Find Me Before Time Runs Out
Find me here. I wait for you.
Find me before time runs out.
The email arrived without warning, a single subject line glowing on Olivia Gunter’s phone like an accusation she could no longer outrun.
ST. MARY MENTAL HOSPITAL
She stared at it long enough for the screen to dim, then locked the phone and slipped it into her pocket as if that could silence the past. The desert sun pressed down on the Gunter estate, heat shimmering over stone and water, over carefully cultivated peace.
Olivia walked toward the swimming pool.
The hallway leading there was wide and airy, decorated with pale marble and tall glass panels that reflected light in a way that always made her feel as if she were moving through something unreal. A stone lion sat near the pool’s edge, water dribbling endlessly from its mouth into a metal basin below. The sound—soft, rhythmic—gave the illusion of coolness, of calm. It reminded her of a ticking clock.
Her family was already there.
Herod Gunter stood near the pool, sleeves rolled up, his posture relaxed but commanding even at rest. He was a middle-aged man, powerfully built, with the kind of sharp intelligence that never truly slept behind his gray eyes. There was also something else about him—an air of extreme self-importance, earned or not, that bent rooms subtly in his favor.
When he saw Olivia approaching, a languid smile curved his mouth.
She wore a white sleeveless dress that fit her tall, statuesque frame perfectly. She moved with a long, graceful stride, unhurried and sure, lacking the self-conscious mincing she had once been taught was feminine. When their eyes met, something passed between them—recognition, expectation, concern. Herod knew her well enough now to sense when something was wrong.
Their children were in the pool. Nadia, their daughter, laughed loudly as she splashed Jack and Jeff, the boys shrieking in mock outrage as they retaliated.
“Something wrong, honey?” Herod asked gently as Olivia reached him.
She hesitated, then took his hand. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Promise me you won’t get angry.”
He squeezed her fingers. “I won’t. You mean more to me than life itself.”
The words almost broke her.
They moved a little away from the pool, the children’s laughter fading into background noise as Olivia finally spoke. She told him about the child she had lost. About the child she had left behind. About blood, sirens, guilt, and choices made out of fear and desperation.
Herod listened in silence.
When she finished, his lips thinned into a hard line. He straightened slowly, his expression darkening into something fierce, almost godlike in its restrained fury.
“How old was she,” he asked quietly, “when you sent her there?”
“Six.”
Herod exhaled, running a hand through his hair. “Jesus Christ babe!" Herod sighed. "I’m not trying to alarm you,” he said at last, “but you were wrong to leave her there. Let’s hope she can still be saved.”
Before Olivia could answer, Nadia climbed out of the pool and ran toward them, water dripping from her hair. “Mum, I’m hungry!”
Herod crouched slightly to meet her eye level. “How would you feel about having a younger sister?”
Nadia blinked. “Are you serious? Is Mom pregnant?”
Olivia laughed weakly. “No. I already have a daughter.”
Confusion crossed Nadia’s face. “A daughter? How come I didn’t know?”
Olivia and Herod exchanged a glance.
“She was… sick,” Olivia said carefully. “She’s twelve now.”
Nadia’s expression transformed into pure delight. “Oh my God! I’m going to be a big sister! I’ve always wanted to be one!”
She ran off to tell her brothers, her voice carrying across the water.
Olivia watched her go, dread curling tightly in her chest. “Do you think it will turn out well?” she asked.
Herod followed Nadia with his gaze. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Screams tore through the darkness.
A small girl in a white dress stood alone, her voice echoing off unseen walls. “Is someone out there?”
She looked down.
Her hands were covered in blood.
In front of her stood an older girl—so similar it hurt to look at her. Red, deep auburn hair. Fair skin. Only the eyes were different. The little girl’s eyes were bright emerald green. The older girls were almond brown.
“Iv… Ivy?” the child whispered.
A gunshot rang out.
The older girl collapsed, a dark bloom spreading across her forehead.
“Sam,” she asked softly as she fell, “why did you kill me?”
Samantha woke with a gasp.
Her heart pounded violently as she stared at the cracked ceiling above her. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Then the smell of disinfectant and rusted metal dragged her back.
“Fuck,” she muttered. “It’s going to be a shitty day.”
The metallic door clanged open.
“Time to bathe!” a male nurse shouted.
He was a shrunken man with light skin mottled by age spots, one eye slightly larger than the other, giving him a perpetually leering look. Samantha followed him down the hallway, her bare feet slapping softly against the cold floor.
Showering was her favorite part of the morning. It was the only time no one watched her closely. Water drowned sound, blurred edges, softened memory. It was where she rebuilt herself for the day.
Samantha Redwing was twelve years old.
Her red auburn hair refused to behave, no matter how short it was cut, curling erratically around her face. Her emerald green eyes were sharp, watchful, always calculating. She learned early that stillness was safer than defiance.
The dining hall assaulted her senses the moment she entered. Voices clashed in a chaotic roar—anger, laughter, despair, cruelty. The air itself felt violent.
“The girl is alive! Bummer,” Diego shouted.
“Don’t be such a pessimist,” Penny replied. “Red, you’re late. Thought Chunky killed you, didn’t you?”
Chunky smiled at Samantha with unmistakable malice.
She took her food and sat without comment.
St. Mary’s was not a hospital. It was a cage.
Everyone there was dangerous. Sociopaths. Psychopaths. Killers who wore patient gowns instead of prison uniforms. They had raised her in their own twisted way, shaping her through fear and survival.
Lessons followed breakfast.
Once, long ago, a penologist turned psychiatrist had arrived and changed everything. His name was Watson Yu. He believed monsters should be embraced, not cured. His patients were experiments. Samantha was his masterpiece.
He taught her chess, strategy, codes, and languages. Guns.
By the time she was ten, her mind rivaled that of adults twice her age. Photographic memory. Cold logic. Precision.
“You’re special, Red,” he told her often. “My best bet.”
His eyes always unsettled her—fractured, furious, hungry.
She endured him because endurance meant living.
The only warmth she knew came from Dr. Hannah Crow.
The Mother of the hospital.
Hannah taught her music, insisting that emotion could survive even in the darkest places. The piano became Samantha’s refuge, her last connection to something gentle.
“You’re going to be something extraordinary,” Hannah once told her.
Samantha believed her. That was the only way she coud say sane.
The BMW cut through the desert road like a blade.
Olivia had insisted on going alone with Herod. She wasn’t ready for the rest of her family to know what she had hidden for so long.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked.
Herod kissed her hand, steering with the other. “It’ll be fine. I’m just worried she won’t like me.”
“She will,” Olivia said softly. “You’re lovable.”
The road pulled memories from her whether she wanted them or not.
Before Herod, there had been Erick Redwing.
A criminal. A mistake fueled by youth and misplaced desire. She had married him too young, believing love could tame darkness. It couldn’t.
They had three children: Jack, Ivy, and Samantha.
The gun had been Erick’s. Loaded. Carelessly left.
She found them in the bedroom.
Ivy on the floor. Jack was frozen in the doorway. Samantha is crying, trying desperately to push pieces of her sister back into place, whispering for her to wake up.
Samantha was five.
After that day, everything shattered.
Therapy was suggested. Money was lacking. Fear made decisions for her. Olivia took Samantha to St. Mary’s, believing professionals would help.
She told herself it was temporary.
It wasn’t.
Years passed. Olivia remarried. Built a new life. Cut contact. Pretended the past stayed buried.
Until the email arrived.
She knew now that avoidance was its own cruelty.
Samantha sat beneath the oak tree in the courtyard, fingers tapping lightly against the stone wall.
Three knocks.
She smiled.
She responded in kind.
“I did what you said,” she whispered. “I may leave today.”
On the other side of the wall, unseen but constant, was E.P. Her only friend. The one who taught her Morse code. The one person who spoke to her like she mattered.
“If you get out,” he said softly, “I’ll find you.”
“And if you do?” she asked.
“I’ll marry you. I’ll give you everything they never did.”
She laughed quietly. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m serious.” "And if i don't get out?"
"I'll come for you... I will burn this place to the ground."
Samantha smiled silently.
She believed him.
“Samantha Redwing!” a voice called.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I’ll meet you in the outside world,” E.P. promised.
She followed the nurse without resistance, a certainty settling in her chest like destiny.
Sister Elizabeth’s office was bright, airy, and deceptively warm.
Two people sat with their backs to her.
She recognized her mother immediately.
Herod turned first, smiling. “You must be Samantha. I’m Herod Gunter.”
Samantha’s emerald eyes flickered with amusement. "So the bitch married rich." she thought to myself.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Gunter,” Samantha said politely.
“Can I call you Sam?”
Her mother couldn’t speak. Fear crushed her chest as she stared at the daughter she had abandoned. There was something wrong in Samantha’s gaze—something cold, unreadable.
As Samantha boarded the BMW, she remembered E.P.’s question on her birthday.
What do you wish for?
Revenge.
The gates of St. Mary Mental Hospital slid shut behind the BMW with a heavy, final clang that echoed through the courtyard long after the car had already begun to move. Samantha watched the iron bars retreat in the rear window, growing smaller, thinner, until they became nothing more than dark lines against the pale desert sky.
For a moment, she felt nothing.
No relief. No fear. No joy.
Just a strange hollowness, as if a part of her had been left behind in those walls—not the part that screamed or bled or endured, but the quiet, observant child who had learned to survive by disappearing inwards.
Her fingers rested lightly on her lap, the knuckles scarred faintly from years of clenched restraint. The bag at her feet contained everything she owned in the world: a few folded clothes, worn notebooks, handmade headphone covers shaped like a wolf with red eyes, and memories that could never be unpacked safely.
The car hummed steadily beneath her, smooth and expensive. Leather seats. Filtered air. A luxury she had never known. It felt unreal, like stepping into someone else’s life without permission.
Olivia sat rigidly in the passenger seat, her hands clasped together so tightly her fingers had gone pale. She hadn’t spoken since they left the office. She hadn’t dared to look at Samantha either—not fully. Every stolen glance sent a jolt through her chest, as if she were staring at a ghost that had learned how to breathe.
Herod drove in silence, his jaw set, eyes forward. He had asked questions earlier—safe ones, polite ones—but now he sensed that silence was necessary. Whatever sat in the backseat of his car was not just a child.
It was an aftermath.
Samantha leaned her head against the window, cool glass pressing against her temple. The desert stretched endlessly ahead of them, golden and indifferent. She wondered, not for the first time, whether the outside world would be any kinder than the one she had left behind.
Freedom, she had learned, was not the same thing as safety.
Her mind drifted, unbidden, to the oak tree. To three knocks on concrete. To a voice that existed without a face.
I will find you.
Her lips curved slightly.
E.P. would never know how close he had come to being wrong. If Olivia had ignored the email for even one more day, Samantha might have left St. Mary’s in a very different way—alone, violent, irreversible.
She flexed her fingers slowly, grounding herself in the present.
Olivia finally broke the silence.
“We—we can stop somewhere if you’re hungry,” she said softly, her voice unsure, fragile. “Or… or we can go straight home. Whatever you want.”
Home.
The word echoed strangely in Samantha’s head. Home had once meant blood on the floor and sirens in the night. Later, it meant concrete walls and locked doors. Now, apparently, it meant a mansion she had never seen, filled with strangers who shared her blood only by accident.
“I don’t mind,” Samantha replied calmly.
Herod glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Their eyes met briefly. There was curiosity there. Caution. And something else—something calculating.
“You’ll have your own room,” he said. “Plenty of space. Privacy.”
Privacy.
Samantha almost laughed.
Instead, she nodded. “That’s good.”
Olivia swallowed. “Your sister is excited to meet you.”
Samantha’s gaze shifted back to the passing landscape. “Is she?”
“Yes,” Olivia said quickly. “Very. She’s always wanted to be a big sister.”
The irony sat heavily between them.
Samantha wondered what Nadia would see when she looked at her. A sister? A stranger? A threat?
Let her choose, Samantha thought. Everyone always does.
The sun began to dip lower, painting the sky in bruised shades of orange and purple. Shadows lengthened across the road, stretching like fingers trying to grasp the car as it sped past.
Somewhere behind them, St. Mary’s remained standing—unchanged, unrepentant. The monsters would continue their routines. The walls would continue to whisper. But one piece had been removed from the board.
And the board, Samantha knew, would never quite recover from that.
She closed her eyes briefly and imagined the chessboard Watson Yu used to set between them. Black pieces. White pieces. Kings pretending they weren’t vulnerable.
She had learned long ago that the most dangerous piece on the board was the one everyone underestimated.
When she opened her eyes again, the Gunter estate gates loomed ahead.
Samantha straightened slowly, rolling her shoulders back, posture calm, controlled. Whatever waited for her beyond those gates—family dinners, polite lies, forced smiles—she would meet it the same way she had met everything else.
Prepared.Watching.Patient.
Her reflection stared back at her from the window glass: emerald eyes, sharp and unblinking, lips curved with the faintest suggestion of a smile.
Time had run out.
And Samantha Redwing had finally stepped into it.
