Chapter Kyla
KYLA
She was freezing. It had taken every ounce of willpower in her body, but Kyla had opened the room’s back door.
She’d cracked the front door, too, left it ajar.
If her plan was going to work, she needed her room to look empty.
Needed it to look like she’d flown through the front door and gone straight out the back.
It was a long shot, but it seemed smarter than bolting both doors from the inside. If she did that, she might as well put a sign out front: HIDING, COME FIND ME.
Kyla didn’t understand who this Jack Allen was—she certainly didn’t understand what in the fuck he’d been talking about when he spoke of a cursed mountain and Apache braves and a wandering lake—but it seemed pretty obvious that whatever he wanted with Kyla and the rest of the guests, it wasn’t good.
At least she’d figured out a decent hiding spot.
Kyla had realized, a moment ago, that although the soffit paneling around the base of the armoire made it look like the armoire’s interior should run straight to the floor, the bottom shelf actually rested several feet off the ground.
When she’d pulled the armoire away from the wall—easier said than done; the thing seemed to weigh about as much as Kyla herself—she’d found a cavity in the paneling, a gap between the bottom shelf and the floor that was barely big enough to hide inside, provided she curled her body into the tiniest possible ball.
By pressing out with her arms and lifting with her back, she was just able to muscle the armoire over herself a moment before the lights around the motel died. She got the armoire most of the way to the wall. Close enough to look convincing. Hopefully.
When the generator cut out, she heard a soft rush of feet outside, an eerie rhythmic hiss.
The darkness of the armoire’s cavity became darker.
It was far, far tighter than she’d expected.
Wood penned her in from all sides. Kyla hadn’t thought, until this moment, that she could ever be claustrophobic, but as the panels of the armoire dug into her elbows and the shelf crushed her back, she almost convinced herself that the space was growing smaller, that it was running out of oxygen, that she couldn’t breathe. She almost convinced herself—
Footsteps creaked on the porch outside, coming from the direction of the motel’s cafe. The steps were calm, thoroughly unhurried. So calm, indeed, they could only belong to one man. The man from the office. The man from her dream.
Jack Allen, who would have audience once more.
His footsteps stopped on the back porch. They stopped right behind Kyla’s room.
After a moment, Kyla heard more steps, these muffled by carpet as they came down the room’s back hall.
Kyla’s claustrophobia left her in a hurry. Her heart thundered in her chest, the sound so loud she was certain the man in the room must be able to hear it reverberate in the wood of the armoire.
The carpeted steps came closer. Kyla caught a familiar smell: old stone, old cologne, staleness itself. His steps passed inches from Kyla’s head. In that thoroughly polite twang, he called out, “Miss Hewitt?”
Kyla heard a rustle of fabric as he lifted the skirt of her bed. He opened the door of the armoire above her. Through the narrow crack between the soffit paneling and the floor, she could see slivers of Jack Allen’s shoes, a shiny blackness in the dark.
She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
The door of the armoire closed. Jack Allen’s footsteps moved away. They returned to the hall and on to the back door. There was silence, punctuated only by the scratches and hisses of the creatures in the desert.
Kyla let herself exhale. She shifted her weight, struggling to get comfortable in the narrow confines under the armoire, and wondered when she could risk a few moments to come out and stretch her legs.
But then, with a cold stab of panic, she realized there was a sound she hadn’t heard: she hadn’t heard the creak of wood from the back porch. She hadn’t heard any indication that Jack Allen had really left her room.
She also didn’t hear him coming back down the hall, silent as a cat, until he dragged the armoire away from the wall.
Air rushed over her. His stench flooded her nose. Outside, a wave of SHRIEKS rose from the direction of Ethan’s room.
“Hello, Miss Hewitt,” Jack Allen said. “I don’t think you’ve ever tried hiding here before.”