and she began to feel a little better.
“I’m just down the hall if you need anything in the night,” Patrick said. “Don’t hesitate. Really.”
“I’ll be fine.”
His eyes fixed on her for a moment, as if he was assessing the truth of her words. “Then I’ll say good night,” he finally said.
A moment later the door softly closed behind him.
Alone, Kara turned back to the window for another breath of the sweet, fresh air flowing in from the Sound, and though the last of the brandy-induced haze lifted, exhaustion began to close in on her again.
“Come in,” she called, certain it was Patrick coming back to tell her something. “I haven’t even started changing yet.” When the only response to her words was another discreet tapping, she went to the door, opened it, and found Neville Cavanaugh holding a small tray. It held a cup of what looked for all the world like the hot milk her grandmother used to make her when she was a child.
“To help you sleep,” he said, echoing the exact words her grandmother used to say.
Kara opened the door wide and he set the tray on her nightstand. “How thoughtful. Thank you.”
The servant straightened up and regarded her with a serious face. “I’m so very sorry about your husband and daughter.” His eyes seemed to bore into her for a moment, and then, abruptly, he turned away. “Sleep well,” he said. A moment later he had vanished from the room and closed the door.
Alone again, Kara took off her clothes, put on the robe that had been left on the bed, and went to the bathroom. Everything she could possibly need was laid out on the marble counter that surrounded the sink, right down to a fresh toothbrush, still in its box. But as she began to brush her teeth, Neville Cavanaugh’s words kept echoing in her mind.
Perfectly normal words that she must have heard a hundred times in the last week.
The same words almost everyone she’d seen had spoken in one form or another.
Then what was it about Neville Cavanaugh’s words that bothered her?
She climbed into bed.
She reached for the cup of warm milk.
She picked up the cup.
And then it came to her.
It wasn’t the words at all.
It was the way he’d said them.
Neville Cavanaugh had spoken the right words, but he hadn’t sounded sorry at all. Instead, he’d simply spoken the words he knew he’d be expected to say.
Kara raised the cup to her lips.
As Neville Cavanaugh’s cold voice came back again, Kara Marshall put the cup back on the nightstand, untouched.
Chapter Forty-eight
Paralyzed!
She was paralyzed, and she couldn’t breathe, and she was blind!
A wave of panic rose inside Lindsay, and she instinctively opened her mouth to scream, but instead of hearing her terror erupt in a howling cry, her mouth filled with air and her head felt like it was going to explode.
Then she began to choke.
Now the wave of panic towered higher, and as she struggled to control the choking and regain her breath, her gorge began to rise and her mouth was filled with the bitter taste of bile.
She was going to drown!
She was going to throw up, and choke on her own vomit, and drown!
The thought triggered a reserve of energy buried deep inside her, and she made herself swallow, made herself force the contents of her stomach back down through her esophagus. But even as the bile receded from her throat, her body began to tingle from lack of oxygen.
Why couldn’t she breathe?
There was tape over her mouth.
She focused her mind, willed herself to banish the panic, drove away any thought but the need to breathe and slowly released the air in her mouth through her nostrils and sucked a fresh breath in through her nose, down her throat, into her lungs.
The wave of terror that had all but killed her subsided.
She took a second breath, then a third.
Her mind began to function again.
Just taped to the chair — her arms to its arms, her legs to its legs. But at least the burning pain she’d felt earlier — the pain she’d thought she couldn’t bear at all — was gone.
But she had borne the pain, and was still alive, and could still think, and—
A faint sound, nearly inaudible, slithered into her consciousness, and for a moment she wondered if she’d heard it at all. But then she heard it again, and knew what it was.
The door at the far end of the tunnel was opening.
Approaching footsteps, clearly audible, moving closer.
Then, out of the darkness, she had what seemed a vision — no, not a vision, she realized, but a memory.
Of Shannon, unconscious, sprawled on the floor.
Sprawled on the floor, and being kicked — kicked until her neck was broken, and her head slammed against the wall like a rag doll in the hands of a furious child.
And if she pretended to be asleep now, it would happen to her, too. So she would be awake, and face whatever new chapter in her torture was about to begin. But her mouth was so dry her tongue had swollen and felt like a wad of cotton, and every time she blinked, her eyes felt as if they were coated with sand.
Maybe, after all, it would be better to die.
He was coming up the stairs now, and once again the terrible panic to which she had awakened only a few moments ago threatened to overwhelm her.
Again the panic receded, but the cold terror in Lindsay’s soul only tightened its grip as first a beam of light and then the dark form of her tormentor rose out of the trapdoor in the floor.
