The Long Way Back, page 16
Eva thinks about their dates, always outside of Landing or in some secluded spot. Parking on snowy roads when it was cold or hiking obscure trails when the weather warmed up a bit. They avoided people and places where they would be recognized and remembered. Zach said it was because he didn’t want them to be bothered by her fans, or by those who would snap pictures of them like homegrown paparazzi. Eva had admitted once that it happened, that people sometimes took furtive photos and uploaded them to fan sites. He looked downright horrified at the thought.
She pulls back now and stares at Zach—at the five-o’clock shadow on his strong jaw, the lips she loves to trace with her fingers, the scar that bisects his left eyebrow and makes him look rugged somehow—and remembers the day that he took her phone and disabled all tracking apps and devices. It seemed romantic at the time, a gallant gesture that protected their privacy and made it easier for Eva to claim that she was hanging out with a school friend or staying late at work. She didn’t even question him. And because Charlie trusted her daughter implicitly, she never checked the apps. She never found out.
“I think I want to go home,” Eva says quietly.
“Eva—”
“This isn’t what I thought it would be.”
“Evangeline, listen to me. I love you, and I want us to be together…”
But she’s no longer listening. The more Zach proclaims his devotion, the more it grates. Her mind is catapulting from one missed red flag to another. Eva wanted this—an intimate weekend getaway without her mother’s interference—and she let the lure and lust of first love blind her. She can see that now.
“We need to go back. I want to hear all about your family and your father, Zach, I really do. But not here. Not like this.” Eva pushes up from the couch and squeezes his fingers when he catches her hand. She gives him a small smile. “Take me home.”
“I can’t.” Zach swallows hard.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“Three more days,” he says, standing so that she has to look up at him. “We have to hide out here for three days, and then we can go anywhere we want and do anything we want.”
She laughs, but it’s uneasy. “What are you talking about? I graduate on Friday. I have a million things to do. You know that.”
“Don’t do this,” Zach whispers, squeezing his eyes shut and tugging her against him.
“Do what?” Eva feels a tear spill down her cheek and wipes it against Zach’s T-shirt. “I’m not doing anything. I just want to go home. Take me home. Please.”
“I can’t. Not right now. I have to make sure that…” He swallows hard. “I need to know that you’re safe.”
“What do you mean, safe?” Eva tries to wiggle out of his embrace, but his arms stiffen.
“Just—”
“Let go!” she gasps, when he holds her tighter.
“Stop, Eva.” Zach’s voice is broken, his words choked and reluctant. “We’re stuck here for a while. If you’d just trust me…”
But she’s past the point of listening. She feels trapped, frantic, and she bucks in Zach’s arms, cracking his chin with the back of her head. He lets out a rough gasp of surprise.
It happens before Eva realizes what’s going on. He sweeps her into his arms and begins to carry her toward the back of the house. “I can’t reason with you right now, but when you calm down we’ll talk, okay?”
“No!” she screams, wasting her voice, though she knows no one can hear her. No one is going to come and rescue her. “No! Don’t do this, please! Zach, you can’t do this!”
“Please, Eva. I’m rescuing you.”
Zach almost trips when they make it to the hallway, and she uses every ounce of her energy to writhe and struggle in his arms. But it’s no use. He’s several inches taller, at least fifty pounds heavier. Every muscle on his body is neat and defined, carefully maintained with free weights and long runs that he takes every morning before dawn. Eva always thought that if she found herself in a precarious situation, she’d be able to battle her way through. She even felt sorry for the women who seemed to just give up instead of fighting back. She would never roll over and play dead. But after only a couple of minutes, Eva is spent and sweaty, her heart beating so hard and high in her chest that her vision begins to blur at the edges.
When they make it to the bedroom door, Zach nudges it open. Stepping inside, he puts his mouth against her temple. “This will all be over soon,” he says.
Then he lowers her onto the bed and hurries out the door. Before she can get her feet beneath her, he’s shut it. And as she lunges for the handle and her fingers brush the cold knob, she hears the same click that she heard last night. A faint, metallic pop that means she’s locked inside.
From the other side Zach says, “I love you, Eva. Don’t forget that.”
CHAPTER 12
SUNDAY
Eva pounds on the bedroom door until her hands are red and throbbing, but Zach does not come back. She screams his name until her throat is scraped raw. Nothing. Blinded by fury and fear, she abuses him with every obscenity she can think of, every cruel and ugly thing that her imagination can conjure. But he ignores her.
So, she switches to pleading.
“Remember when we hiked to the frozen waterfall?” she says, her damp cheek flush against the cold door, her voice breaking. “It was the first time you told me you loved me. And I couldn’t say it back. I could hardly even look at you. But you held me close and said that you’d wait for me. You’d wait until I could say it. You promised not to push…”
There’s a sound in the kitchen, a soft thump followed by a shuffle. Eva presses her fingers against the wood and squeezes her eyes shut. Hoping. Praying.
“You kept your promise,” she begins again. “And just a couple of days later, I said it back. Do you remember where we were? On the street in the dark after my shift at Mugs. I smelled like fryer grease and stale coffee, but you kissed me anyway. I said ‘I love you’ and I meant it. I meant it so much.”
The slide of something against the hardwood floor. Movement that Eva can feel through Zach’s thick socks, reverberating in the soles of her feet.
“I still do,” she says, raising her voice. Can he hear her in the kitchen? “I still love you. I love you, Zach!”
The slam of the front door hits Eva like a bullet to the chest. For a moment, she can’t catch her breath, and the room tilts wildly around her. When she finally does manage to gasp, it turns into a sob, a howl that surely Zach can hear even outside. Where is he going? How can he just leave her here? Sliding down the door, Eva lands in a broken heap on the floor and cries until she has no tears left. Until the sleeves of her flannel are soaked through, and her eyes are swollen and sore.
Zach was her first real friend, her first love. The person who made her believe that she didn’t have to be Evangeline the Blubber Queen anymore, but she also didn’t have to be the Little Mermaid. She could just be Eva, a girl who loved the outdoors, writing, and every book fit to print. She didn’t have to wear makeup or make sure she sported the right label so that she was forever honoring her influencer contracts. Maybe best of all, she could be loved for all the things she truly was—and wasn’t.
Was it all a lie? Did Zach feel anything for her, ever? And if it had all been some elaborate ruse, why?
When she’s cried herself dry and is hollow and exhausted, Eva pushes herself up from the floor and shuffles over to her backpack. Her computer is tucked inside, and even if there’s no Wi-Fi, maybe she can write a note or somehow document what’s going on. If something happens and… but she can’t think like that. She can’t let her mind go to a world where someone would someday have to search for forensic evidence on her hard drive.
But before she even grabs the backpack, Eva can see that her computer is gone. She should have noticed the way her bag slouched against the chair this morning, limp and empty. Eva snags it by a strap and flings it across the room with a scream.
Why would he take it? What on earth would Zach want with her computer? Accepting that he took it makes Eva wonder about her phone. She knows that she put it in her backpack when she was still on the Summer Moon. Did he take her phone, too?
Eva spirals through their escape, and in light of her abduction (imprisonment?) everything changes. The pills Zach told her to give her mom. “Just to help her fall asleep and stay asleep.” His insistence on checking the Summer Moon after she disembarked. What was he doing? Their long boat ride at dusk on a stormy, menacing night… Everything changes when she looks at it through the lens of what she now knows: Zachary Brennan is not the man she thought he was.
“I’m here,” Eva whispers into the quiet of the room. It’s a prayer perhaps, or a wish. “I’m still here.”
Without her computer, Eva feels desperate to find something to help. The bed is unmade, and she rummages through it frantically, yanking off the blankets and sheets to check under the mattress and between the headboard and the wall. It’s clean, and beneath the bed there is nothing but dust bunnies. Next, she tears through every drawer in the bureau. They’re all empty, except for the bottom one, which contains an old, musty afghan and a handful of mothballs. The bedside stands are equally vacant. For a moment, the desk lamp looks promising, but when Eva picks it up, she realizes it’s light as a feather and made of plastic. It would be an utterly useless weapon. Weapon? She can hardly believe that she’s thinking like this.
Escape would be so much better. Rushing to the window, Eva pulls back the curtains only to find that the sash has been nailed to the frame. Someone has painted over the nail heads so that they look like part of the casing, but she can feel them when she runs her fingertips over the wood.
It’s chilling. The understanding that someone installed an exterior door in this tiny, interior bedroom. That they methodically, intentionally nailed the only window shut and then painted over the evidence.
Eva’s not standing in a bedroom. She’s standing in a cell.
Panic claws at her, and for a few blinding moments she is sure she will die of pure terror. Her stomach revolts and she dry heaves, choking on bile. There’s nothing she can do, nothing she can use to improve her situation by even a degree, and she’s never felt more helpless or hopeless in her whole life. She’s entirely at Zach’s mercy.
It feels like defeat to crawl onto the bed, but once Eva’s stomach has stopped spasming, it’s all that she can manage. She wraps herself in the tangle of blankets, shivering so hard that even the heavy layers don’t diminish her chattering teeth. Almost the moment her head hits the pillow, her body begins to shut down. Eva has tried fight, and now all systems are taking flight. She doesn’t want to sleep—it doesn’t feel safe or wise—but it’s as if a boulder is pressing her deeper and deeper into the bed. Just opening her eyes feels like a distant impossibility.
In seconds, Eva is unconscious.
* * *
The light in the room has changed when Eva opens her eyes. It’s gray and muted, no doubt from the sun sinking beneath the line of tall trees that surround the old house. She knows exactly where she is, and the dread and despair that flood her veins is no surprise. Eva doesn’t feel teary anymore, but she also doesn’t have a renewed sense of hope. Her dreams were of long halls and closed doors, of captivity.
For a few moments she lays perfectly still, wishing herself somewhere—anywhere—else. But in the silence, she realizes that she didn’t simply wake up on her own; something broke through the tight web of her nightmares. It’s noise and movement, something frenzied happening, and then all at once there’s a key in the door.
Zach flings it open so hard the door slams against the wall behind it. “Eva!” he half shouts. “Come—you have to come right now.”
He crosses the room in two long strides and tears the blankets off her. Eva is terrified to let him touch her, but it all happens so fast she can’t even open her mouth to protest. Before she can blink, Zach has pulled her from the bed and deposited her on her feet. One hand around her waist and the other tightly gripping her upper arm, he ushers her toward the door.
This is what Eva wanted—freedom—but not this way. She tries to shake him off, but something fundamental has changed in Zach. Without even thinking, he presses her against the bedroom wall and holds her there, his face only inches from hers. His eyes are wild. Afraid. “Stop it. I need you to listen to me. There’s no time to explain.”
Eva’s woozy from the sudden change in circumstance, but Zach doesn’t give her the chance to talk back anyway.
“He’s coming. My dad is coming. Someone must have seen you when you went out this morning. Or the cameras are still active… I don’t know. But you have to get out of here. Now.”
“What?” Eva tries to protest as he wrenches her away from the wall and pushes her into the hallway. His hands are around her waist, guiding, pushing her toward the cabin door.
“There isn’t time, Eva. Just listen to me: the keys are in the ignition of the truck. Head back the way we came. Through Little Moose, and then turn south at the first stop sign—it’s ten miles or so down the road. That’ll take you to highway one.”
“First you lock me up and now you’re sending me away?” Eva finally finds her voice and her strength. Twisting out of Zach’s grip, she hits him in the chest, hard, with both palms. Then all at once her hands are fists and she’s pounding him, over and over again, until he catches her wrists and wrestles her arms behind her back.
“Stop. Please. Just listen to me.”
They’re both spent and heaving, and when Zach lays his forehead against hers, Eva doesn’t pull away. She can’t. He’s trembling beneath her, his skin clammy and warm. He’s terrified, she can smell it on him, something harsh and acrid like a freshly snuffed match.
“I thought you loved me,” she manages after a few shaky breaths.
“I do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“We don’t have time for this.” He pulls away from her and very carefully releases his hold on her wrists. He looks like he wants to gather her to him, but instead he cups her chin in one hand and levels her with a look of pure desperation. “You have to listen to me, Evangeline. You have to run.”
Zach’s voice is a blade, clean and sharp, and though so many things have passed between them, Eva knows in her bones that his words are true. If she was frightened before, it’s nothing compared to what unfurls inside her now.
“You can do this.” Zach kisses her once, on the cheek, then spins her around and together they run for the door. “I’ll hold them off.”
“Them?”
Zach ignores her. “Drive fast and head straight for the Ely Police Department. Turn east, then south. Get on 169—it’ll take you there in forty minutes or so.”
“What am I supposed to tell them?” Eva trips over the threshold and nearly plunges headfirst onto the porch, but Zach catches her and keeps her upright.
“It doesn’t matter. Just get somewhere safe.”
“What about you?”
Zach scowls. “Don’t worry about me. Just get out of here.”
“But—”
“Eva, go!”
She stumbles on the cold grass, her stockinged feet slipping on the lawn and becoming instantly wet. Strips of fog wreath the trees, and a light breeze lifts Eva’s curls off her neck, sending a full-body shiver down her spine. Her hair is still damp, she never even had a chance to brush it, and she knows she must be a sight: tangled mane, bloodshot eyes, no shoes. No coat, either, and nothing at all to identify herself and lend credence to the preposterous story she’s about to tell. She’ll pull into Ely—a town she’s only crossed through once or twice—looking homeless and unstable. Eva doesn’t even know what to say. How can she explain the last twenty-four hours of her life?
But as she nears the shed, Eva realizes she might never get the chance to tell her story. She can hear the roar of an engine in the distance. Someone is revving the motor, driving fast on that long lick of road that splits the forest in two. The sound makes her stumble, and at the very moment that Zach shouts her name, the air fills with the squeal of brakes and the crunch of gravel. Frozen to the spot, Eva watches the flash of black between the underbrush, until adrenaline bucks hard in her chest and she comes to her senses. She sprints the last few yards to the cover of the shed, her heart galloping.
The garage door has already been lifted and Eva slips inside, pressing herself between the truck and the wall and dropping into a crouch. Past the bumper of the truck she watches as a black SUV tears down the drive, slamming on the brakes and pulling to a stop only feet away from where Zach stands. A cloud of dust billows over him, and before it has a chance to dissipate, the doors of the SUV are wrenched open and three men jump to the ground.
Two of the men are in combat fatigues, tactical cargo pants and camouflage shirts with pockets beneath a khaki vest that can only be body armor. Their hair is close-cropped, and the driver is wearing reflective sunglasses, even though clouds have completely obscured the setting sun. There’s no military base around here—at least, not to Eva’s knowledge—but even if there was, these men don’t give off an official vibe. There is nothing safe about them. But they pale in comparison to the man that jumped from the passenger seat.
He’s dressed in dark pants and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His shoulders are broad, but his hair is streaked white and his belly soft. There’s nothing immediately intimidating about him, but the casual way he walks toward Zach emanates such power, such authority, Eva flattens herself against the truck. The man—the way he holds himself and moves through the world and so clearly calls all the shots—is menacing.
Words are exchanged, but Eva is too far away to hear. When the white-haired newcomer turns away from Zach, she feels a moment of relief, but then he brings his arm around with the full force of his body and backhands Zach across the face. He crumples to the grass and doesn’t move.
