Audrey released him at once, and the connection snapped.
The man jolted and finished his sentence weakly, blinking as if he’d lost his place in his own mind. Then he kept arguing, unaware that several seconds of his life had belonged to someone else.
No one had noticed.
Audrey stepped back against a steel column, pulse hammering.
If she could hold someone for five seconds, could she do it for longer?
The thought made her uneasy enough to lock it away at once. She took a deep breath. She hadn’t lost control. She’d chosen to stop.
The distinction unsettled her more than anything.
None of it changed what mattered most: Alex was still missing, and the killer was still steering her toward a direction of his choosing.
Forcing her aura inward, she sealed the cracks of this madness before temptation widened them.
She would not become a monster.
And yet, as she stepped back into the moving crowd, the truth followed her. The freeze on the bus had been survival, while this? It had been a rehearsal. Deep down, this feeling had been growing for a while. Today, it was just louder, as if the monster inside her had stopped pretending it was human.
People stared at her now, their phones rising. Someone snapped a picture, then another, while whispers spread as the crowd slowed around her. Audrey’s heart kicked into a nervous rhythm. All she wanted was to disappear, to blend back into obscurity before anyone could attach her face to a headline or a file. She needed to escape, to reclaim the anonymity that felt more vital than air. A flash of red and blue outside caught her eye. Two officers climbed from a patrol car. One pointed toward the station while the other lifted a radio.
A hand closed around her wrist. Before she could fight, a second, stronger arm pulled her out of the crowd by the shoulder and into a dark alley.
“You need to stay out of sight,” a man whispered, dragging her deeper into the shadows. He stood at least a head taller than her with a black hoodie obscuring most of his bearded face. His posture was controlled and his movements purposeful. But shecaught the color of his eyes—a brutal, startling cerulean. They lingered on hers, searching, then he hesitated, jaw flexing as if weighing a decision.
There was something urgent and uncanny in the way he kept glancing over his shoulder, his focus split between the crowd and Audrey, as if her being here had changed something.
Audrey pulled up her own hood and followed him, mostly because she didn’t have a better option. He was a stranger, but the police behind her and the killer in her head made him the least dangerous option. She needed to get out of here. He led her to a quieter side street and pointed toward North Seventh Avenue, only a few paces away.
“Go,” he said.
She didn’t need to be told twice.
Behind her, a distant siren wailed through the city grid, and out of the alley’s shadow came the prickling certainty that someone else was already watching—someone more dangerous than the police or the man in the hoodie.
Audrey sank deeper into her hood and slipped into the streaming crowd, wondering who would find her first.
3
She ran for the next street, fumbling through the papers in her bag until she found Alex’s address written in the margins.
Alex was her anchor, her fallback.
Unlike the population at large, he’d known about her secret ability since they were kids. It seemed as if he simply sensed it from the moment they met and accepted her, as-is. She remembered the way he'd looked at her that first summer. He'd seen right through the walls she built to keep everyone out. There must have been a moment she told him, or maybe he witnessed something slip from her control, but the exact memory had disappeared. Sometimes it felt like it had been pulled from her mind altogether, leaving only the certainty that Alex knew the truth. And still, he’d chosen to stay.
Resolution surged inside her. She would go to him and make him understand that the voice, the man at the station, and the things happening inside her head that she couldn’t even name yet were real.
Audrey disappeared into the current of people on Tenth Avenue. Despite her determined pace, dread still twisted low inher gut. All hell was breaking loose while Alex was nowhere to be found, and that ominous feeling worsened the moment she reached his building.
Nothing was visibly wrong, but that was what made her hesitate. The windows were dark and devoid of any sign of life. She waited across the street, anyway, chain-smoking with one hand tucked into Cary’s jacket.
An hour passed, then another. People came and went through the lobby, but Alex never appeared. Audrey ground her teeth. He’d promised they’d meet today. The quiet lasted too long, settling into something that didn’t feel accidental, and the killer’s voice cleaved through her composure like glass.
He isn’t coming.
Ask yourself why.
