But it was her mouth that was the worst. So parched. So dry. Her tongue felt withered, like desiccated old leather. And there wasn’t enough saliva to keep it from shriveling further.
She was dying. Not dead yet, maybe, but dying for sure.
She didn’t want to believe that, but she knew it was true.
Somewhere . . . somewhere very, very far away . . . a sound.
Grinding. No, rumbling.
She knew the sound, recognized it.
A chain saw.
But it was so far away. So very, very far away . . .
Time passed. She counted not by days, but by dreams. She never awoke. Never stopped dreaming.
Sometimes while she slept there was a voice, a soft, gentle voice, reassuring her that she was okay. That she was still “his girl.”
An image of a boy flashed. A boy with laughing eyes and sandy-colored hair.
But the voice was all wrong. It wasn’t the boy’s voice she heard.
Still, the voice was there. And he lifted her head and cradled it gently, giving her water. She drank until she choked. Until she gagged. She felt the water trickle down her chin to her neck. And then he’d lay her back down again, and he’d wipe her dry, holding her hand and waiting until her body stopped convulsing.
Then she was alone again.
The moment she felt the skin of her eyelids parting, she nearly whimpered out loud. But somehow she held it back. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself; she didn’t want the voice to know she was awake again.
She rolled her eyeballs one more time, using them to pry her lids apart, to unstick them, and the opening grew . . . first on her right side, and eventually, on the left one too.
She didn’t mean to, but she let out a soft sigh.
“I was wondering when you’d wake,” the voice said from somewhere nearby. From right beside her, she realized.
She blinked, glad that she could, and let her head follow the sound, trying to locate him.
He wasn’t hard to find; he sat beside her on a bed. In a room she didn’t recognize. It was dark outside, no light coming in from behind the curtain, but there was a light fixture overhead, and it was bright enough to let her see her immediate surroundings.
She saw varnished pine walls, a checkered quilt, a ruffled canopy overhead. It was a little girl’s room.
“You’ve slept almost the entire day. I thought you’d miss dinner.”
A day? She struggled to remember the last time she’d been awake, but she was certain it had been far longer than just one day.
She tried to focus on his face, but her vision blurred. She blinked again, this time squeezing her eyes shut and reopening them.
His features were vaguely familiar, in a strange and elusive way. She couldn’t quite put her finger on where she’d seen him before, but that didn’t dispel the unease she felt in his presence. The prickling sensation warned her that he was not to be trusted.
Somehow, she knew he was the reason she was here.
“Whe—” She tried to talk, but it was too difficult. Her voice didn’t even register; it was just an arid breath. Dry, like dust.
“Shh.” He pressed his finger to her lips, and that was when she smelled it.
The blistering stench of burnt rubber.
And everything came back to her in a rush.
It was him.
Caine.
And she was Violet.
She understood the feeling of needles that stabbed at her skin. The way her eyes burned from the acrid stench. And the hint of rubbing alcohol on her tongue—not an antiseptic at all—but an echo.
They were all coming from him. He was the carrier of these imprints.
He stored them—wore them—completely unaware that she knew about them. But Violet knew who—and what—he was. A killer.
She turned away, unable to bear the onslaught of emotions that overwhelmed her, knowing that she too might end up part of his collection.
“If you’re good,” he explained, ignoring her rebuff and holding a bottle of nail polish in front of her face, “I’ve brought you a treat for after dinner.”
The sound was back, the chain-saw noise she’d heard before. It seemed like forever ago, but after what he—Caine—had told her about sleeping all day, she was fairly certain it had only been yesterday.
This sound, she knew, wasn’t an echo. It didn’t come closer when he was near. Unlike the other things: the astringent taste of alcohol, the tingling, the burning rubber that made her eyes sting.
The chain saw was just a chain saw. But why?
She glanced around the room again, at the rustic feel, and several things struck her at once. It was morning. She’d slept all the way through the night, yet there was a cloudiness that clung to her, a haze that muffled her clarity, and she realized he must have drugged her. Again.
The soup.
She’d wondered at its taste, if it was only the strange echo he carried lingering on her tongue or whether there really was an underlying flavor of something almost . . . medicinal.
She remembered, after eating it, the way her eyelids had fluttered while he’d held her hand, painstakingly working on her fingernails. She remembered wanting to draw her hands away from him, to make him stop, but she’d been unable to. She’d been too weary and weak, too disoriented to put up any kind of fight.
Instead she’d watched him, blinking sleepily as she wrestled with the grogginess while he meticulously painted each nail.
But now she was awake . . . and alone. Now was her chance.
She tried to sit up, but panic welled up from her gut as she realized she was going nowhere.