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And that’s all he does.
But her breath is steadying now. Her cries are softening.
And her mind is clearing.
Billie doesn’t think about it for more than a second before she’s doing it. She just acts. Impulsive, poorly planned, and fully reliant on hope.
She throws herself at the hall table. Her hands smack down on the hard wooden edge, and it rattles. The crystal vase, the silver candlestick, the colored-glass lamp, they all shudder on the table.
Before Blood Hood can react, before he can move for her or the hunting knife stuck in the wall, Billie rips the narrow table away from the wall with as much strength as she can muster. Her body screams in protest, agony shredding through her back and her leg, and it releases in a cry that tears out from between her lips.
But the table is thrown from the wall—and smacks into Blood Hood. The force of it is enough to throw him off balance.
He falls back, falls down the staircase, and the table goes with him. The thump of his landing on the steps is muffled by the crashes and clangs of all the ornaments and the shattering of the vase.
She can only hope everything is smacking him all the way down the stairs—at least to buy her some time.
Her last cry of exertion, her last ounce of strength summoned, all she can manage to do is grab onto the texture of the wall paneling to pull herself up off the landing floor and stand.
Billie knows she can’t take the stairs down to the foyer. Blood Hood is on those stairs, somewhere. Maybe at the bottom. Maybe knocked out by a rogue vase, or even standing up now to make his way back to the landing to finish her off.
She can’t know, because she’s not insane enough to look down the stairs and see where he is. Her only strategy is to get the fuck out of here, far away from Blood Hood before he can kill her.
Problem is, every muscle and bone in her body is screaming for relief, each nerve in her back burning ice-cold agony through her.
She won’t get very far.
So she just has to hide.
Crimson is smeared all over her hands. It’s all she sees as she staggers for the only door near her. She slams into it, red streaks where her fingers slip over varnished wood. The stairwell closet. Might find a weapon or even a window to climb out of. Something.
Billie will takeanythingat this point.
Choking on a whimper, Billie yanks the handle and manages the door open. But it’s only darkness beyond it, darkness broken only by the faint corridor light.
Her eyes blink, once, twice, to adjust. And once they do, she sees. She sees the horror of what lies beyond the door.
Not a room. A closet of sorts, long and wide.
There’s a wooden chair in the center, and a girl strapped to it.
Belts are looped around her waist, her wrists, her legs—and there’s a whole roll of duct tape bound around her mouth to silence her.
“Tonya…” Billie’s voice is strangled, but the sound is enough for the other girl to look up from her wet lashes. Exhaustion is etched into those familiar eyes that meet Billie’s stunned stare.
“Tonya,” she repeats, this time with the same strength she finds in her body to stagger towards her friend. She drops to her knees, hard, the urgency starting to awake in her shaky hands, and she reaches for the belt buckles that wink gold at her.
The loud, long creak of the floorboards in the corridor sends a shiver up her spine. He’s coming up the stairs. Her time is short.
Frantic, she yanks and pulls and scratches at the belts, ripping them off Tonya, one after the other.
Tonya rattles in the chair, her eyes wide and teary. She looks straight over Billie’s head at the doorway.
He’s coming.
He’s coming.
There are so many more belts left to remove, at least a half-dozen still wrapped around Tonya. No matter how fast she works to free her, they seem never ending.
