But when he tried to step toward it, his knees gave out and he fell with a sickening thud.

Startled by his inability to control his body, he stared up at the building overhang above.

He wasn’t going to make it, he realized. After everything he’d been through—doing hard time in state prison, surviving fights with his worst enemies—he was going to die because of a pregnant woman?

No. He couldn’t believe it. But his ears began to ring and his vision dimmed until the darkness on all sides of him gathered into one tiny pinprick of light.

Which suddenly winked out.

The disappointment was so acute Evelyn couldn’t quit sobbing. Her chest heaved as she beat on the door. She was acting like a child, but she didn’t care. She’d come so close to escaping with her life and her baby’s life!

Now all the courage she’d screwed up, the hope that had driven her, the painful effort of creating the lethal shiv, the hours and hours of terrified waiting …

It was all for nothing.

At least he hadn’t killed her. That thought eventually lessened her despair. He could’ve done much worse than toss her back inside the cooler and lock the door, but she could hardly count that as a kindness when Lyman Bishop was on his way. She’d rather be murdered outright than become Bishop’s next zombielike slave.

“Let me out!” she called again, but she’d been yelling for so long her voice was too tired and hoarse to be heard.

Drained of the energy she needed to maintain the onslaught, she sank to the floor.

What was she going to do now?

She wiped the blood from her face as she gazed at the blood spatter on the wall. The oatmeal her captor had brought was spilled all over the floor. The banana had been kicked under her cot. And the tray was bent. Apparently, that was what had been in the way when she’d tried to close the door.

It had all come down to a food tray.…

And now she didn’t have anything to drink. She’d used the last of her water to deceive him and, if he’d tried to bring her more, it had ended up on the outside of the cooler and not here, where she needed it.

“Heaven help me,” she muttered. Too weak and discouraged to even get to her feet, she crawled over to the bed and climbed into it. Despite the blood and the water all over everything, this thin mattress was the softest place to be, and she needed what small comfort it and the blanket could provide.

The pictures she’d reviewed from Bishop’s file when he first arrived at Hanover House paraded before her mind’s eye. They made her sick. So did what he’d done to his own sister.

Evelyn closed her eyes in an attempt to block out those images.

She couldn’t face her own future, couldn’t contemplate what she was looking at next.