There’s nothing from him. But there is a text from an unknown number.
I click the message, just in case. Maybe he’s contacting me from someone else’s phone? Maybe he, too, woke up in a field like Lumen, drunk from the night before? Who knows what he did after I left his room? It’s possible that he had a crisis of conscience and panicked, tried to self-medicate or something. Much as I hate to entertain the idea that sleeping with me could cause so much distress.
Fortunately, the text seems to hold some answers.
I found Parrish. Can you call me right away? Don’t tell Tess.
A rush of relief fills me. He’s with someone, a friend probably. He’s okay. He’s safe. I very quickly make the call, but nobody answers. I’m about to try again when a video call comes through from the same number, and I accept it.
I’m smiling. At first.
The call connects, and it takes me a full minute to recognize what I’m looking at.
It’s Parrish, that’s for sure. Only … it’s Parrish tied to a chair and bleeding. And oh my god, there’s so much blood. It’s fucking everywhere. My head swims and my vision blurs as I blink through the panic and my mind scrambles to make sense of what I’m seeing.
“Dakota,” he says, his voice ragged and pain-riddled. He barely looks coherent, like he’s on the verge of passing out. What. the. fuck. is going on here?!
“Parrish.” His name is barely a breath, a promise, a desperate wish as it leaves my suddenly dry mouth. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
He shakes his head briefly, his body sagging against the chair. Behind him, I can see a wine cellar, row after row of glimmering bottles against a stone wall. But that’s about it. No other clues immediately present themselves, and I’m too freaked out to look for them anyway.
“I need you to do something for me,” Parrish continues, lifting his head up to look at the camera. His body looks worn out, but his eyes are sharp, glimmering with violence and unspoken things. “You need to go downstairs and ask Tess a question.”
“I’ll do you one better: I’m getting the detectives.” I stand up suddenly, but Parrish’s voice cuts through my resolve.
“No. Dakota, no.” His eyes flick to one side, like he’s looking at someone just off-screen before turning back to me. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I blurt out, my own body flooded with so much adrenaline that my hand is wracked with tremors.
“If you do that,” Parrish begins, licking the edge of his bloodied mouth with his tongue before refocusing on me again. “He’s going to kill me.”
Those words echo in my skull, like a bullet bouncing around my brain, destroying me from the inside out. I somehow end up in Parrish’s room, pacing ruts in the floor the way Tess was doing earlier. But she’s working on fears and assumptions: I’m working on facts.
Parrish is tied to a chair.
Parrish is wounded and bloody.
Parrish doesn’t want me to talk to the cops.
“Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to go downstairs, and I need you to ask Tess a question. Can you do that for me?” Even as he was pleading with me to save his life, his voice was calm, almost soothing, like he was trying to hold my hand through this.
That just about killed me, the way he looked at me like he was sorry for putting me in this position. As if he has anything to be sorry about at all.
“I can’t answer any of your questions, not yet. First, you need to find Tess. You need to ask her about a man named ‘Justin Prior’.”
Justin Prior.
I tried looking him up online, but it’s a common name. There wasn’t anything special or noteworthy for me to find. I even tried combinations like ‘Justin Prior Tess Vanguard Medina’ and other random collections of keywords. Nothing. Fucking nothing.
Now here I am panicking because I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I can go down there and ask Tess about some random guy while she’s in the middle of a crisis, wondering if her son has been hurt or killed while I know the answers to all of those questions. He’s alive. He’s hurt. He might be dead if I don’t do this.
I bite down hard on my hand to stifle a scream. There are detectives down there. All I have to do is walk my ass down the stairs and tell them what I saw. How would the person holding Parrish captive even know that I’ve done it? How?
“He’s going to kill me.”
But fucking hell. Is it worth the risk? Is there anything in this world that’s even remotely worth the risk to Parrish’s life? It’s just a question, at the end of the day. Just a stupid, easy question. What it means, and what it has to do with Tess, I have no idea.
Could be a crazy fan, I muse, thinking about the huge crowd of reporters outside. Tess is pretty famous, and she does write a lot of true crime stuff which could put her at risk … but really? Kidnapping her son? How did this guy even get to Parrish? Did Parrish go out for a walk and get snatched off the street? Did someone actually come in here?
My mind strays to that night in the woods, the one that I’ve decided to push aside in favor of chalking the experience up to sleepwalking and nightmares. If someone came in the house then, they could do it again, couldn’t they? It just seems so … coincidental that the security cameras weren’t recording. Even the outside cameras that are supposed to livestream to the security company picked up nothing unusual. They didn’t even catch Parrish leaving the property voluntarily, so what happened? He had to have gotten out somehow.
The door to Parrish’s room flies open, and I stifle a small scream. My nerves are fried at this point.
“Relax, Little Sister. It’s just me.” Chasm pauses, and then, upon seeing the look on my face, slams the door behind him and puts his back to it. “What the hell is going on?” he asks as I sputter and try to come up with a lie. Even now, with just Chasm in here, it feels like the truth is going to burst out of me and spatter the room with Parrish’s blood. “Dakota.”
Chasm stalks across the room and snatches my phone from my hand. He sees the text message right away. That, and evidence of the video call that ended almost fifteen minutes ago.
“What the fuck is this?” Chasm chokes out, staring down at the screen. I jump but I don’t answer him, not right away. I’m shaking so hard that I can’t stand up anymore; I end up sitting on the edge of Parrish’s bed without remembering how I even got there. “Dakota, what is this?!”
“Parrish.” Just that one word. It’s impossible to say more. How can I? What could I possibly say? “It’s Parrish. He’s …” I take a deep breath and rub at my tired eyes. “He’s been kidnapped.”
Chasm just stares at me like I’m a crazy person before letting out a nervous, breathy laugh.
“Not funny, Dakota. Did you talk to him? If you know where he is, you better fucking—”
“I’m not lying!” I shout out, shoving up to my feet and snatching the phone from Chasm’s hand. He looks taken aback, leaning away from me like he doesn’t know who I am anymore. Or maybe never did, come to think of it. “I got a video call from Parrish. He was tied to a fucking chair. He was bloody and bruised, Chas. It looks like someone beat the shit out of him.”