No gun. No shoes. Rope on ankles. Basement. Concrete floor. No windows. One door. One door. One door. How would she get out? It would be locked. One door. No gun. No shoes. No window. One door.

Get the hell out of there, Hart.

She only realized her breathing had gone ragged when she swayed with the lack of oxygen. Dropping her forehead to her knees, she concentrated on pulling in air, allowing her lungs to expand and press against her rib cage. It didn’t hurt. That was a good sign. She held on to that as her mind tested the boundaries of the leash she’d just put on it.

Get the hell out. She was trying to. But it wasn’t a thought, rather an echo again. Just like earlier. They’re all lying.

Hart. No one on the island called her that. Who would call her that?

Izzy. Her head throbbed, but this time the pain was bearable, blunt instead of barbed.

She let her eyes unfocus. Izzy had told her that. When? In the attic. The buzz, she’d felt it in her jeans. There was something else there. Something important.

Mia breathed in again. There was a hint of salt, just like everywhere on the island.

Izzy was gone. She was trying to find . . . someone. Important. Someone important.

The artist.

No.

No, she wasn’t trying to find him. Because . . .

The artist. The artist.

The artist was dead.

Mia blinked everything back into focus. Her broken thumbnail had been digging into the already-pink skin by her ankle. The pain barely registered.

The artist was dead. So where was the reporter? Robert Twist. If the artist had been the dead man in the bay, that meant Sammy was in on it. Was he the one holding her? Had he knocked her out? But where? The last she remembered she had been in Cash’s attic.

She flinched away from what that meant and went to work on the knot again. It was starting to give beneath her desperate fingers.

This time she let herself listen instead of think. It seemed likely she was below ground, but maybe she’d be able to hear footsteps above her—if she could get the blood roaring past her eardrums to quiet down.

Only when sound started filtering in again did she realize how much she’d been missing locked inside her own world. Pipes rattled and protested, a radiator hissed somewhere in the corner, a steady drip of water pinged against something solid. The background noise of a Maine basement.

Then she heard it. Soft, so that it almost faded into nothingness. Mia would have missed it if she hadn’t been listening for each groan of the house.

A hitched breath.

There was someone else in the room.

She froze. But the noise was gone. Had she imagined it?