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“Yeah, probably. No thanks to you,” Jensen snarled. “You fucking idiot. We would’ve been fine if you hadn’t sent that message!”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Piper twisted her hands, face etched with guilt and fear. “What do we do now?”
“It’s too late to leave. We have to hide.” Jensen pointed at the couch. “Grab that blanket, Amerie. You two can go down into the root cellar and cover yourselves.”
I nodded, grabbed the blanket, and sprinted down the hall, followed closely by Jensen and Piper. We peeled back the carpet runner and opened the hatch. “It looks like there’s a bunch of boxes and crates at the back,” Jensen said, squinting into the darkness. “Hide behind them.”
Piper lowered herself into the small hole first, white-knuckled hands clinging to the rickety wooden ladder as she descended. When she hit the floor, I tossed the blanket to her and started to climb down myself.
“Wait.” I abruptly stopped when I reached the halfway point and stared up at Jensen. “You said ‘you two’ a second ago.”
“I know.” His face was set like granite. “I can’t hide with you.”
My stomach lurched. “Why?”
“Our car is outside, so those Rosmerta people know that someone is definitely here. If I hide with you, they’ll tear the house apart until they find us all down there.”
“So where will you hide, then?”
“Nowhere.” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “When they come inside, I’ll tell them that it’s only me here. I’ll say that you two took another car and started heading north. That way they won’t tear the house apart searching for you. You’ll be safe.”
I shook my head. “They’ll never believe that we split up.”
“They will. I’ll tell them we were going for the whole ‘divide and conquer’ method.” Jensen’s voice was laced with urgency now. “Get down there now, Amerie. We have about thirty seconds before those people start smashing the front door down.”
“I can’t let you do this.” My voice was close to cracking, and my body was shaking so hard I almost lost my grip on the root cellar ladder. “Not after everything you’ve already—”
He cut me off. “They’re pulling up now. I can hear the tires,” he said. “Get down there and hide. Now.”
Piper reached up to tug at the hem of my sweater. “Come on, Amerie.”
I shook her off, disgusted at her for getting us into this situation when we were so close to the finish line. “Jensen, I can’t—”
He cut me off again. “Amerie, please. Go,” he said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll figure out a way to survive. But I can’t do that unless you hide right now.”
I swallowed the hard lump in my throat and reluctantly nodded. “Promise me you’ll be okay?”
“I promise. I’ll be fine. They won’t kill me as long as you two are missing, because I’m the only one who can tell them where you are.” Jensen gave me a faint smile and reached down to stroke my hair. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
I began to descend again, tears flooding my eyes as my hands clung to the wooden rails. When I reached the bottom, Piper grabbed my sleeve. “This way,” she whispered, guiding me toward the right side of the dusty space. “We’ll lie down behind the crates and cover ourselves like Jensen said, just in case. But as long as he puts that carpet back over the hatch, the Rosmerta people probably won’t find it.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes with my other sleeve. “I only just got to see him again,” I said. My voice was so hoarse with emotion that I sounded like I’d come down with a terrible flu. “I can’t lose him.”
“You won’t.” Piper patted me on the back. “You heard what he said. He’ll find a way to survive. He… he has to.”
The door slowly closed above us, plunging the root cellar into darkness. With that darkness came an excruciating ache of sorrow that permeated every fiber of my being.
Jensen had promised me that he’d be okay, but deep down, I knew he only said it to convince me to go into the cellar without him. As much as I wanted to believe that he could get himself out of any situation, no matter how dire, I couldn’t shake the horrible premonitory feeling that was settling over me now; the feeling that told me this was one promise Jensen couldn’t keep.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to capture the memory of his face hovering over the cellar door a moment ago. I needed to cling to that image with all my might.
It could be the last time I ever laid eyes on him.
Jensen
Pulse racing, I closed the hatch and replaced the faded carpet runner on top of it. For good measure, I stomped on the peeled-up edge piece to flatten it out so it wouldn’t draw attention to the floor.
