“Someone came in. Did you see them?”
I step back, and my ankle knocks into something hard. It scrapes across the floor with a high-pitched squeal that fills thesilence here. I flinch and bend to touch my ankle, to ease the pain. My balance falters, and I’m falling all too quick.
Then—a hand touches me. Long fingers wrap around my forearm, grounding me, keeping me from falling. It’s cold.
“Who—”
“Shhhh. It’s okay. It’s me.”
The relief is instant, but incomplete. Even as my heart slows, my skin crawls. Mom’s words echo in my ears. He can be anyone. Anywhere.
“Lewis?” I reach out, needing to know.
“A man followed me. He had a gun.” His voice is barely more than a whisper. I press my hands to his chest, and I know, in an instant, this is my Lewis.
It’s him.
I fall into his arms, and he wraps me up. I can’t speak. My mind fractures around his words, around our reality.
“I’m okay,” he assures me. “But, look, I don’t think you’re going to believe me.” His words are slower, like he’s not sure he’s remembering it right. Like he’s in a dream, too. “I think it was?—”
“EJ,” I fill in the blank for him. The name leaves a sharp, bitter taste in my mouth. Like rust.
He inhales sharply against me. “You already knew?”
I want to tell him everything. About what I saw out the window. About Mom. And Taylor. About Greta. But my throat is dry.
It hurts to speak, to know.
“It’s a long story. For now, we need to get everyone out of here. We need to get somewhere safe, and we need to find Taylor.”
“He cut the power when I saw him. The porch lights, everything. It’s too dark to see anything. And I dropped my phone. I don’t even remember where. I had it one second, and then it was gone. I’m sorry. It was a blur.”
My skin prickles at his words, at the confirmation that EJ is behind our lack of power. Of light.
Outside the closet, the world has gone unnaturally quiet. The kind of quiet that sets your skin on fire and makes your ears ring.
“Why did you shove me in the closet?”
“I was running away from him. I didn’t…I didn’t think. I just saw you, and I needed to get you somewhere safe. This was the first place I thought of.”
Something inside me cracks at the thought that his first instinct was to save me. It probably doesn’t mean anything. It’s a habit, but still. It’s nice. “I don’t have my phone either,” I admit, remembering.
“What are you talking about? Where is it?”
“I…” To answer that would require me to go much deeper into this night’s story than I’m prepared for. “It’d take too long to explain. It doesn’t matter anyway. The guys have their phones. We need to warn them. Get them out of here.”
The house is still eerily quiet outside the door, and I suspect they’ve moved into hiding places too. I hope Greta isn’t alone.
“He has a gun, Corinne,” he reminds me.
My breathing catches. “I know.”
“If we go out there, I might lose you.”
“If we don’t, we might lose everyone.”
“Why is he doing this?”
