They'd made a mistake.
You didn’t touch what was his. Not one damn hair on her head. They made a big mistake and he’d be the one to rectify it.
CHAPTER 5
EMILY
She was on her third cup of coffee and had been awake since four-thirty when the compound started coming to life around her.
It happened gradually. First, she heard boots knocking dirt off against the front door, then distant clank of someone in the kitchen, the low rumble of male voices carrying through the walls. Not alarming. Just present, the way a house settling wasn't alarming once you knew the sounds it made. A family waking up.
Emily sat cross-legged on the bed with her back against the headboard and her phone in her lap and tried to feel like a person.
She'd texted Chloe at five. It wasn’t too early. She responded in under a minute, which meant she was at the coffee shop. They'd gone back and forth for a while. They didn’t talk about anything heavy, just the particular shorthand of two people who'd been friends long enough to communicate in fragments. Chloe had sent a string of questions about whether Emily had eaten, whether the bed was comfortable, whether anyone had been weird to her.
Emily: No, yes, and absolutely not. They brought me a blanket. Irish's dog slept outside my door.
Chloe: Irish's dog or Irish?
Emily: I think Irish has better boundaries than Clover. Plus, Irish has a serious girlfriend.
Chloe: I don’t think Rampage would have liked Irish outside your door.
Emily: He’s on the other side of the wall in the room next door.
Chloe: Of course he is.
Emily: It’s where his room is, Chloe. It wasn’t intentional.
Chloe: I doubt that.
It had almost felt normal. For about six minutes.
Then she'd put the phone down and the quiet had come back and with it the thing she'd been holding at arm's length all night, the image of the man in the ball cap trying her door handle. The unhurried, methodical way he'd moved around her car. Like he'd done it before. Like he expected it to work. He was a lion stalking his trapped prey, just waiting for the opportunity to strike. And, he had the upper hand. That was, until The Watchmen showed up. Just on time.
She remembered the information Rampage had given her.
Her car had been tampered with.
Marcus Delling had her phone number, her first name, her general location, and apparently the patience to set a trap andwait for her to walk into it. She'd bought the squat rack two weeks after the listing went up. She'd initiated contact. She'd showed up at his house, not once, but twice, and then, because she was a reasonable person who believed the best of people and also apparently had a death wish, she'd goneback.It was all a setup. Why? Why wouldn’t he have done it the first time? When she came with the U-Haul? Was it because she’d clearly stated that she was meeting someone for lunch and her best friend knew where she was? She hadn’t mentioned any of that this time around.
She pressed her palms against her eye sockets.
"Stop," she said to herself. Out loud. It helped sometimes.
A knock at the door.
"Yeah," she called.
It opened but it was not Rampage like she suspected. Instead, it was a woman she hadn't met yet, carrying a coffee mug in each hand and an expression that was warm without being performatively cheerful about it.
"I'm Savannah," she said. "Savage’s girlfriend. I heard you were up. Figured you could use reinforcements. Hot chocolate." She held up one of the mugs.
Emily took it. "Thank you. You didn't have to?—"
"I was already making it." Savannah sat in the chair by the window like she'd been invited, which Emily found she didn't mind at all. "How are you doing? Honestly."
"Honestly." Emily considered that. "I feel like I got hit by a truck. Not literally. The truck just followed me. But emotionally, sort of like a truck."
