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My heart is still racing, and I press my hand over it, counting the beats, trying to calm myself down.
“It’s okay, Willow,” I whisper again, but the mantra still doesn’t work.
My phone chimes in the distance with a notification, and the sudden sound makes me jump, a small scream bursting out of me. When I go to grab my phone from the kitchen, I find the screen lit up with a text from April, the head bitch at school who loves to torment me in her spare time.
“Fuck,” I mutter under my breath.
I scan the text, reading it several times but barely processing it at all. It’s about a group project we have in one of our classes, and it feels so fucking surreal to be thinking about school right now. It seems so mundane, sonormal, compared to everything that just happened to me.
The two things don’t match up, and it makes me feel even more untethered, like I’m floating in a haze.
It just feels… wrong.
Like none of it can be real.
The phone feels heavy in my hands, and I’m almost in a daze as I type out a reply, promising to email her my part for the project so that she can add it to the PowerPoint.
Then I put the phone down and let out a sigh.
It’s late now, and my whole body feels heavy and sore. It feels like this night has been a whole week. A whole year, even. I’m exhausted.
Moving sluggishly, I crawl up onto the bed and burrow under the blankets.
I left the lights on, thinking that would make me feel safer. It’s what I used to do as a kid when I needed to be sure there was nothing in the closet or under the bed.
Dark things hate the light.
But as I lie in my small bed, listening to thethump, thump, thumpof my heartbeat, the light makes me feel vulnerable in a different way. I imagine it shining through my apartment windows like a beacon, calling for those three men to come kill me, and I scramble out of bed and flip off the light switch.
Usually, there’s nothing I want more at the end of a long, exhausting day, than to curl up in bed and drift off. Between work and school and worrying about money, I don’t get enough rest as it is.
But tonight, it takes hours for sleep to come.
6
VICTOR
The lightfrom the bank of screens around me glows, casting shadows in my otherwise dark room.
My eyes dart back and forth between the computer monitors, narrowed in concentration while I work on my task. I have various security feeds from nearby the whorehouse up, and I meticulously scan through every bit of footage, scrubbing any hint of me and my brothers and that girl we didn’t kill from a wide perimeter around the place.
I’m the most comfortable like this—in front of my computers, laser focused on a task. No chatter in my ears, no one asking questions. My fingers fly across the keys, and anytime I pick up a sign of that girl or one of us, I make sure it’s gone.
Ransom always calls it ‘boring as hell, with maybe one or two exciting parts thrown in,’ but there’s something comforting about the repetitiveness of scrubbing data.
I have to be thorough, and that scratches an itch somewhere in my brain.
“If we fucked up, then we fucked up together! As a team!”
Ransom’s voice breaks through the calm in my mind for a second, and I’m dimly aware of him and Malice walking into my room, mid argument.
“It was a mistake,” Malice growls, his tone agitated. “I should’ve just shot her like I planned to.”
I ignore their heated back and forth, tuning them out enough to keep doing what I’m doing. My eyes flick from one screen to another, and I narrow my gaze as I lean forward a little.
It’s hard to tell if the person in the coat hurrying from the bus stop in some footage I picked up from earlier this evening is the girl, but just to be safe, I delete that snippet of the recording and then keep going, tracking through more of it.
“That’s not the fucking point!” Malice explodes, his voice breaking through my concentration again.
