Evelyn looked back at Edna. “Do you think someone could be here?”

She seemed horrified instead of hopeful. “If there is, I pray it isn’t my daughter.”

Hilltop, AK—Tuesday, 4:45 p.m. AKDT

Jasper couldn’t open his eyes. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness while listening to a couple of disembodied voices and the steady, annoying beep of a machine. Where was he?

“He’s coming around,” a woman said as a hand covered in latex lifted his arm. Whoever had spoken seemed intent upon doing something to him, but he couldn’t tell what—taking his blood pressure?—and he didn’t really care.

“Can you hear me, Inmate Moore?”

Inmate? He wasn’t an inmate. He was a prison guard in Arizona, living with his nurse wife and her two girls, all of whom he hated. He’d spent a lot of time trying to decide how he’d eventually kill the older daughter, who got under his skin the worst. They’d had a pool, so drowning had seemed like his best alternative. But then he and his wife had broken up, and she’d been so nice about the whole thing—conceding on every issue—that he’d let her go, let them all go.

No, he’d let her go because he couldn’t afford any trouble at that particular juncture in his life. He’d just been hired at—

Suddenly much more recent memories tumbled forward like a rockslide, and he realized that he’d momentarily forgotten the past eighteen months. He wasn’t a prison guard anymore. He’d succeeded in getting on at Hanover House, where he’d worked for a time. But then, when the torture chamber he’d been building in his basement was complete and he’d finally made his move on Evelyn Talbot, he’d been caught and prosecuted.

He was a prison inmate now, and unless he could devise a way to escape, which he hoped to do eventually, he was stuck behind bars until the day he died. All he had to look forward to, all he had to break the tedium, were his meetings with Evelyn and—

Evelyn! She was gone. Someone had taken her. That popped into his memory, too, as well as the fact that he’d been jumped in the showers.

Was he even alive? Or was this what happened after death?

He certainly hadn’t expected to survive. The last thing he remembered was seeing that shiv—and then what?

Had he been stabbed?

He didn’t know. Someone must’ve kicked him in the head. He was already down on the floor when he blacked out, and that was only a second after he realized he was about to be stabbed.

With extreme effort, he managed to open his eyes. He wasn’t dead, not unless hell had hospital beds, doctors and nurses just like those in the land of the living.

He wanted to ask where he was and how long he’d been out, but he couldn’t move his jaw. The best he could do was moan.

An older man with white hair, wearing scrubs and a mask, leaned over him. “Take it easy. You’re really banged up.”