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“Not a chance in hell, pretty girl.”

Boom!

Another deafening crack of thunder detonates right above the cabin, shaking the floorboards beneath our feet. Simultaneously, a massive jagged arc of lightning splits the darkness wide open, flooding the clearing outside with stark, unnatural light.

Through the window, Ryder catches it too. His eyes narrow into slits, his amusement vanishing instantly as his gaze locks onto something in the thicket.

“See!” I cry out, a sudden, surreal surge of validation washing over me. “You saw it too.”

Ryder pushes himself off the wall, his whole body shifting into a fluid, predatory stance. His voice drops into a dangerous whisper. “Yeah. I saw it.”

He reaches down, slipping his hand behind his back, his fingers tightening around the heavy handle of my father’s hunting knife.

“Stay here.” His tone leaves zero room for argument.

“Ryder, wait⁠—”

He doesn’t listen.

He turns on his heel and glides toward the front door of the cabin, moving with impossible, unnatural silence despite his massive size. It takes him seconds to move the furniture I used as a barricade.

Ryder steps out into the howling wind, pulling the hood over his head before the heavy door closes behind him until only a narrow, two-inch crack remains open to the storm.

I stand frozen in the middle of the pitch-black cabin, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

Seconds drag into eternity.

The silence inside the room becomes suffocating, broken only by the relentless drumming of rain on the roof and the rhythmic creaking of the floorboards beneath my feet.

Then, something strange occurs.

The roaring howl of the wind outside doesn’t just fade—it dies completely, dropping into an eerie, freakish vacuum of dead silence. The rain continues to pour, but the wind simply ceases to exist.

And then, from right outside the cabin door, comes a sound that turns my blood to solid ice.

It isn’t the sound of heavy boots or snapping twigs. It’s a soft, rhythmic scratching sound—like fingernails dragging slowly down the wet wood of the outer wall.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

My stomach drops into a bottomless pit.

I clutch Ryder’s small folding knife tighter in my trembling hand, the cold metal biting into my palm.

Scratch. Scratch.

Then comes a voice.

It doesn’t sound like a man, nor a woman. It’s a wet, gargled whisper that seems to echo from everywhere and nowhere at once, rising directly from the cracks in the floorboards.

A violent shiver wracks my entire frame.

The voice drags on, twisted and wet, sounding like lungs filled with stagnant river water.

I can’t stay here. I can’t sit in the dark like a trapped lamb waiting to be slaughtered.

Disobeying Ryder’s direct order, I creep silently toward the front door, my boots barely whispering against the floor.

I reach the narrow opening and press my eye to the crack in the heavy wood, desperate to see what is happening on the rain-soaked porch.