Page 90 of Claiming Lily
“Oh good. You’re awake.”
The soft, calming tone practically startles me out of my skin. I know that voice.
Sarah steps out from the shadows near the doorway, dressed head to toe in black. Her usually perfectly styled hair hangs wet and stringy around her face. There’s something crazed in her eyes that makes my stomach twist into knots.
Innately, humans recognize evil. The question is whether we’re aware enough to listen to our instincts or too numb by the vices of the world to hear them screaming for us to run! I hear that intuition loud and clear but there’s no way I’m getting out of this chair.
“Sarah?” My voice comes out hoarse and cracked. “What are you doing? What is this?”
She tilts her head to the side, studying me like I’m some kind of specimen under a microscope. “I warned you, Lily. I tried to be patient. I really did.”
What is she talking about warning me? We’ve always been cordial, and I thought we were becoming close friends. What exactly is she. . . Everything clicks with a horrifying clarity that makes me want to vomit. The pictures. The texts. The feeling of being watched. The e-mails.
“You’re the stalker.” The words scrape my throat raw.
Sarah’s laugh sends chills down my spine. It’s high-pitched and unnatural, nothing like the professional chuckle I’ve heard in countless client meetings. “Took you long enough to figure it out, didn’t it?”
My mind races, trying to process this nightmare. Sarah. My coworker. The woman I’ve shared coffee with, complained about difficult clients with, celebrated sales victories with. She’s been terrorizing me this whole time?
I don’t understand what I’ve done to her. We get along great. I never took her clients and she never took mine. “Why?” The question scrapes out of my throat.
Sarah’s expression softens for a moment, and she takes a step closer. The plastic crinkles under her feet. “We belong together, Lily. I thought you knew that when you finally broke up with Matt. I was so excited when I heard you were single again then you threw my flowers into the trash.”
The lilies were from her? I had thought they were from Matt, some lame attempt at an apology.
She starts pacing back and forth in front of me, her hands gesturing wildly. “I’ve been waiting for you to come to your senses. To realize what we could have together. The way you look at me sometimes in the office, the way you laugh at my jokes. I know you feel it too.”
I’ve never looked at Sarah as anything more than a colleague. Never even considered it. The delusion in her voice terrifies me more than anything else. The certainty that I liked her.
“Then you moved in with those three,” she continues, and her voice takes on a sharp edge. “Really, Lily? Three men? I couldn’t believe it when I followed you there that first night and saw the way you looked at them.” There’s so much rage in her words, anger of the purest form.
Panic claws at my chest as I pull against the ropes again. The rough fibers burn my skin, drawing blood, but I don’t care. I need to get out of here. I need to get away from her.
Sarah notices my struggles and her pacing becomes more erratic, her movements jerky and unpredictable. “I tried to be subtle at first. The flowers, the sweet notes. I thought you’d understand. But you kept ignoring me. I could’ve given you the world.”
“Sarah, please—”
“No!” She whirls around to face me, her eyes wild. “You don’t get to talk right now. You had your chance to listen, and you blew it.”
She crosses the room in three quick strides and grabs my face with both hands, her fingers digging into my cheeks. Her face is inches from mine, her coffee-scented breath fans my face.
“Why can’t you just understand?” Her voice breaks on the last word. For a second, she almost sounds vulnerable. Human.
I try to keep my voice calm, soothing. “Sarah, we can talk about this. We can figure something out—”
The slap comes so fast I don’t even have time to brace for it. My head whips to the side. Pain explodes across my cheek, and tears spring to my eyes.
Sarah’s features contort with disgust. “It’s too late for that now.” Her lips curl into something that might have been a smile if it wasn’t so terrifying. “Way too late.” Sarah’s watching me with those crazed eyes, and I realize with crystal clarity that she’s completely lost touch with reality. There’s no reasoning with her. No talking my way out of this.
Fear—bone-deep terror—floods my system. The plastic sheeting, the distraction of the crash, slowly isolating me from the guys so she could take me. I can’t stop the sob that escapes my throat as one thing becomes crystal clear.
I’m going to die here.
Chapter Thirty
HUDSON
The antiseptic burns as the EMT cleans the gash on my skull. My hands clench into fists on the gurney as she works, trying not to think about how much worse this could have been. How much worse this still might be. Lily is missing and there’s nothing on the scene to tell the cops where she might be.
