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…So why does Billie feel like someone is watching her right now, someone sinister? Why do her toes curl under the coarse blanket and her suddenly clammy hands twist the sheet in their grip?
A shaky breath shudders her chest, like it was chopped up on its way out. Her reddened blue eyes sweep the darkness of the room. Moonlight wisps in through the window, not much but enough of it to illuminate her side of the room. The light gleams over the metal bar at the foot of the bed and stretches up the blanket. It glistens like raindrops on Preston’s dark curls like tar—and a sheen of crimson.
Preston!
Billie’s heart skips a beat, then plummets right to her now-writhing gut.
Preston’s slumped over the edge of the bed, his arms folded into a makeshift pillow that he rests his forehead on, as though he’s just sleeping. Resting. And at first glance, that’s exactly what it looks like. He’s just asleep.
But the crimson sheen that disturbs the black of his thick head of hair tells her something else entirely.
Her fingers tremble as she reaches out for him, a delay in her movements, a hesitation—
She knows what she’s about to touch. And the truth of it has her heart hammering against her ribcage.
But the moment—the very second—that her fingertips blot against the patch of fresh, dark blood on the back of his head, all preparation vanishes.
Her face twists with a wave of sickly sobs that wash over her. The kind of grimace her face warps into whenever she’s trying to hold back tears.
Preston ain’t asleep.
He’s been hit. Struck. Knocked out cold. Still, the urge to call his name, as though simply hearing it will snap him awake, alert, parts her cracked lips.
Before she can gather so much as a whisper in her strangled throat, a soft thud springs her attention to the corner of the room. The corner with the darkest shadows snaring up the wall like long, spidery fingers.
A second thud, and she recognizes what that noise is.
One bootstep. Two bootsteps.
Billie stiffens.
Her muscles clamp up, as if bolted to her bones; a hand still hovering over Preston’s head, above the bleeding wound; the other hand twisted in the sheet, and even her breaths trapped in her chest.
Gaze fixed on the dark, shadowy corner beside the bathroom door, she feels her eyes burn with the promise of tears.
Tears of fear.
Her lashes flutter but don’t quite blink; invisible threads seem to tug up her eyebrows, and, finally, her breath escapes in a wispy sound that trembles her lips.
Out from the dark—
Thud,
thud,
thud.
Blood Hood steps into the moonlight.
But…
No.
Not Blood Hood.
There’s no hunting knife gripped in either of those leather-gloved hands. Instead, there’s a single, sleek, black gun. No blotchy, blood-stained hood, but there’s a familiar face with eyes Billie’s known almost her whole life.
She breaths out the name that’s swimming in her mind, speaks it without inflection. But her voice fails her.
