“Of course you don’t. But for the record, if you find yourself needing to hit something, hit me.” He smiled. Or smirked. Or both. “After all, I lied to you, and if it weren’t for my sheer animal magnetism, you probably wouldn’t have followed me into the depths.”

“Shut up,” I said, but now I wanted to throw something at him, which was significantly more comfortable than allowing in the lurking memories.

“Shut up,” Gabriel countered, “or get you out of here?”

I didn’t waste any time with my reply. “Both.”

* * *

I couldn’t stop expecting my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but even with the flashlight, we couldn’t see more than three or four feet ahead. The air down here was damp, and my heart beat a little harder and a little faster with every turn. The longer the two of us trekked toward what Gabriel insisted was an alternate way out of the mountain, the harder it was to stop from going over everything I knew—about Bella’s disappearance, about Gabriel’s brother and the other missing persons reports, about the research I’d seen on Gabriel’s wall.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Gabriel said, pausing to remove a canteen from his pack. “This would be an excellent place to ax-murder someone.” He took a swig of water before passing the canteen to me. “It occurs to me,” he continued, “that it’s also a horrible place to talk about ax-murdering.”

Given the circumstances, I suspected Gabriel was employing what Jude would have referred to as dark humor. I took a drink of the water. “Why would you need an ax?”

There was a long pause. “What I love about you is your ability to make a rhetorical question sound disturbingly not rhetorical at all.”

He handed me the flashlight. I took it, unsure why he was giving it to me.

“You’re not going to like this part.”

I processed that statement a moment before I steadied the flashlight and saw the opening. It was two feet in diameter, if that.

“This is the only other way out of the mountain,” Gabriel told me. “Or at least, the only one I’ve found.”

This. As in a tunnel so small that the only way through was on your stomach. The muscles in my throat clenched a moment before the wave of nausea hit me.

Trapped. Dark.

“You take the flashlight and go in first. I’ll follow.”

Bad things happen to bad little girls.

“Kira?”

The wisp of control I’d been holding on to snapped. “If I go first,” I said, the words forming in the back of my throat, “you’ll be behind me.”