Obsession Falls Read Free Page B

she’d crawled in here. Was it dark outside?
    Yes, because no more light leaked into the cave.
    Should she try to leave?
    Could she leave, or was she trapped here?
    Using her hands to sweep up the wall behind her, she stood, and at about five feet up, she located the outcrop that led to the entrance.
    She was five-seven. This was doable. She could climb up there. Somehow. If the rock didn’t break. If she didn’t fall backward and splatter her brains out on the stone ledge, or fall all the way down into whatever oblivion waited at the bottom of the cave.
    What if Dash was sitting out there, waiting?
    No choice. In her waist pack she carried her phone, some drawing pencils, a sharpener, a mini-pack of tissues, a fold-up cup, and an energy bar. She had more stuff in her rental car: a couple of bottles of water, a sandwich. But she hadn’t come equipped to camp. She hadn’t come to survive. She’d come out to sketch ingrown toenail mountains.
    She was a skilled furniture designer. She was a respected interior decorator. She liked her job. She liked the money she made. So why the hell had she decided she needed further fulfillment as an artist?
    She was such a schmuck.
    And she was stalling.
    She groped across the rocky surface. She found dust and gravel, but nothing to hang on to.
    She pulled on the ledge a little, wincing when a few chunks of stone crumbled and fell at her feet.
    She opened and ate the energy bar, and stuffed the wrapper back in her waist pack.
    She pulled out her phone. Held it in her hand and decided that since she was deep underground no one—that would be Dash or his mysterious boss—could trace her signal. She squatted down and huddled close against the wall, powered on her phone, and blinked at the sudden blaze of light.
    Three thirty-eight A.M . She had slept longer than she realized.
    She powered it down again, stashed it in her waist pack. She took a breath, and tried to hoist herself up.
    Pain shot through her wrist. She landed back on her feet, squatted down, and held her wrist. And rocked.
    Cracked. Yeah. Cracked for sure. And it couldn’t have been her left wrist. No. It had to be her right one, and she was most definitely right-handed.
    So what? She still had to get out of here.
    Standing, she took long, fortifying breaths, and tried to take heart in the fact that the shelf above her had held her weight. If she could work around that wrist and pull herself up there …
    This moment was why she had been working out with Brent, the physical trainer. If she could ignore the pain that sadist made her inflict on herself, she could ignore a few bruises and a cracked wrist.
    So she did it. She mostly used her elbows, whimpering and scrabbling for anything to hold on to, finding nothing, whimpering and scrabbling some more. It wasn’t graceful. She was glad no one watched her. But when at last she lay there in the narrow, tight place before the narrow, tight crack that would take her out of the narrow, tight cave, she was panting, sweating, trembling. She found herself torn between relief … and fear. Relief because she needed food and water, and fear that she didn’t have the energy to work her way out through the tiny crack in the rock. Plus, she still didn’t know if Dash was out there, and she had to crawl. He could smash her head as soon as she stuck it out.
    Cheerful thought.
    Wiggling around, she dug a sharpened pencil out of her waist pack.
    Hey. It was a weapon. Not much of a weapon, but her karate master had promised that after only twenty lessons, she would be able to kill a man with a sharpened pencil.
    Too bad she’d quit karate after lesson two, when she hit the floor and got the breath knocked out of her.
    She gathered her courage to make the first move toward freedom—or death.
    Beneath her knee, a chunk of rock broke off.
    It struck the ledge where she’d rested below, bounced off into oblivion. Her leg dangled in the air. The rest of the ledge started to crumble—and