“From dear ol’ dad?”
“Yes.”
I narrow my eyes.
“Who let you out?”
Her brows knit.“What?”
“Your chain.My door.That shampoo.”I lean in, sniffing.“Was it Oaks?”
She flinches.Not guilt, but offense.
“No.”
“Then who?”
Her pretty little mouth twists.“A club bunny.Blond one.She said she felt sorry for me.Brought me shampoo so I could take a whore’s bath in the sink.”
My grip on the key tightens until the metal bites.
Fucking Joey.
“You talked to her?”
“I bribed her with the only thing I had left, my last stick of eyeliner.”
Bullshit.
I stare at her.She stares back.She didn’t have any eyeliner on her.Or did she?She had a fucking key I didn’t find.This girl is gonna fucking kill me.I glance past her into the darkness and freeze.
“Come on,” I say, heading toward the church.
The night air chills as we cross the gravel behind the clubhouse, heading toward the old Pearly Gates’s church.There’s a new one now, practically a mansion.But the Reverend will lurk there.
Can’t run into him and keep my promises to Legend not to kill him.
Becki keeps pace beside me, close enough that her shoulder brushes mine when the wind pushes us sideways.
It should feel wrong.
But it seems like déjà vu.
This road.
This silence.
This dread in my gut.
I walked it before.
“Funny,” Becki mutters, staring at the broken steeple ahead.“How I always end up back here.”
I don’t answer at first.
Because a picture hits me, hard and fast, of the two of us teens, walking this same dirt path under an August moon.Her hair in messy braids.My hands scraped from climbing the fence.Both of us barefoot because we weren’t supposed to be out past curfew.
Back then, this place didn’t look haunted.
