“Alex.” Zoe was sitting up. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.” I didn’t know if it was the aftereffects of whatever drug had been spit into my system, or if I was just in shock, but I felt completely numb. “I’m just… I’m taking it in. Did someone seriously knock me out with a syringe? Who did it?”
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her face, leaving a dirty smear. “They always wear a ski mask. I don’t know if it’s one person or more than one person. They’re similar in size.”
I pushed the horrifying image away. If I allowed my mind to linger, I would fall to the ground and curl up into a ball. I took a few deep breaths.
“Did they drug you too?” I sat gingerly on the duvet next to her.
“No, I just passed out. It’s been happening more and more.” She swept her greasy hair back. “Time has no meaning down here—they don’t turn off the lights—so I’ve just been randomly falling asleep. I don’t even know how many days I’ve been down here.”
“Three,” I said.
She nodded. “I thought it was longer. Time drags when you have nothing to do.”
“Zoe.” I paused. “Your real name is Zoe, right?”
“Yeah.” She plopped her chin on her hand. The purple circles under her eyes verged on black. I had a flash of her the first day: animated, pretty, her voice taking up so much space. Now she looked pinched and thin.
“We thought you were dead,” I told her. “We thought you’d wandered outside, asleep or tripping. The door was open and there were footsteps.”
“Clever.” Zoe cocked her head. “But no. I didn’t go outside.” She studied me. “How’d you find me?”
“I found the keypad. We realized there must be a room here. I searched Roza’s room to see if there was a way down here…” I felt a flush of shame. “I thought you might actually be in on it, though. That it was some kind of game.”
She snorted. “It might be a game to Roza, but it’s sure as fuck not a game to me.” Dirty and enraged, she looked like Poppy’s profane twin sister.
“So who are you really?” I asked. “We found your ID. And the book you were copying.”
She stared at me. “You didn’t call the police?”
“We tried,” I said. “Keira and I tried to use the radio, but it was broken. We realized there were cameras and we talked about leaving, but we didn’t know how. Roza said the roads hadn’t been cleared yet. Whether or not that was true, the driveway is still covered in like three feet of snow.” The words rushed out like a confession. “And we found out there was a snowmobile, and we should’ve used it to get out, but again… we thought you might be in on it. We wanted to try to get into the secret room first. We didn’t think…” I waved my arm around.
“That makes sense.” She scratched at her bare leg, the anger and exasperation gone.
“So… what happened? Why did they lock you in here?”
Zoe tugged the duvet over her legs. “They caught me in the control room. I passed out in front of the monitors. I’m assuming they thought I knew too much.”
“About Roza watching us?”
“Yeah. I haven’t worked out if they know who I really am. If they do, there’s no way they’re letting me out. We have the same last name.”
“The same last name as who?”
“My aunt.” Zoe dropped her chin on her knees, looking exhausted. “Roza killed my aunt.”
“Roza killed your aunt,” I repeated. The words sounded absurd. “What? Why?”
“My aunt Lucy wrote Lion’s Rose,” Zoe said. “Roza stole it and published it as her own.”
This stunned me. Lion’s Rose: the novel about the gardener whose HIV had progressed into AIDS, and whose garden was keeping her alive.
“I knew about the book because Lucy had been working on it for years,” Zoe went on. “Her good friend died of AIDs in the eighties; she got HIV from her husband, who was secretly sleeping with other men. Anyway, Lucy and I were really close, and I was a writer too, so she’d give me parts to read. She didn’t show anyone else, just me. So when she died and her famous friend’s new novel came out less than a year later and it was Lucy’s book, I was the only one who even knew what had happened.”
There were so many questions, but I managed to pin one down. “How did they know each other? Lucy and Roza.”
“Lucy was the assistant of Roza’s editor. I guess they just hit it off and Lucy showed Roza around when she was in New York. They were both in their twenties. At some point Lucy must’ve showed Roza her own work, and it was good enough to kill her for it.”
I swallowed, my throat tight. “How did she kill her?”
“Roza made it look like she overdosed.” Zoe’s face was expressionless. “People believed it because she’d been an addict. But she’d been clean for years at that point. Sure, she got depressed sometimes. But she never would’ve used again.”
“But how did Roza do that?” I asked. “Fake an overdose?”
“I don’t know for sure.” Zoe shrugged. “I assume Roza stayed over with her and just stuck a needle into her when she was sleeping. They found her alone in her apartment.”
“Oh my god.” It felt like we were talking about a TV show. This couldn’t be real.
“When the book came out I had a complete meltdown, as you can imagine. But I didn’t have any proof. Lucy would always print out excerpts and I’d edit them and give them back to her. So when I went to my dad—Lucy was his sister—he acted like I was unhinged with grief. My friends believed me, but of course there was nothing they could do about it. We were freshmen in high school. Even my favorite teacher thought I was delusional. And then”—Zoe smiled, humorless—“I started emailing reporters. When they found out how old I was, they disappeared. Just some crazy teenager from Bumfuck, New York, trying to get attention.”
“That’s awful.” My brain shuffled through this new information. Could Roza have actually murdered someone? It felt like too much. And who knew… Maybe Lucy had actually overdosed, and Zoe hadn’t been able to accept it?
Then again, Zoe and I were trapped in Roza’s dungeon right now. So perhaps I was the one having trouble accepting things.
“So I waited,” Zoe went on. “I knew Roza would mess up at some point. Lucy had told me some weird things about her, especially towards the end, when she was starting to realize what kind of person Roza really was. She told me Roza had a personal assistant who was in love with her, obsessed with her.” She shrugged. “Yana.”
“Yana?” It was hard to imagine her, cold as she was, obsessed with anyone.
“And she told me about this too.” Zoe waved an arm around. “Lucy visited when Roza bought Blackbriar. She didn’t remodel it for a long time, but Roza showed her around the old mansion. She was really excited about the secret passage and the secret room. Apparently she joked about using it as a secret writing factory, forcing young girls to churn out her stories.”