“Boys!”I hiss, and somehow that makes them stop and turn their heads in my direction.Whatever Wes sees on my face is enough for him to flick out his elbow and point the flashlight down the hall.
A click sounds out in the silence, a sphere of cold, white light bursting out of the flashlight, down the hallway and illuminating it to the very end.While the familiar tones of red and black and brushed bronze take up most of the visible space of the corridor, my eyes are drawn to a color that never used to instill any kind of emotion in me but now has the power to make my skin prickle in fear.
Pink.
CHAPTER 24
“It’s complicated.All this murder shit’s complicated.And that’s good.Because if it’s too simple you’ve got no reason to try, and if you’ve got no reason to try you don’t.”
—NotWhat If
Heart Eyes still doesn’t move, and it’s thenotmoving that’s terrifying.The meat cleaver from before is gone and a regularHalloween-style kitchen knife has taken its place, similar to the one gripped in Wes’s hand.Even from so far away, I can tell Heart Eyes’s grip on the handle of the blade in his left hand is loose, casual, and his right arm is behind his back, like he’s some character from a Regency-era film who’s going to confess his feelings in the rain or in a crammed tearoom.
It’s only the slight shift in where the light reflects off the blade that alludes to the fact Heart Eyes is breathing, he’s real.Otherwise, he is dead still.The slow walk, the ramming into the bathroom wall, the meticulous pummeling of his knife into hallway guy’s stomach—it was all so active.It was something we could react to.
But this…
“You’re gonna go back to the entrance,” Wes murmurs.His voice is barely above the sound of a breath and I need to lean in to hear him, shift away from John and the way the drying blood on his shirt makes my hand stick to the material.I peel my palm away from it.
“Once you’re there, go back upstairs.You hid before, you can do it again.”
It’s rule seven all over again: don’t run up the stairs.Not to mention all three of us trying to climb them—Wes and me holding John’s weight as we do, with Heart Eyes on our tail… It’s a death trap.Then I realize what he said.
You.Not us,you.
He’s taken himself out of the equation.
“Weare going to go together,” I spit back.His hero-complex shit isreallygetting old.I don’t know if his abs can even make up for it at this point.
I look at John.His focus is firmly on Heart Eyes, too, but his eyelids keep drooping into prolonged blinks, his breathing heavy.At some point he dropped the Midori bottle on the ground to take over trying to stop the bleeding from his wound.
“I can’t carry John by myself,” I say as Heart Eyes keeps idling at the end of the hall.“And you’re not going up against that asshole; he’s got a knife.”
“So do I,” Wes replies, taking a step away from us, turning toward Heart Eyes.
Wes brings his knife into view and there’s a moment where, still caught in the middle of the spotlight glare of the flashlight, Heart Eyes shifts on his feet.His round, pink head tilts ever so slightly to the side.Like he sees Wes, he sees the knife, and he accepts the challenge.
“You guys just have to hide until help comes,” Wes whispers.“And help is going to come, okay?”
I can’t even bring myself to shake my head, not when we don’tknow what will act as the starting signal for Heart Eyes to close the distance between us.
“Not okay,” I grit out.“Not okay in the slightest.”
Wes takes another step away and it takes me to a place of such unbridled panic I almost miss it when Heart Eyes moves his arm from behind his back.
A blade—the long, broadFriday the 13thkind—slides out from behind his thigh and glints like the disco ball currently hanging over the personalized intestine heart he made for me.His shoulder dips from the weight of his weapon, and Wes freezes.
Of course he brought a machete.
Wes’s knife is as good as those corkscrews I left in the bathroom, and he knows it.That’s why he doesn’t take another step forward, why he drops the knife to his thigh again as his back straightens, and why both he and John let out heavy sighs.
Wes takes a step back and I let out a strangled exhale.The sound makes him look over his shoulder and meet my gaze.The expression on his face, the emotion in his eyes—it makes me irrationally, intensely angry because how dare he look at me likethatwhen he’s just all but told me to leave him to die?
“Jamie, youneedto run,” Wes says, and I don’t like the way he’s using that soft, low voice.I had hopes we’d be alone, away from here, wearing fewer clothes and not covered in blood when I eventually heard it.His expression is still intense, meaningful, steady, and made to make my heart ache, andagainwe’re in the entirely wrong context.It’s more suited for confessing that I complete him, or that he likes me very much, just the way I am, or that if I’m a bird, he’s a bird.It’s not the right expression for a situation involving a machete.And I refuse to let it be the last thing I see of him.If I’m the Final Girl, then I get the final word.Iget the final say.And I’m not ready to be alone yet.
“I’mnotleaving wi—”
“We’ll slow you down.’?’
