Page 109 of Ruthless Possession
"No."
Evan's eyes flick to the rearview mirror. "Don't."
She goes quiet. But I can hear her trying to move, the rustle of the blanket, the scrape of her foot against the cargo floor. She's testing. She's an ER nurse. She knows about drugs, about doses, about how long they take to wear off. She's calculating.
I need her to stop. I need her to lie still and let the drug wear off completely before she makes Evan turn around. Because if he turns around in this car, the gun will move, and if the gun moves, one of us dies in the back of a sedan on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
The trees break.
We emerge into a clearing, or what was once a clearing. The grass is waist-high and yellowed with frost. In the center of it, black against the dark sky, sits a barn.
It's huge. Or it was huge once. Now it's a skeleton with the roof half collapsed, the walls weathered gray, and the double doors hanging open like a mouth waiting to swallow us. The headlights sweep across the front of it and I see the gaps between the boards, the missing shingles, the way the whole structure leans slightly to one side as if it's been trying to fall down for years and hasn't quite committed to the act.
Evan stops the car.
The engine idles and the headlights throw twin beams into the darkness of the barn's interior, illuminating nothing. The light just disappears into the darkness.
"We're here," he says.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs, willing them to stop, but they don't. The fear is in my blood now, in my bones, in the space between my heartbeats. It's not the calculated fear of the loading area, the tactical fear of planning and watching and waiting. This is primal. This is the fear of a deserted barn on a deserted road with a man who has killed women and has a gun and has my friend's unconscious body in the back of his car.
Evan turns off the engine.
The silence is absolute. No highway noise or distant sirens. No sound of life at all, just the ticking of the cooling engine and the wind through the dead grass, and my own breathing, which I'm trying to control and failing.
"Inside," Evan says. He picks up the gun. Points it at me. Not at Trixie this time. At me.
I look at the barn. The headlights are still on, the battery hasn't drained yet, and in their beam I can see the interior: dirt floor, scattered hay, the rusted skeleton of some farming equipment pushed against the far wall. The roof has partially collapsed on the left side, letting in a rectangle of pale moonlight that falls across the ground like a spotlight.
I think about running.
The thought arrives fully formed and is immediately deemed useless. We're miles from the highway. I don't know which direction. The grass is tall enough to hide in but the ground is frozen and the frost will show footprints, and Evan has a gun and knows this terrain and I don't.
"You won't get far," Evan says, reading my face with the same precision he used in the loading area. "And I'll shoot her first."
He means Trixie. He's telling me he'll shoot Trixie if I run.
I believe him.
I open the car door. The cold hits me like a wall, not the polite cold of the loading area but the deep, penetrating cold of an open field in November, the kind that finds every gap in your clothing and sets up residence. My dress is thin. I left my jacket in the restaurant. I didn't know I was going to a barn.
Harris gets out on his side. The gun stays on me.
"Get her out of the back," he says.
I move to the rear of the car. My legs are wooden, uncooperative, like they belong to someone who hasn't used them in years. The hatchback opens with a beep, and there's Trixie, curled on her side, her eyes open now and fixed on mine with a clarity that wasn't there twenty minutes ago.
She's coming out of it. The drug is wearing off.
"Morgan." Her voice is a thread. "Where?—"
"Don't talk." I keep my voice low. "He's armed. Just do what he says."
Evan steps around the car, the gun still trained on me. "I said, get her out."
I reach for Trixie, helping her sit up. Her body feels like deadweight, but there's a new awareness in her eyes. She's fighting it.
"We need to move inside," I tell her softly. "Can you stand?"
