“PLEASE—”
A sound from inside.
Locks turning. One. Two. The chain sliding free.
The door cracked open three inches. Then the security door opened, and a face appeared in the gap—Fiona’s, pale with fear, her eyes widening and then immediately welling with tears at the sight of us standing there alive.
The relief hit so hard my vision went white. I sagged forward against the doorframe, and the sound that came out of my chest belonged to no category I could name—between a sob and a laugh, fully neither, occupying the narrow, desperate space between them.
Finn didn’t pause.
He pushed us both through. I caught the doorframe, caught Fiona, and nearly went down over a pair of small rain boots sitting just inside—Lily’s, toes pointed neatly at the wall, the left one slightly ahead of the right the way she always left them.
Finn slammed the security gate and then the door shut behind us. The boom of it rolled through the hallway, and he was already at the locks—deadbolt, chain, the secondary lock I’d put in three years ago after the Delgados’ place got hit—each one driven home with a click that landed somewhere behind my ribs.
The last lock turned.
Quiet.
My legs gave out entirely.
I collapsed in the hallway, knees hitting the hardwood, hands catching the floor before I went down completely. My armsshook, and my breath came in sharp gasps that tore at my throat on the way in and shuddered on the way out.
The sound my fingers made when they went in—that’s the part I can’t stop hearing.
I gagged. Forced it back. Gagged again.
“Hey—hey—”
Finn’s voice was close, the sharp edges gone. He dropped down beside me, knees hitting the floor, and his hands found my shoulders first, then my face, turning it toward him with a deliberateness that asked nothing from me except to let him. His palms pressed against my cheeks.
“Look at me.”
I tried, but my eyes wouldn’t hold focus. The hallway swam and tilted.
“Libby.” Quieter. More certain. “Look at me.”
I found his eyes. Dark and anchored.
“It’s gone,” he said. “It’s dead. You’re inside. You’re okay.”
His thumb moved across my cheekbone, slow and deliberate, clearing away the creature’s fluid still drying on my skin. He didn’t flinch from it, didn’t recoil. And when he was done, his hand didn’t leave. It just stayed.
“You’re okay.”
My body didn’t believe him.
Not yet.
His hands remained on my face, warm and unmoving. I wanted to lean into that warmth, to let it be enough. But my skin still crawled with the memory of other things, and the hallway felt too small to hold both. My mind kept going back: the weight of it on my chest, the sound, the fluid on my face that his thumb had cleared away like it was nothing, like he could just—
I pulled back, not far—an inch, maybe less.
His hands didn’t follow. They just waited.
A tremor moved through me in a long, slow wave, and I pressed my palms flat against the floor, breathing. I looked at him and hated myself for needing him to stay exactly where he was.
Sixteen
