But then it cracks off again, and this time, it sounds closer.
Like a warning.
“Stay close to me, or it won’t be their bullet that kills you.” He says it quickly, then he moves off me, ducking under the door jamb of my car.
I think about shutting the door and leaving him here, but I want to know who it is that seems to be shooting at us to scare us. Besides, enough bullets can go through a car window.
And one look at him standing there, crouched a little, using my door as a shield, I realize he’s waiting for me. He won’t let me leave until I do as he said.
“The marina building,” he says quietly. “The door facing us is unlocked.”
I don’t ask how he knows when another round goes off.
I crawl out of the car, wanting to grab my gun, but I don’t have time to look for it in the floorboards of the car—it’s no longer on the console—and instead, I unsheathe my knife as I run low over the gravel lot and toward the black building with the deep blue door.
A laugh peels off in the night, and it isn’t Storm’s, because when I twist the knob, he’s right behind me, and the sound was further away.
He crashes his palm forcefully against the door and we both stumble through, into the dark. It smells damp here, bitter, and it seems like we’ve run into a small office judging by what I can see from the moonlight outside. That illumination is gone in a blink as Storm slams the door closed at his back. I hear the lock click as another round goes off and I wonder if whoever it is out there will shoot through the door. But I don’t know if it’s random teenagers doing stupid shit, someone drunk off their ass doingthe same, or something more sinister, and I know I need to treat it like the latter, no matter what. It’s the same assumption I ran into with Storm, treating him like a lesser threat.
There’s no such thing in these mountains, is there?
And as I blink to adjust my eyes to the dark, I know I need to remind him I’m not a helpless victim he can move around like a ragdoll. I’m not a girl he can get away with threatening the way he did in the car.
I see him looming in front of me, gun in hand, and I lift my knee and drive it into his groin without a breath.
He stumbles back against the door and with my free hand, I pull the gun from his grip, loosened because of my attack.
He grunts and I hear the Glock clatter on the floor just as I unsheathe my knife and hold the tip of the blade to his throat. I plant my hand over his chest, keeping him pinned to the door.
The whites of his eyes only just rival the blue as he finds my gaze in the confines of our new darkness.
“You’re going to bleed before you crawl out of here, Storm Leary.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
LYDIA
He doesn’t speak.
I can see his eyes on mine and I feel the hollow of his throat beneath the tip of my blade. The memories of crawling around my mother are knocking on the edges of my brain and they’re overlaid with the perfect picture of Lele on the hospital bed, his eyes closed, tubes coming out of his motionless and thinning body.
You did this.I want to blame Storm for everything even though I know it’s impossible; he probably doesn’t even know about my mother, let alone who and what happened to her.
I barely know the who.
What kind of mother leaves her kids that way? What kind of mother does it when they’re home? I hate her. I love her. I needed her.
Not anymore.
She was useless, just like the locked box of cash in her closet. Sealed with a key like one for a journal; nothing that would stop anyone, just a minor nuisance which helped her sleep better at night, when she did sleep.
Just one hundred dollars that wouldn’t last a nine-year-old and her brother two weeks. Lynx raised me.
My mother left me.
But Storm is a year younger than me, give or take. Maybe Lele’s age. Maybe mine, it’s not like we’ve discussed birthdays and all of his records seem to be hidden except for the assault he almost went to prison for.
