I clench my jaw and don’t speak. And maybe it isn’t true, anyway. If Stein stays away like Sanford claims he will, the house could just be a house.
44 Ritual Drive is tainted, because of my mother’s death. And Haunt Muren holds echoes of my abuse, too, but the years of torture on Ritual were far worse.
Still, I want to know the answer to Karia’s question.
If this is our chance to go anywhere in the world, why there? Going to Number Seven was stupid enough as it was, and all because I thought I might get answers for why my own father loathed me my entire life.
Haunt Muren is only proof of that loathing, not an answer for the cause.
But when I blink, I find Sanford looking at me, as if I’m wrong.
“You understand you will have to murder him, if you want any chance of living freely. Here,” Sanford glances around the forest hiding us, “there are no weapons.There…”He holds my gaze again. “You know as well as I do there are plenty.”
But something echoes inside my head. The words Stein spoke to Karia and I before Writhe ambushed us all.
Who do you think let him out?
I flex my fingers around the back of Karia’s neck and draw her closer, taking a shaky breath and ignoring the pain in my stomach. “Which side are you on?” I ask Sanford plainly. He’s suggesting a homicide, but it also wouldn’t take much to murderhim.
Yet there is a tangled part of me hesitant to do so. He knows pieces of my history I could never gather from anyone else. And once he is dead, there will be no one to tell me if my mother ever loved me or truly cared for Stein. If there was ever a hope this would turn out differently.
If there was something I could have done to stop everything.
And there will be no one left to remind me I am not completely tainted.
“Neither,” Sanford answers me softly, and it feels like a blow, somehow. “But I don’t want to die, buried.”
Chapter 14
Karia
There’s a blur of movement as we head deeper into the forest, skirting around the hotel, giving the building a wide berth to make it to a road so we can catch a train out of this fucking city.
The motion was so fast it could’ve been a bug, a bat, a bird. But the sensation of being watched heightens.
I still, aware Sanford is growing further away at our backs but I am not sure that’s a bad thing.
To the train is ideal—how else will we get far enough away under the cover of a crowd? But after we arrive at the station, I’m not certain Haunt Muren should be the destination.
Sullen stops, too, at my side, and I can feel him staring at me, but he says nothing. I turn to glance over my shoulder into the gloom, straining my gaze in the dark.
My pulse beats in my ears and I’m terrified any moment will be the end of this. We have escaped too many times.
The story is over.
We both die.
That is our only happily ever after.
But I see nothing. Hear nothing else.
I start to apologize to Sullen—I don’t know whysorryis what I want to say—when I see it again.
And this time, under the moonlight drifting down through the trees, my eyes catch a sliver of who is watching us.
A deep shadow, far to the right of Sanford struggling to catch up.
But it’s not the shadow that holds my attention.
