Page 10

I throw the duvet aside, intending to get out of bed, but stop before my feet touch the floor.

I’m wearing pajamas and they are not my pajamas.

I stare down at myself before slowly running my hand over the shirt, fingertips sliding across the fabric, and my confusion intensifies. I have never owned anything remotely like this. And it is concerning that whoever owns it knew my size. The shirt fits across my shoulders without pulling, and the sleeves end precisely at my wrists instead of hanging over my hands to stopping above them.

I don’t remember putting them on.

I don’t remember taking my clothes off either.

I close my eyes and try to force myself backwards through the night, but what comes back is fragmented, disconnected pieces that refuse to become a complete memory. There was music, many people, Logan beside me, the gunshot cracking through the dark, trees rising everywhere around me. My lungs burning while I ran, branches scraping against me as I tried to put as much distance as possible between myself and whoever was following.

I also remember a hand at the back of my collar and a voice beside my ear.

Hello, little stripper.

My eyes snap open. My heart begins pounding so hard that I can hear it.

Someone caught me.

There had been a man behind me in the woods. I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing him again and again, always following, never seeming to hurry even when I was running so hard that my lungs felt ready to tear themselves apart.

Then I remember struggling and not being able to breathe.

Where are Stacy and Logan?

I reach automatically toward the bedside table for my phone but find nothing there except a glass of water.

A fresh wave of unease crawls through my stomach.

Where is my phone?

I push myself further up the bed and start dragging my hands through the sheets, checking beneath the folds of the duvet incase my phone somehow buried itself there.

My fingers are still searching when something in the corner of the room catches my attention.

There’s a man sitting in the chair not far from the windows.

A small, humiliating sound hiccups out of me, and I jerk backwards so violently that my shoulders strike the headboard with a dull thud. Pain shoots between them, but I pay it no mind because all I can see is the shape of someone sitting in the semi darkness.

The light slipping through the curtains is too weak to reveal much. I can make out one ankle resting over the opposite knee and the broad line of shoulders, his body is so still as he watches me.

Maybe he isn’t watching me.

Maybe he’s sleeping.

But there’s something about the angle of his head that tells me his eyes are open. Then as if to confirm it, he unfolds himself from the chair and stands. I instinctively press backwards even though there is nowhere left to go.

“Please.” The word leaves me in a thin, breathless whisper.

I don’t know what I’m asking him not to do. Come closer? Touch me? Kill me?

He comes closer, unhurried, and as the darkness gives his face back to me piece by piece, the mask he’s wearing makes recognition moves through me with a sickening feeling in my belly.

It was him in the woods.

The man who chased me.

He stops beside the bed and looks down at me, and I suddenly realize how enormous the room is, how far away the door is and how little difference screaming would probably make behind walls this thick.