He stared at her for a few beats before ordering her to close her eyes. Ava obliged. She knew she could take a hit, but it was difficult to pretend that it didn’t hurt.
She felt a cold fabric being tied around her head. That was another thing that cemented her belief that he knew her, and that she most certainly knew him. If she were just another random woman he had brought to the farm, he wouldn’t have to go to such great lengths to blindfold them.
“You don’t really have to blindfold me; I already saw most of everything,” Ava quipped.
“I don’t want to look at you,” the man gruffly replied.
“Ellie, he blindfolded you too?” she called out to make sure.
“No,” came Ellie’s soft reply.
The man resumed yanking her around once more and she stumbled. The first time, the man had grunted in annoyance and waited for her to right herself. When she tripped a couple more times, he just kept on walking.
Suddenly the blindfold was ripped off, taking a few strands of hair with it. The man hefted a large trapdoor revealing stairs that led down into the basement.
“Hey, try being more gentle next time,” Ava grumbled.
The first thing she sensed was the damp and musty smell of the area. Ava’s eyes squinted as she looked at the lone light dangling from the ceiling. She rubbed her eyes as she struggled to observe her surroundings.
The man pushed her and Ellie forward, down the stairs, and Ava almost stumbled with how much force he used. Observing the area, Ava spotted mildew growing along the walls of the basement and grimaced.
“Maybe try to make the place look more inviting next time,” she commented.
That earned her nothing more than another shove. This time, Ava tripped over an old mattress, with a blanket folded meticulously over it. Ava dusted off her pants, ignoring her aching knee, and immediately looked for the girls.
There they were, huddled in the far corner of the basement. The man’s head turned to where Ava looked, and he waved at them. They huddled into each other, refusing to meet his eyes.
He gave Ava one final push before he went back up the stairs and closed the trapdoor with a bang, causing everyone to flinch. Ava looked the two girls over, and sure enough, they were the ones who had gone missing.
Their clothes were expensive but dirtied. Ava approached them slowly, aware of how jumpy they were. When they sensed her presence, they both looked up and Ava frowned at the sight of bruises on the skin visible to her.
She reached out and gently lifted one girl’s chin to see just how far the marks went. The girl, who Ava later identified as Kate, although afraid, lifted her chin and presented the bruise around her neck.
“I’m sorry,” Ava whispered.
They were interrupted by the sound of crashing upstairs. Ava directed Ellie and the others to stay in one corner as she walked up the stairs to hear better.
“I’ll kill your kid, I swear!” the man had yelled.
Well, that connected everything. He was holding these girls for ransom.
“Hey, Ellie,” Ava said, turning around to face her, “How did you manage to contact this guy?”
“I wanted to leave my foster house. I didn’t like them, and they didn’t like me, so I thought it was better to leave. One day I was approached by some guy in a beat-up van—and I know what you’re thinking: ‘a white van and a suspicious man’— there’s no way I’d fall for that. But I did. I was so desperate to go away that I agreed to meet him at that gas station.”
“Was it that bad?” Ava asked softly.
“The house? Yeah, I was only brought on to be a free babysitter,” Ellie commented with a bitter laugh. “The guy promised to take me to a bus station outside the city. And now I got you involved in this.”
Ava shook her head, reached out and patted Ellie’s hand.
“Things would have been worse if I wasn’t here, and I promise you, I’ll get us out of here,” Ava said.
Ellie nodded, hope blooming in her chest, while Ava buried herself under the thin blankets. Promises were easy to make. What she worried about was how she would deliver on them. She patted around her boots and cursed when she couldn’t feel the outline of her phone. If it had fallen out during the altercation with the man at the gas station, he would have seen it and kicked it away just as he did with her gun.
There was only one other place where her phone could have fallen out of her boot and that was his truck. Ava shifted around the mattress until she found a position comfortable enough to sleep in. There was nothing she could do now. Trying to get her phone back was impossible, but assuming it hadn’t died yet, there might still be a chance that Carl and the other officers would track her phone to find her.
Chapter 6
Ava couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t realized just how used to the sounds of the city she was: to the cars driving on the street and the occasional siren, to her loud neighbors and how she unintentionally knew everything going on in their lives.
Now she was at a farm, with no neighbors in sight for a few kilometers. And worst of all, it was deadly silent. Sure, there were crickets outside but that could barely compare to a busy highway. It wasn’t an irritation to her at all. The noise had always made her feel safe. In this silence, every rustle or creak or thud would cause her to open her eyes and stare at the ceiling, body tensed and ready for some
