Page 202 of What We Burn

“Because it’s spoofed,” Milo says quietly.

I look at him. But his face is blank.

Holden notices and narrows an eye. “What did the last one say?” he asks me.

I force the words out.

“‘You killed me. You buried me. You blocked me. But I’m still breathing down your neck.’” My fingers curl against the table. “‘Feel that? It’s just the beginning.’”

Micah places his head in his hands and groans. “What the fuck?”

“When did that arrive?” Eli asks.

“Yesterday morning.”

“And you deleted it?”

“Yes.”

Eli rises.

The chair legs scrape across the floor, but he doesn’t go anywhere. He plants both palms on the table and lowers his head between his shoulders.

“Someone put a rope around your neck, Sage,” he says. “Someone has been continuously sending you threats from a dead man’s number, and you decided none of us needed to know?”

“I decided telling you wouldn’t change anything. We still don’t know who Stephen is.”

His head snaps up.

“It would have given us evidence,” Holden puts in before Eli can speak.

“For what?” I ask. “It’s not like the original text got us any closer. It just would have given you another reason to lock me inside this house.”

Eli laughs. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard him make.

“Lock you inside.” He lifts his head, and his eyes are bright in a way that makes my chest hurt. “You were pinned under a corpse five hours ago, Sage. A stranger climbed on top of you in a motel room and started pulling your clothes off, and the only reason you’re sitting in this kitchen is because Milo followed you. But sure. We were going to overreact.”

“Eli—”

“Someone put a rope around your neck.” His voice breaks on it. Both palms flat on the table like it’s the only thing holding him up. “Someone is out there fantasizing about finishing what Brock started, and you fed it to a trash folder because you didn’t want to be managed.”

This is the part I didn’t plan for. Not the killing. The hurting them.

“You’re not a prisoner,” Knox says.

The first words out of him since I sat down, and they land exactly like he means them to—stones dropped into still water. There’s no anger in his face. That’s worse. Anger I can fight. Knox just looks at me like he’s recalculating every protection plan he’s ever built and finding the flaw he missed: me.

“I don’t think I’m a prisoner,” I say quietly. “It’s just . . . my life has changed so dramatically and so fast that sometimes I feel like I don’t have any control. I love all of you. I love us. But I miss making decisions for myself. I miss the freedom to just walk out the door without worrying some boogeyman is going to jump out and get me.”

The words sit in the middle of the table with the crackers and the painkillers, and nobody touches them.

Eli sinks back into his chair like his strings have been cut. The anger drains out of his face and leaves something worse underneath—fear, naked and exhausted, the kind he can’t lesson-plan his way around.

“Thank you for being honest with us,” Micah says quietly. He reaches across and takes my hand, turns it over, presses his thumb into my palm, and runs it back and forth. “But baby girl, control and secrecy aren’t the same thing. You didn’t make a decision for yourself. You made one for all of us.”

“Deleting those messages didn’t keep you free,” Holden says. The coffee machine hisses behind him, forgotten. “It kept us blind. There’s a difference.”

“So what, I just hand over my phone every morning like a hall pass?”