He sets fire to my survival strategies, so I focus on the table clock in the entryway that echoes up the stairs. Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.
I haven’t been this dysregulated since I first escaped the cult. It’s a setback that may cost me more than I have to give.
Every light in the house is on. It reflects on the bulletproof windows through the crack in my blackout curtains—another reminder that someone out there wants to hurt me.
Survive, not thrive. It keeps me safe.
Your fortress hasn’t kept the monsters out though—it’s simply kept you alone.My therapist often tells meI told youso in my thoughts. He’s an asshole.
It’s also why Elle is foisting her giant one-hundred-pound untrained Bernese mountain dog on me now. Without Savvy next door in our duplex, they’re afraid I’ll become a house troll. They’ve never said as much, but I know them.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, right next to my snow globe that blows constant glitter around an old-fashioned typewriter and gives off an ethereal glow I adore.
Ten missed calls. Eight from Madi. Two from Elle.
I silence it. Talking to them means I’d have to explain tonight. The town fair. The man who called me Honeybee and then pretended he didn’t know me.
He made my heart stop and my world implode in the space between one breath and the next.
Valen Stone—my first friend, my first love, my first loss.
Except he’s not mine. Perhaps he never was. My Valen never would’ve looked at me like I was a stranger.
Is it possible that I’ve made him all up in the safe places in my head? That the trauma of that place distorted fiction and reality so much that I made up an entire relationship that feels so real, I think my ribs are breaking?
Survive.
Standing, I pull on another compression shirt, enjoying the hug it offers my body, before wrapping my weighted fleece robearound my shoulders. The thing swallows me whole, but it’s the safe kind of lost that I enjoy.
One step leads to two, then three.
My heart thrums erratically in my ears, thumping like a bass drum the closer I get to the window.
Is he still out there?
One inch. Then two. I pull back the heavy drapes and peer out.
My nose hits the cool glass when I see the nondescript sedan parked a few cars down from Rip’s.
It’s 3:02 in the morning.
“What the heck do you want from me, Valen? Do you not sleep anymore either?” The words are loud in my head but barely make a sound as they leave my lips.
Good girls are seen, not heard, Miss Styx. And you want to be a good girl, don’t you?
My body trembles violently as the voice of a ghost rakes across my exposed skin. No matter how deeply I burrow into my robe, I still feel her words slithering across my body.
Her.
Valen’s mother.
She’s dead now, Clover.
How many times over the years have I reminded myself that she can no longer hurt me? How many times have I woken up gasping for the breath she tried to control?
He’s right there, Clover. Go ask him. Ask him where the fuck he’s been!
The evil voice, the one who guides the villains in my thriller novels through the dead of night, is dangerous in my ear now.
