Only when Evelyn called out—or groaned, since she wasn’t capable of speaking coherently—had she been able to draw his attention back to her. Then he’d snapped out of his rage, become purposeful and efficient again and returned to finish tying her hands behind her back.

He must’ve gagged her at some point, too. Although she didn’t remember that part, she could feel fabric biting into the sides of her mouth. To avoid having to cope with what was happening, she’d willingly surrendered to the dark void on the edge of her consciousness throughout the encounter.

She wished she could do the same now—give up and just drift away. But she had to fight to overcome the drug he must’ve given her, or what happened to her next would be even worse than what’d happened to Edna.

I’d rather be me, the older woman had said when discussing the future they each would likely face. Evelyn hadn’t admitted it at the time, but she felt the same. She would rather die than become Lyman’s next “Beth.”

Music came on. Show tunes. Bishop seemed to like those. So did Evelyn. They were so familiar they calmed her fears, to a point, until he started singing along to “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera and she got the impression he identified with Raoul instead of the Phantom. He didn’t see himself as a monster.

Somehow, that knowledge made her face how terrible her situation really was. He’d taken her from the ranch before Amarok or anyone else could find her.

Now she had almost no chance at all.

Anchorage, AK—Thursday, 12:05 a.m. AKDT

The scream he heard at the chicken ranch went through Amarok like shards of glass.

After getting halfway to Hilltop, he’d suddenly whipped around and returned to Anchorage. Something about leaving had just felt wrong, and that sense of impending doom had grown worse with each passing mile. Convinced as he was that Edna Southwick was the key to solving Evelyn’s disappearance, he’d decided he wasn’t going to drop everything and hurry to Hanover House to see Jasper Moore. If it was that important, Jasper could share whatever he knew with someone else who could then pass on the information. Right now Evelyn needed him too much for Amarok to risk making any mistakes, and since he didn’t know what would be a mistake, not at this juncture, he could only trust his gut.

When he’d reached Edna Southwick’s home, there’d been no one there. Considering what he had planned, he’d been grateful for the privacy. He’d thought it might be hard to break in, that he might bump into Anchorage PD, if someone had called them about Edna, or that the noise would draw the attention of a neighbor.

But that didn’t prove to be the case. As he circled the house, he’d noticed that one of the windows wasn’t closed all the way, so he’d used his pocketknife to cut the screen, forced the pane up and crawled through. What took considerably more time was going through Ms. Southwick’s office, searching for the rental agreement that corresponded to the receipt she’d mailed to Emmett.