Chapter 12
Sleep didn’t come easy.
Even after the house had gone quiet and Giovanni turned in for the night, I lay awake beside him, staring at the ceiling, replaying everything I knew so far until my mind was so filled with possibilities exhaustion took over, and I drifted off.
I opened my eyes sometime later to silence.
Not the comfortable kind of silence. The kind that felt wrong.
I sat up and looked around, realizing I was in a bedroom, but not my bedroom.
I slipped out of bed and walked to the door, opening it.
Down the hallway, a faded beacon of light beckoned, and I made my way toward it, finding myself in Mia’s living room as the dream took hold.
Shadows stretched across the walls in long, uneven shapes, and the television flickered in the corner, muted.
It was the same late-night glow I’d imagined Wren had been in right before she died.
I looked down, seeing Wren sprawled on the floor in front of the sofa, her body positioned just as it had been in the photographs I’d seen.
I leaned in for a closer look, and the air shifted. A ball of light drifted across the room, bending and shaping itself until a figure emerged, a second version of Wren suspended in midair. She looked much like she had in life, except there was a stillness to her that didn’t belong to the living.
Her gaze dropped, settling on her lifeless body.
“Hi, Wren, I’m—”
“I know who you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Do you know what has happened?”
“I know I am no longer alive, but I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“I believe I died before my time, and now I’m here, trapped within these walls like a prisoner.”
“Do you know why you haven’t moved on from this life yet?”
“It feels like something isn’t finished.”
Something wasn’t finished.
Her murder wasn’t solved.
“Do you remember what happened?” I asked. “Do you know who did this to you?”
She tilted her head, studying me. “I remember a sound that wasn’t a sound.”
A sound that wasn’t a sound … the hush of a gun fitted with a suppressor.
“Did you see the person who shot you?” I asked.
Her gaze drifted past me, unfocused. “It’s the key.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The key,” she repeated.
“What about a key?”
She turned to me again, her expression now serious. “The key waits where it shouldn’t and leaves when it’s found.”
“What do you mean? Are you talking about the key to solving your murder?”
That had to be it.
The key to who killed her and why.
“The key waits where it shouldn’t and leaves when it’s found,” she repeated.
I wasn’t getting anywhere, which was often the case with dreams like these.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said.
“It’s there, and then it isn’t.”
“What’s there?” I asked.
As the question left my mouth, she blinked at me as though she’d already given me enough to piece it together. “I have faith in you, and you have faith in yourself. Do not doubt the way forward.”
“What is the way forward?”
Before she could answer, she began to fade.
“Wait,” I said, holding up my hand, palm out. “Please, don’t go yet.”
“Something is about to happen, and you will be a part of it.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“I must go, and you must go. You must go now!”
As she said the words, the light around her diminished even more, and then she was gone. The television flickered off as if it had pulled her inside of it, and the room went black. I stood there, my mind racing, trying to make sense of it all.
A key.
Something about to happen.
Me being part of it.
Wren had been trying to tell me something.
Why did I feel like whatever it was, I was already too late?