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“Yeah,” I say softly, stepping out into the alley. “You’re right. We have to keep moving.”
We move down the alley to the right, take a left away from the building, and then another right. Timofey will look for me. I know he will. I don’t want to be three blocks straight east when he does.
“I’m cold.” Noelle wraps her arms around her thin pajama shirt. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. It’s late, so there isn’t much open. I thought, maybe, we’d just… We could sit over there?” I point to a bench in front of a closed ice cream shop. The neon ice cream cone light has been shattered and the windows are boarded over with plywood covered in months, maybe years, of graffiti.
“Sit?” She says the word like she hardly knows what it means.
“Yeah. We’ll take a load off and… and talk.”
That’s all I need. Twenty or thirty minutes to figure out what Noelle knows about Benjamin. Then she can be on her way, and I can be on mine.
Her thin wrist is in my hand, but she pulls away. She’s shaking her head. “We can’t sit. He’ll find us.”
“Not right away. We have time.”
“He can’t find us,” she says. “Ever.That’s why we’re running away.”
I sigh. “No, when I said that I didn’t mean we were—We just need to get away for a few minutes to talk, okay? I need to come up with a plan before Timofey finds us.”
“Before he finds us?” she splutters. “You said to trust you. You said nothing would happen!”
“Nothing will happen. I just need to figure out what my next move is.”
“Yournext… What about my next move?”
Noelle looks more like herself than she has this entire time. Her brows are knitted together, a line of worry folded between them. Beneath her wild hair, her eyes are wide and clear.
“Timofey said he won’t kill you. I’ll make sure he doesn’t kill you, so—”
“I’m not just trying to survive,” Noelle spits. “Not dying isn’t quite enough to tempt me, Piper. I want tothrive.”
I blink. “Okay. Maybe you can still do that. I don’t know. But I just need to talk to you about a few things.”
“Maybe? Maybe isn’t good enough. Are you going to help me hide from the people after me or not?”
I stare at her, realization beginning to dawn. “You’re okay.”
“Do I fucking look okay to you?” Noelle throws her arms wide. There’s a hole in the armpit of her pajama shirt and the pants are rolled at the waist so many times there is a tube of fabric around her middle. “I’m eking out an existence while I wait for the Albanians or your boyfriend to hunt me down and kill me. I don’t need to talk, I need to run. I need to escape. Where did you send Ashley? Send me there, too. I’ll go with her.”
“You’re okay,” I repeat in disbelief. “You were faking it before. You aren’t having a psychotic episode. You’re completely—You’re fine! You lied to me!”
Noelle rolls her eyes, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it from the beginning. The way Timofey did.
He knew she was bullshitting from the moment he arrived.
He also knew I was too sympathetic to see her act for what it truly was.
“I didn’t lie to you,” she hisses. “I told you the truth: I’m being hunted by the Albanians and your deranged boyfriend. I’m in danger. I wouldn’t call that ‘completely fine.’”
“Before, when we were in your room, you apologized for Benjamin. Did you mean that?”
“Do I feel bad about what happened to him, you mean?”
“About what you did to him, yeah.” I nod, already dreading the answer.
“I regret that it had to happen. I regret—”
