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The first thing Eddie registered was the smell. He would know it anywhere, he was in hospital.
Then came the pain. It was a jagged, hot white flare radiating from his ribs and his left arm, pinning him down to the unforgiving mattress. He forced his eyes open, fighting through a heavy, drug induced haze. The harsh lights burned his eyes.
The crash. The memory hit him like a second impact.
They were driving back from Nashville. Eddie remembered the sudden, blinding glare of headlights rushing up on their bumper, a heavy truck that didn't just drift into their lane, but actively rammed them. He remembered the sickening crunch of metal, the world spinning in a violent cascade of shattered glass, and the terrifying weightlessness of the truck rolling down the embankment.
"Buck," Eddie gasped, the word tearing at his dry throat.
A nurse materialized beside his bed, her hands gentle as she pressed his shoulders back down. "Mr. Diaz, please, you need to stay still. You have two fractured ribs and a concussion."
"Where is he?" Eddie demanded, his voice cracking with rising panic. He ignored the agony in his chest, grabbing the nurse's forearm. "The man in the passenger seat. Evan Buckley. Where is he?"
A police officer stepped into his line of sight, from the hallway, his expression grim and carefully neutral. It was the face of a man who delivered bad news for a living.
"Mr. Diaz," the officer said, removing his hat. "When the paramedics arrived at the ravine, you were unconscious behind the wheel. The passenger side door had been pried open." The officer paused, the silence stretching into a suffocating eternity. "Your friend wasn't in the vehicle. We have searched a two mile radius. He is gone."
Eddie’s heart flatlined in his chest. The monitors beside him began to scream, a frantic, rapid beeping that perfectly matched the pure terror exploding in his veins.
Buck wasn't thrown from the wreck. He was taken.
Two thousand miles away in Los Angeles, Maddie’s phone slipped from her trembling fingers, clattering against the hardwood floor.
She stood frozen in her living room, Athena's words ringing in her ears. Accident. Eddie hospitalized. Buck missing. Foul play suspected. Eddie had rang Athena, asking her what happens next in the investigation.
A frantic, heavy knock at the door violently pulled her back to reality. She pulled it open to find her father, Phillip Buckley, standing in the hallway. He looked completely unraveled. His clothes were rumpled, his face pale and drawn tight with panic.
"Dad? I thought you and mom are getting back on the road?" Maddie choked out, tears finally spilling over. "But you should know, it's Evan. There was a car crash on their way back from Nashville... he is missing."
Phillip didn't gasp. He didn't cry out. Instead, all the remaining blood drained from his face, leaving him the color of ash. He staggered forward, bracing himself against the doorframe as if his legs had turned to water.
"Maddie," Phillip whispered, his voice trembling. "Your mother... Margaret disappeared from the caravan park two nights ago. She hired a rental car and vanished."
Maddie blinked, her grief colliding violently with confusion. "What? Dad, why are you bringing this up right now? Evan was in a car crash. Someone took him."
"You don't understand," Phillip interrupted, his breath hitching, a profound and horrific guilt swimming in his eyes. "At dinner last week. When we sat down with you and Evan and told you we were getting a divorce... I didn't tell you the real reason."
A cold, creeping dread began to coil in the pit of Maddie’s stomach.
"I lied to protect her pride, to protect the way you saw your mother, but I shouldn't have," Phillip confessed, a tear tracking down his weathered cheek. "Margaret... she hasn't been right, Maddie. It started months ago. The odd comments. She started setting an extra plate at the dinner table. She started talking to empty rooms, calling out for... calling out for Daniel. She was completely detaching from reality."
Maddie stopped breathing.
"I begged her to see a doctor," Phillip pleaded, his voice breaking. "I begged her to get help, but she turned vicious, she only got worse. So I told her I couldn't do it anymore. I told her we needed a divorce if she wouldn't get help. She just said...I have Daniel, I don't need you."
The silence in the apartment became deafening. The dots connected in the air between them, forming a picture so monstrous, so deeply unnatural, that Maddie felt physically sick. Her mother was having a psychotic break. She had a rental car. And now, Buck had been dragged from a wreckage halfway across the country.
"Oh my god," Maddie breathed, clapping a trembling hand over her mouth. "Dad... You think, she took him."
It was the cold that woke him. A damp, biting chill that seeped deep into his bones.
Buck groaned, his head swimming in a dark, nauseating fog. He tried to reach up to rub his pounding temples, but his arms wouldn't move. He pulled harder, a jolt of panic slicing through the haze as tape bit savagely into his wrists.
His eyes snapped open.
He was standing in the center of a windowless room. Arms tied behind his back around a wooden beam. The air was thick with the smell of mildew, rusted iron, and old motor oil. A single, bare incandescent bulb swung gently from the ceiling, casting long, wavering shadows against the rotting wood walls of a shed.
Buck took a ragged breath, pain lacing up his side from the car crash. Eddie. He remembered the headlights. He remembered the sickening roll of the truck. Where was Eddie?
He struggled against the bindings, his broad shoulders flexing against the tape, but they were tied with meticulous, punishing strength. As he strained, he looked down at his chest, freezing mid motion.
His clothes were gone. His button up, stained with his own blood from the crash, had been stripped away. In its place, he was wearing a red a white stripped shirt. It was tight, too small for his heavily muscled frame and the fabric was old, smelling faintly of mothballs and stale lavender. It was a very specific, faded stripped pattern.
Buck’s breath caught in his throat. His blood ran ice cold.
He knew this shirt. He had seen it before, in a photo kept hidden in a wooden box for decades. Maddie had shown it to him the day she finally shattered the family's darkest secret. It was the shirt Daniel was wearing in the photo, or at least a bigger version of the same shirt.
Bile rose in Buck’s throat. A primal, suffocating terror clamped down on his chest. Why am I wearing my dead brother's shirt?
Outside, gravel crunched.
Heavy, rusted hinges screamed in protest as the shed door was slowly pushed open. The harsh midday light spilled into the gloomy space, framing a silhouette.
Buck’s heart hammered a frantic, terrified vibration against his bruised ribs as the figure stepped inside and closed the door, plunging them back into the low yellow light of the bulb.
Margaret Buckley stood before him.
But it wasn't the mother he knew. Gone was the rigid posture, the judgmental scowl, and the icy, put together veneer she wore like armor. Her hair was messy. But it was her eyes that made Buck’s soul try to crawl out of his body. They were wide, glassy, and completely hollowed out, shining with a terrifying absolute madness.
And yet, she was smiling. It was a soft, unnerving sweet smile that didn't reach her dead eyes.
She walked toward him slowly, her footsteps echoing on the dirty floor. Buck pressed himself back into the hard wood beam, his jaw trembling. "Mom...?" he croaked.
Margaret stopped right in front of him. She reached out, her fingers icy and light as a spider's web, and gently brushed a blood matted curl away from his forehead.
"There you are," she whispered, her voice dripping with a rotting, sickly kind of motherly devotion. "Welcome back, Daniel. Mommy missed you so much."
"Mom, please," Buck breathed, the words trembling as they left his lips. He strained against the thick tape binding his arms behind the wooden beam. Every micro movement sent white hot spikes of agony radiating from his crash battered ribs. "It's me. It's Evan."
The soft, unnerving smile instantly vanished from Margaret’s face. The maternal warmth was snuffed out, replaced by a cold, violent fury that made Buck’s blood run cold.
Without a word, she raised her hand and struck him across the face.
The slap was shockingly hard, the crack of flesh echoing off the rotting walls of the shed. Buck’s head snapped to the side, his jaw throbbing, the metallic taste of blood instantly flooding his mouth from where his teeth cut into his cheek.
"Do not say that name in this room," Margaret hissed, her voice vibrating with a psychotic edge. She stepped closer, her face inches from his, her breath smelling faintly of peppermint and something metallic. "Evan was just... spare parts. A vessel. You are Daniel. You have always been Daniel, and you are finally home."
"Mom, you are sick," Buck pleaded, tears mixing with the blood on his face. "Please, I need a doctor. I'm hurt. Eddie... my friend was in the car crash, I need to know he is okay,"
Margaret’s eyes went completely dead. She picked up a heavy, rusted wrench from a nearby workbench. She didn't scream or rage, the horror was in her absolute, chilling composure. "Daniel was a good boy. Daniel never lied to his mother. You need to learn how to be a good boy again."
She swung the wrench, bringing it down hard against his already fractured ribs.
Buck’s agonizing scream tore through the damp air of the shed, bouncing off the windowless walls. He slumped forward as far as the tape would allow, gasping for breath that wouldn't come, his vision swimming with black spots.
"I will come back when you are ready to tell me your real name," Margaret said smoothly, dropping the wrench to the dirty floor. She turned, walking out into the harsh daylight, and pulled the heavy door shut. The lock clicked into place, plunging Buck back into the suffocating, yellow lit nightmare.
Eddie gritted his teeth, his hand trembling as he ripped the medical tape securing the IV to the back of his hand.
"Mr. Diaz, what the hell are you doing?" the nurse demanded, rushing into the room. "You have a severe concussion and broken ribs, if you get out of that bed,"
"I am leaving," Eddie growled, his voice entirely devoid of warmth. He slid his legs over the side of the bed, the room spinning violently for a terrifying second before he forced it to steady. Pure adrenaline was masking the excruciating pain in his ribs. "Where are my clothes?"
"I'm calling security," she warned.
"Call them," Eddie shot back, pulling his hospital gown tighter. "Unless they are going to help me find my partner, they can get the hell out of my way."
His phone buzzed on the plastic tray table. He snatched it up. It was Maddie.
"Maddie, have they found anything?" Eddie demanded, bracing himself against the wall as he finally stood.
"Eddie," Maddie sobbed through the speaker, her voice shattered. "It's my mother."
Eddie froze, the blood roaring in his ears. "What?"
"My dad is here. He told her he wanted a divorce because she was having a psychotic break. She's been hallucinating Daniel. Talking to him. Setting plates for him." Maddie’s breath hitched into a violent cry. "She vanished in a rental car two nights ago. She was the one who rammed your truck, Eddie. She took him. My own mother took him."
Eddie felt the floor drop out from beneath him. A sickening wave of nausea hit him, not from the concussion, but from the pure, horrific reality of the situation. Buck wasn't taken by a stranger looking for a ransom. He was in the hands of a delusional, psychotic woman who held the deepest emotional knives to his throat.
"She thinks he is Daniel," Eddie whispered, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the phone. "Maddie, I'm going to find him. I swear to god, I am going to find him."
He hung up, the pain in his body completely overridden by a feral, desperate need. He shoved past the nurse, limping out into the hallway toward the local sheriff standing near the nurses station.
"I have a name," Eddie barked at the officer, his dark eyes blazing with a dangerous, lethal fire. "Margaret Buckley. I need you to run every rental agency between Los Angeles and here. Now."
Time lost all meaning in the shed.
Buck didn't know if it had been ten hours or two days.
The agonizing strain on his shoulders from being bound to the beam was unbearable. His legs had given out long ago, leaving his entire body weight hanging from his wrists. The tape had rubbed his skin raw, his hands numb and swollen.
Every time he drifted into a pain filled unconsciousness, the harsh scrape of the door would wake him.
Margaret would return. Sometimes she brought a cup of water, holding it just out of his reach. Sometimes she brought a damp cloth, gently washing the blood from his face while singing a chilling, off key lullaby. But every interaction ended the same way. She would ask him his name. He would beg, he would cry, he would insist he was Evan.
And then she would hurt him.
The physical torture was brutal, but the psychological warfare was actively breaking his mind. This was the woman who had birthed him, the woman he had spent his entire life trying to be good enough for, trying to get her to love him, she was looking at him with absolute, adoring love, but only when she was looking at a ghost, Buck had never received this look, but she thinks she is looking at Daniel.
The absolute absence of a mother's instinct to protect her living child shattered something deep and fundamental inside him.
"You are being so stubborn, sweetheart," Margaret cooed, standing before him with a heavy leather belt she had found in the shed. "The sickness in your head is making you fight me. But I can cure you. I can make you remember. We can be a family again, just the two of us. You will be my boy again, Daniel."
She struck him again. Buck couldn't even scream anymore only a broken, wet gasp escaped his lips. His head hung heavily against his chest, his curls matted with sweat and dried blood. The red and white striped shirt, Daniel's shirt was torn and stained.
His mind was fracturing. The pain was too vast, the reality too horrific to process. His brain, desperate to survive the unendurable, began to build a wall.
Dissociation crept in like a dark, numbing fog. If being Evan meant dying in this shed, then Evan had to go away.
Margaret stepped forward, her fingers forcefully gripping his chin, lifting his heavy head so he was forced to look into her hollow, mad eyes.
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice a deadly whisper.
Buck stared into the void of his mother's eyes. He felt the last, fragile piece of his identity snap, severing his consciousness from the agony of his body. His eyes glazed over, the vibrant spark of Buck dimming until it was completely extinguished.
"I'm..." Buck's voice was hollow, a dry, robotic rasp. "I'm Daniel."
Margaret dropped the belt. A terrifying, ecstatic grin split her face. Tears of profound joy spilled over her cheeks. She threw her arms around his trembling, broken body, pulling his head against her shoulder.
"Oh, my sweet boy," she wept into his hair. "I knew you would come back to me."
Thirty miles away, Eddie was leaning over a desk in the local police precinct, staring intensely at a map illuminated by a harsh desk lamp.
He was running on fumes, his face pale, his breath shallow due to his taped ribs. Phillip was on speakerphone, his voice heavy with exhaustion and grief as he tried to retrace decades of old memories.
"She kept a diary of all our old road trips," Phillip said, his voice crackling over the line. "When Maddie was a toddler, before... before Daniel got sick. We drove through that part of the state. There was a place she loved. She always talked about it when her mind started to slip recently. She had said, 'The pines are so quiet there.'"
Eddie’s finger traced the interstate routing away from the crash site. "Sheriff, look at this. Are there any lodgings near the state line with 'Pines' in the name?"
The sheriff leaned in, tracing a secondary, forgotten highway that branched off into the deep woods. "There's the Whispering Pines Motor Lodge Motel. It's been abandoned for about five years. Mostly just squatters and raccoons out there now."
Eddie’s heart slammed against his bruised ribs. He didn't wait for permission. He grabbed a heavy Maglite flashlight off the sheriff's desk.
"That is where she is," Eddie said, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, absolute certainty. "Let's go."
The Whispering Pines Motor Lodge Motel loomed out of the darkness like a decaying corpse, its neon sign long shattered, the overgrown parking lot swallowed by the shadows of the deep woods.
Eddie didn't wait for the sheriff’s cruiser to come to a complete stop. The moment the tires crunched against the gravel, he shoved the door open and hit the ground running. His fractured ribs screamed in protest, but the pain was entirely eclipsed by the frantic pounding of his heart.
The headlights of the police cruisers cut through the mist, a car parked haphazardly near the back of the dilapidated main office.
"Around the back!" the sheriff yelled, drawing his weapon as deputies swarmed the area.
Eddie’s flashlight beam danced frantically over the rotting structures until it caught on a standalone wooden shed at the edge of the tree line. There was a heavy, rusted padlock securing the door.
"Here!" Eddie roared, sprinting toward it. He didn't wait for the deputies to bring bolt cutters. Driven by pure, feral desperation, he raised the heavy Maglite and brought it down with bone jarring force against the rotting wood holding the lock's hasp. The wood splintered. He kicked the door with his heavy boot, the rusted hinges shrieking as the door gave way and slammed inward.
The air inside was suffocating, thick with the stench of copper, sweat, and the sickly sweet scent of stale lavender.
Eddie froze in the doorway, the beam of his flashlight piercing the gloom. The breath vanished from his lungs.
In the center of the room, still bound to the heavy wooden beam, was Buck. He was slumped forward, his body battered, bruised, and wearing a torn, blood stained red and white striped shirt.
Sitting on a stool right beside him, gently stroking his matted curls, was Margaret.
She was singing a soft, off key lullaby, her eyes wide, glassy, and lost in an absolute, terrifying madness.
"Shh," Margaret whispered to the empty darkness, not even blinking at the sudden intrusion of police flashlights. She pressed a tender kiss to Buck's temple. "Daniel is resting. He has had a very long day."
"Buck," Eddie choked out, a raw, devastated sound tearing from his throat.
The sound of the name was a trigger. Margaret’s head snapped toward the door, her features contorting into a mask of pure, vicious rage. "No! Get out! You can't take him away from me again!"
"Ma'am, step away from him right now!" the sheriff commanded, deputies moving in quickly.
Margaret lunged, fighting with the terrifying, unhinged strength of a cornered animal. It took three deputies to wrestle her away from the beam, her manic shrieks echoing off the rotting walls.
"Daniel! Mommy's here! Don't let them take me, Daniel!" she screamed, her voice tearing through the night air as they dragged her out of the shed.
With the monster violently removed from the room, the suffocating illusion shattered.
Eddie dropped to his knees, his hands shaking violently as he pulled out a pocket knife and sliced through the thick, bloody tape binding Buck’s wrists. Buck’s lifeless weight collapsed forward, and Eddie caught him, ignoring the agonizing flare in his own chest and ribs as he pulled his partner into his arms.
"Buck," Eddie pleaded, his voice cracking, his hands hovering over the horrific patchwork of bruises and lacerations. "Evan, it's me. It's Eddie. I've got you. You're safe."
Buck didn't move. His eyes were wide and completely vacant, staring through Eddie into a void only he could see. For five agonizing seconds, nothing happened. The dissociation was a thick, impenetrable wall.
Then, Buck blinked.
The glazed, dead look in his eyes receded. He registered the harsh police lights outside. He registered the smell of Eddie's cologne beneath the scent of the hospital Eddie had just fled.
The realization that he wasn't Daniel, that the nightmare in the shed was over, crashed down on him with the force of a falling building.
The absolute, agonizing reality of what his own mother had done to him flooded his nervous system all at once.
Buck shattered.
A ragged, broken sob tore its way out of his raw throat. He buried his face in the crook of Eddie's neck, his large frame trembling violently. He didn't form words, he couldn't. He just clung to Eddie with bloodied, swollen fingers, weeping with the primal, unendurable grief of a child who had been broken by the one person meant to protect him.
"I know," Eddie whispered fiercely, wrapping his arms securely around Buck, pressing his face into his partner's filthy hair as his own tears finally fell. "I know. I'm here. I've got you."
The silence in the secure hospital wing was deafening.
Buck sat propped up in the crisp, white bed, bathed in the soft morning sunlight. His ribs were wrapped, his lacerations stitched, and the hideous striped shirt had been incinerated, replaced by a soft hospital gown.
But the ghost of the shed remained.
Buck hadn't spoken a single word since the rescue.
When the nurses asked him questions, he stared blankly ahead. When the doctors examined him, he flinched, retreating into himself. He had gone completely mute, locking the horrific memories away in a dark vault inside his mind, entirely unable to process the betrayal or voice the degradation he had endured in the dark.
Out in the hallway, standing behind the observation glass, Maddie pressed her trembling hand against the window.
She had flown out the moment Eddie called. Phillip had stayed behind, crushed under the weight of his own guilt, dealing with the catastrophic reality of Margaret's permanent psychiatric hold. Now, Maddie could only watch her little brother, his vibrant, golden light completely extinguished.
Eddie stood beside her. He looked awful pale, bruised, and clearly running on fumes, but his dark eyes were fixed on Buck with a fierce, immovable devotion.
Maddie swallowed hard, wiping a tear from her cheek. "Whatever he went through in there... he is going to need time, Eddie."
Eddie didn't hesitate. He didn't even blink. "That's okay. I'm not going anywhere."
He took a slow, painful breath, his hand resting flat against the glass near Maddie's. "Buck missing... it showed me how much I can't lose him, Maddie."
Maddie looked over at Eddie, her grief softening for just a fraction of a second. She offered him a sad, understanding smile.
Eddie turned his head, holding Maddie's gaze with absolute, unwavering certainty. "I'm in love with your brother, Maddie. And I will tell him once he recovers from this trauma." He looked back through the glass at the silent, broken man in the bed. "But right now, I am just going to be there for him."