put a safeguard on the inside to prevent what had just happened to us. It wasn’t what these were used for. I glanced at the door at the top of the steps. Even if it hadn’t been bolted shut, it wasn’t light—it had taken two of us to lift the door we’d opened. But maybe there was a way we hadn’t thought of yet.
“Who would do this? The Learys?” I asked, thinking out loud.
Forrest let out a huff of breath. “Could be. Maybe they’re trying to scare you.”
I rolled that thought around in my head, but it didn’t fit. Locking me in a root cellar didn’t seem like Callum Leary’s style. But then again, it wasn’t like I knew the guy. Maybe Forrest was right. Maybe Callum Leary thought I’d be easier to deal with if I was scared.
I wasn’t scared—not yet. Even so, I could admit this had not been one of my better decisions.
“We should have talked to Hawk and Griffen before we left,” I said.
Forrest just nodded his head, a shadow in the dark.
I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t stopped me, why he hadn’t made me do the sensible thing instead of rushing off after the clue. But I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t Forrest’s responsibility to stop me from being a dumbass. And more than that, I knew why Forrest hadn’t stopped me—because he wanted me back. The last thing he’d want to do was piss me off. Yet again, this fuckup was all on me.
“I’m sorry,” I said into the cold, dark room. “I’m so sorry. We should have told them what we were doing.”
“You don’t owe me an apology, Sterling,” Forrest responded. “I could have said something, but I wanted to get here, too. I didn’t want to wait. Now we just have to figure out how to open that door.”
We worked on the door for what felt like hours, shoving and banging. I tried gouging at the hinges, but all the parts that mattered were on the outside. If anyone heard, they didn’t come to our rescue. I thought about whoever had locked us in here. Were they waiting to see if we escaped? Would they meet us out there with a gun? Was this a prank or something far more insidious?
With a sigh, my palms bleeding and hands aching, I said, “I don’t think we’re going to get out of here.”
A spike of fear went down my spine, the implications of my words became clear. No one knew where we were. We had no way to communicate with anyone. Our car was hidden in the trees, and we were locked in an empty, cold root cellar deep in the woods.
My impatience had gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years, but this might be my worst, and last, mistake. It didn’t seem right that my story would end here. I had so much more I wanted to do.
I ran through how things would go at Heartstone when they realized I was gone. They’d try to track my phone, and they’d see the last known signal ping somewhere nearby. That gave me hope. Griffen and his team would find us. I was sure of it.
The question was how long that would be. A day? Two? And when they arrived, would this mystery person who’d locked us in here be waiting for them?
And further to that, who would want me and Forrest dead? The only person who knew where we were was the one who’d locked us in. If it was the Learys—and I wanted to hope that it was—they’d come back to let us out. I was no good to them dead.
The Learys needed us alive to finish solving the clues, so killing us simply didn’t make sense. Plus, the clue very clearly led us here. Why would they lock us in instead of waiting for us to solve it and then come after us?