Chapter 2

M y breaths are white puffs of mist before me as I try to ignore the deep ache in my bones and the burn in my lungs. It’s as if he’s breathing down the back of my neck, like he’s right behind me, even though I hadn’t heard him running after me.

It’s some sick game, I realize.

I’ve fallen into some fucking trap. I hadn’t just gotten a flat; all of my tires blew, which is highly unlikely. Unless something was placed in my path to do exactly that.

The road has to be near, but I don’t know what to do once I get there. The store I stopped at for gas was at least fifteen miles from here, and the roads leading to this house were empty.

I’d searched for food the entire way, only finding businesses and streets empty. It was like Dunhaven was a ghost town.

My mom told me to stick to the main highways, but when there was a seven-car pile-up on I-75, the highway patrol led us off an exit near Belleview, which led me here.

All I wanted to do was go home for Christmas. Well, home as I know it, anyhow.

My mom is my home, and she moved here three years ago, leaving me behind in New York to make my own way. Which I have, but not well enough to come down every year. Funds are tight.

I finally saved enough to come this year. Now, look.

“I can still smell you, puppet. I’m getting close!” the man’s deep voice shouts through the woods.

He’s definitely behind me. Judging by the heavy footfalls echoing off the trees, he’s close.

My body burns, my lungs ache, and my brain is telling me to give up. But my heart is beating rapidly, reminding me I’m still alive.

I can survive this.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, right?

“Puppet!” he calls tauntingly, and I whimper as tears dry on my cheeks as fast as I cry them.

Finally, I push out of the overgrowth and into the house’s backyard.

It’s decayed, and one look tells me it’s unoccupied. There’s no one inside me to help.

I brush past the house, running full-out for the road. I can’t look back. I don’t know where he is, but I can’t look back.

I’m too afraid.

When I’m shoved from the side, I topple over, rolling into the latticed wood of the rotting porch of the house as I cry out. Stabbing pain shoots through my ribs as I try to sit up against the agony.

“Please,” I beg, but he only steps closer and closer.

He crosses his arms over his chest, looking down at me. It’s like he’s disappointed.

“Maybe it’s your short legs that make you slow,” he says as if studying me. He crouches, lifting my chin with two fingers. “Did you even try?”

My breathing hurts, and my lungs sting from the cold air as I keep silent, tears ambling down my cheeks to the cold, causing a bitter chill to spread.

Damning fingers still hold my chin.

“Answer me,” he grumbles, and my brain can’t fathom why I should.

Survival is the only thing that makes me open my mouth again.

“Something feels broken,” I tell him, shifting as I feel something move in my belly that likely shouldn’t be there.

He sighs, looking down as I lean against the porch, my hands finding a stick shoved into my stomach a few inches. Warm blood trickles out of the wound, and I cry out as panic seizes me .

“Don’t remove it.” His voice sounds annoyed. Like I’ve clumsily ruined his game.

“It hurts.”

“Mm, I bet it does. You should’ve run faster, puppet, and I wouldn’t have caught you.”

He helps me to my feet and lifts me into his arms.

I try my hardest to see behind the mask. I need something to tell the police when they eventually find me.

Someone has to know by now that I’m missing. My mom had me checking in every hour on the hour of my drive, and I was about to call her when I saw headlights getting far too close to my rear end.

She knows something’s wrong, and she’s had to have called the police by now. She tracks my phone. She knows my location. And even if that malfunctions, my phone will detect a crash and alert her, as she’s my emergency contact.

Pain takes hold of my thoughts as I’m thrown down on a bed without a care for the stick jutting out from my gut, and I grab for it, trying to hold it still.

“You’ve made quite the mess of yourself, puppet,” he tsks, shaking his head as he rips my shirt open to get a better look at my wound.

His scent is nearly overwhelming, spiced, yet laced with a sickly sweet tang that has me licking my lips.

His mask looks like the one Jason Vorhees wore, a classic hockey mask, except it is worn and has blood staining it. The longer he looks over me, lingering with his overwhelming scent, the more confused my brain grows.

I know it was him who ran me off the road. Why else would he have then come back and towed me into the woods? However, he could be working with someone else.

His veined, thick hands look at the jagged entry wound where blood oozes each time he moves the stick.

“I need a hospital,” I breathe, and I hate how small and helpless I sound.

“You only need me,” he growls back, not looking up at me.

His dark hair is wet with sweat. His leather jacket is worn and has the last name Mordova embroidered on its lapel. It looks like a bomber jacket worn by a pilot in some distant war.

“And who are you?” I ask, knowing he’s not going to answer but trying anyhow.

“Your master, of course.”

His answer skitters through my cortex. “What?”

He looks up at me, his ice-blue eyes stabbing into mine as they hold my gaze steady and stern. “Every puppet needs a master.”

What the fuck?

This was the stupidest decision I’ve ever made. To come home alone. Now, I’m captured by a fucking psychopath who thinks I’m his toy, and a stick is going to be the end of me.

All on the week of Christmas, too .

But it wouldn’t be my life if it wasn’t a shit show.

“This will burn,” he tells me, and I tug back to my reality that’s growing blurry around the edges the more blood I lose.

“What will?”

Before answering, he leans over the bed, and a prick stings my neck as he injects me with something.

His cologne hovers dangerously close as I slip back onto the bed, feeling like I’m sinking into each fiber, becoming a part of the woven fabric as its hostage forever.

“Don’t worry, puppet. When you come back to me, you’ll be whole again,” he says, but it sounds like he’s talking through water.

I open my mouth to reply, but the world goes fuzzy, and I close my eyes and lean into the feeling of heavy, unburdened sleep.

Nausea rolls in my stomach, and my mouth is dry. My lids are heavy, almost to the point that I can’t lift them.

“Come on, puppet. Fight it.”

His voice alerts me that all that happened before darkness swept in was real. I gasp, battling the heaviness to open my eyes and find him in the candlelit room.

“Help,” I rasp as pain shoots through my body .

Now, it’s not only my stomach that aches but my shoulders and arms.

Rolling your car into a ditch seems to leave a nasty hangover behind.

“I did help. You’ll see.”

His words don’t make sense, and nothing has made any sense in the last few hours.

“I don’t feel good,” I say, trying to sit up.

It’s not as if any one thing doesn’t feel good; it’s a general feeling of being unwell, and I want to go back to sleep.

There’s a sour taste at the back of my throat, and my stomach flips with unease.

“But I made you better,” he says, curiosity lacing his tone. “There’s no reason you should feel bad.”

I scoff, still trying to sit up.

“Be careful, you’ll tangle your strings.”

My strings?

“I don’t have strings.”

I shake my head, trying to clear some of the fog, but it doesn’t help.

“What are you talking about?” I manage, sitting up in the bed against the pain in my stomach.

My hand finds the bandage over where the stick previously was reeling from my flesh. It’s far less painful and has been cleaned.

Looking down, however, I find myself naked. He’s removed my clothes when it wasn’t necessary to tend my wound .

While I was blissfully floating in the haze of whatever drug he’d injected, he was doing God only knows what to my lifeless body.

The sick feeling in the back of my throat stretches, threatening to make me hurl.

“You do now,” he says matter-of-factly.

Confusion muddles my thoughts as I follow the tiniest of strings glistening in the air. It seems connected to me, and my eyes follow it downward to my arm.

Delicately placed under my flesh are pierced hoops. Connected to the hoops are hooks with strings.

Strings that bind me to a board on a conveyor in the ceiling that’s rigged so I can move on it.

Panic ceases my chest.

“What in the hell?” I mutter, looking over the rest of me. My shoulders and back all have new piercings and hooks that connect more of my flesh to the ceiling.

Footsteps come closer, and I look up at the masked man with tears brimming in my eyes.

“Welcome home, my beautiful puppet. We’re going to have some fun, you and I,” he says, gravel raking through his tone.

Shivers make gooseflesh rise, and the hoops in my skin burn.

“What have you done?” I ask him, feeling the warmth from my tears track over my cheeks.

“I’ve freed you, my darling.”

“Freed me from what?” I whimper .

“From them, from the world. Here, with me, you’ll be happy and cared for—as long as you behave.”

“And if I don’t?” I swallow.

He sits on the edge of the bed. “If you don’t, you’ll cease to exist.”

He says it so calmly that it sets my teeth on edge.

His hand lifts and brushes a lock of my hair back over my ear, his blue eyes searching my face for something.

“If you’re my good little puppet, you’ll be the happiest girl in the world.”

Fear wobbles in my stomach.

I’ll never be free of him. Unless someone finds me.

Hope is the only thing that’s going to keep me alive, hope that my mom finds me and saves me.

I only have to stay alive long enough for her to find me alive and not dead in a freshly dug hole in the back of this psycho’s yard.

“How do I be a good puppet?” I ask him, trying to get a good read on him.

Sure, I’ve only taken a few of my pre-requisite psychology classes so far, but I’m hoping they are enough to help me survive this fucker.

“You do whatever your master tells you, darling.”

His voice is deep and commanding, and my nipples bead under its power.

To survive this man, I’m going to have to lean into that, I realize. Lean into the psychotic way the brain will adapt to survive.

Even if it changes my makeup in the end .

“Are you going to be my good little puppet?” he asks, his blue eyes hopeful behind his mask.

I nod, swallowing down fear and nausea. “I am.”

He purses his lips as if that was the wrong answer. “They all say that in the beginning.”

He stands and leaves the room, slamming the door behind him, and I lean back on the plush pillows, letting my tears fall now that he’s gone.

Pleasing him to live might be the death of me.