Page 65 of Camera Stays On

“I don’t know how.” I yanked on the jaws, careful not to cut myself. “Sawyer, can you help?”

“You’ll need bolt cutters.” His words came out lazy, almost uncaring.

“Okay, so go get some,” I snarled. His aloofness was pissing me off. She was hurt and close to losing her foot.

“No, I don’t think I will,” he said, almost dreamily, before turning and walking away.

What the fuck.

“Don’t bother with him,” Bea snapped, her brow covered in a sheen of sweat. “Run and get help from someone else.”

I inhaled deeply. This was three incidents in less than twenty-four hours. First Lux, then Andi, and now Bea. This couldn’t be purely accidental.

“How did you get all the way out here?” I asked.

“I was trying to escape,” she hissed. “You know, since there’s a crazed man with a gun walking around that house.”

She wasn’t wrong. I’d considered it, too, last night. However, shortly after Andi’s accident, we discovered Sawyer had not only dumped our phones in a bucket of water, but at some point had also gone out to every car on the property and pulled out the batteries. Unless we were going to walk, like Bea had tried, we were trapped here.

“I can’t leave you.” I looked back to where Sawyer had wandered off. What if he came back? The way he’d been acting made me wonder if he’d placed the trap.

“It’s fine. He’ll either shoot me through the eyes or he won’t. Just go—get something to pry this bitch open.” She closed her eyes, as if accepting her fate.

Against my better judgment, I stood and took off toward the house.

The inside was dark, everyone still asleep from last night’s horrible, draining activities. I rushed up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. Once upstairs, I threw open Darius’s and Mick’s doors, not bothering with Gavin. He was too close to Sawyer to be any help. He might’ve even helped him.

“Bea’s hurt. She needs our help.”

The men were up in a flash, and we sprinted back to the woods with bolt cutters from my truck, where Bea was struggling to stay conscious. With her so far from the house, I worried she’d bleed out just from the waiting.

“Did he come back at all?” I asked, dropping near her head. I wiped her face, and her eyes fluttered open.

“No. The damage is already done. He doesn’t need to come back.” Her words came out weak. I nodded and turned to Mick and Darius. They went to work, yanking and tugging at the trap, to no avail. We tried my cutters, but the trap didn’t budge. I ran my fingers across the levers, trying to figure out how they worked.

“We gotta move her closer,” I said when Mick suggested leaving to grab more tools. “She can’t wait twenty minutes every time one of us leaves and comes back.” Agreeing, the three of us worked to gently lift her and make our way through the woods.

Bea whimpered but closed her eyes and went limp. It felt like hours until we reached the house, but finally we put her down in the yard and went to go find tools to open the trap.

I stayed near Bea’s head, trying to keep her awake and calm. I watched as Mick and Darius worked and worked, coming and going with various tools, until they tossed them all aside and stood up.

“Look at this,” I pointed to the levers on the trap. They hunched over to examine the metal. Darius nodded.

“Let’s try to leverage it open,” he explained. “If this doesn’t work, she either loses the foot, or one of us has to try to go through the trees for help.”

“Don’t!” Bea shouted. “There are traps everywhere.”

Stepping on both sides, Mick and Darius put their full weight on the springs.

Slowly, the jaws released, pulling Bea’s skin, muscles, and tendons with it.

She let out a cry of relief as I hurried to lift her leg out. Scooping her up, I hurried inside the house. Mick and Darius helped us inside, and I set her on the couch.

Our volume caused doors upstairs to open, and a moment later we were joined by a groggy Gavin and Juliet.

“What’s going on?” Gavin yawned.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Juliet hurried to sit next to Bea, reaching for her hand. “What happened? Did Purdy attack you?”