Somewhere beneath the clamor, Piper’s own thoughts struggled to surface, trying to make sense of how she’d come to be sitting in a stranger’s living room in the middle of the night.
“Are you feeling any better?”the woman asked, her voice coated with artificial concern.
“The voices,” Piper managed, forcing each word past the pressure in her throat.
“What voices, Piper?What are they saying?”
“Killer.Killer.She has the yarn.White is for self-righteousness.”
The woman moved closer, her hand extending toward Piper’s shoulder.“You’re not well.Let me help you—”
Something inside Piper snapped.A surge of clarity burned through the fog, igniting a spark of resistance.
“STOP IT!”she shouted, the words tearing from her throat with such force that the woman before her flinched back.“STOP IT NOW!”
The world froze.The voices vanished as if sliced away by a knife, leaving behind a ringing silence.In that moment of quiet, Piper’s mind cleared, edges sharpening into focus for the first time since she’d left her mother’s house.
She looked up at the woman who stood before her, but now Piper saw what lay beneath the mask of concern: cold calculation, barely contained panic, the flat gaze of someone who had taken human life and could do so again.
“I know what you’ve done,” Piper said, her voice steadier now.“I can see it on you.”
The woman’s expression hardened into something predatory.“You don’t know anything,” she said.“You’re confused.Delusional.No one will believe anything you say.”
A low groan drifted from somewhere deeper in the house—weak, pained, but unmistakably human.Both women’s heads turned toward the sound.
“Someone else is here,” Piper said, pushing herself upright from the chair.Her legs trembled beneath her, but held.“Someone you’ve hurt.”
“Sit down,” the woman commanded, her gentle tone abandoned.“That’s none of your concern.”
“It is my concern,” Piper countered, taking a step forward.“I was brought here to stop you.”
The woman moved with unexpected speed, positioning herself between Piper and the hallway.“You weren’t ‘brought’ anywhere,” she hissed.“You wandered here in some psychotic episode.If you try to leave this room, I’ll be forced to restrain you for your own safety.”
“Move,” Piper said simply.
The woman lunged then, hands outstretched toward Piper’s throat.But Piper had a physical strength born of daily farm labor.Her hand shot out, catching the woman’s wrist and twisting sharply.
Using the woman’s own momentum, Piper pulled her off balance, then planted her palm firmly against the woman’s sternum, shoving with all the strength she’d built over years of lifting and carrying.
The woman’s feet left the ground for an instant before she crashed onto the hardwood floor, the impact forcing air from her lungs in an audible whoosh.
Piper didn’t wait for her to recover.She stepped over the fallen woman and moved swiftly toward the direction of the groan, finding herself in a hallway leading toward the back of the house.
Halfway down the hall, an older woman with silver hair lay on the floor.A trickle of dried blood snaked from her temple down the side of her face.The woman’s eyelids fluttered.
Behind Piper, the sound of movement indicated the younger woman was regaining her feet
“What should I do?”Piper asked aloud, the question directed not at either woman but at the voices that had guided her here.
Then, a single voice—clear, calm, somehow familiar though she couldn’t place it—spoke from the void.
“Go to the kitchen window.Hurry!”
*
Jenna moved into Elena Bowers’ empty house with her service weapon drawn.Nothing seemed out of place except the glaring absence of the woman herself.
“Sheriff,” Officer Martinez called from a back room.“You need to see this.”
