But when I try to step toward the stairs, my legs won’t cooperate.
Billy’s laughter fills my mind, low and amused, like he’s watching a mouse realize it’s trapped.
“What’s wrong?”he asks.“Going somewhere?”
I’m not paralyzed. I can wiggle my toes and can clench my fists, but I can’t make myself take a single step toward those stairs.
I want to wring this asshole’s neck. He killed twenty-seven girls, and now he thinks he can just control me?
“I said no,” I snarl. “I’m not your fuckingplaything.”
“EDEN!”
My eyes snap up at the sound of my name before I can stop them.Fuck.
I try to look down so hard my eyeballs burn in their sockets, straining against muscles that won’t obey, but they are stuck on him. His eyes are gleaming with triumph, pupils blown wide and hungry.
DJ told me not to look a ghost in the eye, and what do I do? I deserve whatever’s about to happen for being so monumentally stupid.
He oscillates his head from side to side like a cobra. My peripheral vision collapses inward until all I can see are his eyes.
“Did nobody tell you not to look me in the eye?”His voice drips with satisfaction.“Perhaps you can’t help yourself.”
I try to close my eyes, but they won’t obey. They’re locked open, forcing me to stare at him as the pressure builds.
“Do you feel me inside you?”Billy asks.“Tapping the backs of your eyes?”
I gasp as the feeling of cold fingers probes the delicate tissue behind my eyeballs, exploring, like they’re testing how hard they can push before something ruptures. My thoughts scatter like dropped marbles, rolling out of reach.
“The boy never lets me get this far,”he says.“But you. You’re so…permeable.”
My head is going to split open. The pressure builds until I’m drowning in pain. His cold presence slithers inside my mind, and I try to resist, but I don’t know how. It’s like drowning except the water is inside my skull and I can’t find the surface. He slinks through my memories, touching things that are mine, pulling them out to examine them.
He opens the box.
Rosie’s face flashes across my mind. Rosie dancing, throwing her arms and legs in every direction. Rosie with ice cream on her nose. Rosie smiling with her front teeth missing. Stanley Daniels leading her down the hallway by her small hand. She glanced back at where I was lying on the floor with the bag still over my head, and I couldn’t see the details of her face through the fogged-up plastic. She died thinking she was completely alone. And I did nothing.
My knees buckle, but I don’t fall, because my body isn’t mine anymore. I’m sinking into dark water with no bottom, and Billy’s presence is the weight tied around my ankles, dragging me down.
“I wonder if you’ll scream like Rosie,”he says.“One way to find out.”
A hand clamps over my eyes and yanks me sideways. The connection severs with an almost audiblesnapinside my head, and I can feel my body again. My legs give out completely, but strong arms catch me before I can hit the ground, pulling me against a solid chest.
Billy’s laughter echoes in my mind, fading but still there, and his voice slides into my head with perfect clarity:“Still playing the hero, are you, Nicholas?”
Nico’s hand presses hard against my eyes. His palm is rough and cold, and his other arm stays locked around my ribs, holding me upright.
“Don’t look,” he growls. “Keep your eyes closed even when I let go.”
I nod against his hand, and I could collapse right here on this freezing metal floor from sheer relief. Nico lowers me carefully, and I pull my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. The world spins around me even with my eyes closed, like I’m on one of those teacup rides at Coney Island that Rosie and I used to beg Mom to go on over and over until we both felt sick.
“Oh, Nicholas, don’t be upset,”Billy says.“I didn’t tell her what you did.”
My teeth chatter uncontrollably. I can still see Rosie’s face. Her small hand laced with Stanley’s big one. The way she looked back at me.
A machine roars, the bass so deep it reverberates in my ribcage. The hum builds until my teeth ache, and then there’s a whooshing sound, like all the air is being vacuumed out of the room at once. There’s a resonant boom. Then a click.
Then silence.
