Everything went quiet upstairs.
No footsteps. No voices. No movement.
Everyone was listening. Everyone was holding their breath, waiting to find out if that sound would bring scratching at the walls.
I held still. Head tilted. Ears straining.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Nothing from outside. Just the faint creak of old wood settling, the distant bleed of sirens, and once a sound that stopped before it finished.
“Keep going,” I murmured.
I drove the remaining nails in fast. Short, controlled strikes—still too loud in the confined space, but speed mattered more than stealth now.
The second two-by-four went up below the first. Four nails at each end, sunk deep into the door frame’s timber.
I stepped back and tested the brace with both hands. Pushed hard.
The doors flexed a quarter inch and stopped dead.
Solid.
Someone would have to splinter the wood before the bracing gave. That bought time.
Next—the basement window.
Narrow. Maybe fourteen inches wide, eighteen tall. A rectangle of dirty glass; gray daylight from the alley above. Too small for a grown man.
A determined corpse would fold itself through that gap without a sound.
I grabbed a scrap board and drove the nails in fast.
BANG… BANG… BANG.
Each hit punched through the silence, echoing off stone walls. I drove the last nail flush and stood, hammer still in hand, not quite ready to put it down.
The board swallowed the window, and daylight vanished. The basement dropped a shade darker, the single bulb overhead working harder to fill the space.
Cellar doors braced. Windows sealed.
A small, cautious thread of relief wound through my chest.
Good bones, after all.
I set the hammer on the workbench and wiped my forehead with my forearm.
The kitchen door still needed reinforcing. Seven windows. The dresser.
Hours of work yet. All of it in silence.
I pocketed the nails and headed for the stairs.
Above me, the floorboards muffled a question from Lily, her voice small and uncertain. The specific words were lost, swallowed by the old wood.
But Libby’s response came through—muffled, steady, warm despite everything.
