Page 93 of Some Kind of Haunted

I tell myself this will be a piece of cake. Because I get a shower, if not one I’d call up to my standards. And maybe it’s louder here, more like jails I’ve seen on TV, but that’s okay too.

My second very long night in jail, I dream of Cleo. She’s bloody and ravaged, but she’s standing in front of me. Talking to me, blood dripping down her face, but I can’t make out the words she’s saying. She’s too quiet under my own sobbing.

I wake to tears streaming down my cheeks and a real sob caught in my throat. Which is when I realize someone is in this cell with me. I bolt upright, feeling markedly less brave than last night—

“Logan.” I wipe at my cheeks. I don’t want him to be worried about me crying, so I tell him the truth. “I dreamed about Cleo.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, but he’s . . . weird. Detached, almost. “You’re going to be released.”

But he isn’t happy. I don’t understand. “What’s happened?”

“Someone confessed to the murder.”

He does not deliver this news with excitement or even triumph. He is all gritted teeth and clenched jaw.

I call it what it is. Fury.

“Who?” I ask. He doesn’t want to tell me. I can see that all over him. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Logan? Do you not—”

“Nora.” He throws her name out there between us like a bomb.

I don’t understand. “What happened to Nora? What are you—”

Logan’s dark eyes blaze. “It’s Nora, Lexi. She turned herself in.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The wave of relief that washes over me when Logan leads me out of the jail and into daylight is intense, but it goes away before the door to the station shuts behind me and I feel guilty about it anyway.

Because I might be free, but Nora isn’t.

“Why would she do this?” I ask Logan as we walk. I’m blinking back tears. Tears because I’m legitimately crying or tears because the bright fall sunshine feels like an assault after being locked in a jail cell, I can’t really tell.

Logan looks like his jaw might crack in half, he’s so tense. “I have no fucking idea.”

“But you’ll get her out.” I say this more to reassure myself than anything else. “You’ll fix it.”

Logan fixes everything. Behold my entire life as proof.

But though he has a firm grip on me, leading me toward a large parking lot that I didn’t see while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, he doesn’t respond to what I said. And the more he stays silent, the more uneasy I get.

I frown at him. “You’ll get her out. That’s what you do.”

He doesn’t meet my gaze. “She confessed, Lexi. There’s only so much I can do with a goddamned confession. That’s why I told her not to fucking do it. But she was determined, and she brought that damn bloody cardigan of hers you borrowed, acted like she’d been wearing it.”

I can’t stomach the idea of Nora stuck in that jail cell, with the bleach-scented clothes and the fluorescent lights and the noise. I stop walking and try to change directions.

“I’ll go back.” I’m strong enough. I can take it. I’ve had more practice being uncomfortable. “We’ll tell them she’s just protecting me. We can prove she’s just protecting me.”

But Logan’s grip tightens and he holds me in place, something that is entirely too easy for him. I always forget that Logan is all muscle, the dick.

Right now his eyes are furious. “You will not sacrifice yourself for her. You’ll just both end up in there. Even I don’t have the bandwidth to get two of you out of this.”

“We can’t just leave her,” I grit out at him.

“We have no choice right now,” he grits right back. “But in case you forgot, Lex, we’re standing outside a jail and almost certainly being watched, because this is a small town, a woman is dead, and there’s no way anyone’s going to be happy about the killer maybe being the hometown girl when there are two outsiders from New York City in the mix.” When I stare at him, he looks slightly abashed. But only slightly. “You listen to all the same murder podcasts I do.”

“We are not in a murder podcast, Logan.”