Chapter 13
Morning light spilled through the window. For a moment, that alone disoriented me. It felt wrong that the world had decided to keep going. That the sun had risen like it always did, indifferent to what had happened here.
I swung my legs out of bed and froze. The pen sat on the dresser. It hadn’t rolled. It hadn’t shifted. It rested exactly where I’d left it. I stared at it longer than made sense, my brain dragging its feet, resisting recognition.
Maddie’s face surfaced first. Then Noah’s. The way the snow had swallowed the road. The way the SUV had sunk into it, as if being claimed. The way everything had slid, one thing after another, into something darker.
All items cursed. Curse lifted at time of sale.
The words rose fully formed, as clear as if someone had whispered them directly into my ear. I swallowed hard. Either it was the worst run of bad luck I’d ever witnessed—or it wasn’t luck at all.
I turned away from the dresser before the thought could settle. If I let myself believe we were cursed, I didn’t know where that kind of thinking ended, or what it might excuse.
I slipped out of the bedroom and made my way to the kitchen. Snow glittered outside, the storm having moved on as if finished with whatever it had come to do. The air smelled faintly of smoke and something sour beneath it, stale alcohol, maybe. Or grief. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
I filled the coffeepot and stood there while it brewed, my reflection warped in the glass. Ricky shuffled in, eyes rimmed red, hair flattened on one side.
“Well,” he said, after a beat, not cheerful. Just testing the word. “We’re still here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Where’s Jake?”
Ricky poured himself coffee, then hesitated before answering. “Still sleeping, I think. He took Noah and Maddie’s room last night.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I thought it was odd, but I wasn’t about to argue with him.”
I nodded, though something about that tightened my stomach.
Ricky froze, mid-pour. “Is that . . . ?”
I followed his gaze to the front window. Bill’s truck sat at the edge of the drive. It was parked crookedly, and the engine was off. My skin prickled. This was starting to feel like déjà vu.
“What’s he doing?” Ricky asked.
“Maybe firewood. He said he’d bring more,” I said, grabbing a mug. “I’ll go check on him,” I added. Something about staying inside felt unbearable.
I pulled on my boots and coat, the motions mechanical at this point.
I stepped onto the porch and paused, my eyes drifting toward the bodies in a small, wordless gesture of respect.
Maddie and Noah lay side by side along the wall, wrapped in sheets stiff with frost. The fabric fluttered faintly in the breeze.
Noah’s sheet was stained red at the neck, where blood had continued to flow for a few minutes before the cold sealed his throat shut.
They shouldn’t have been there. They should have been lying in their bed, tangled together, deciding whether to sleep in or wake up and make the most of their day. Now, they had no choice.
I forced myself down the steps.
“Bill?” I called as I approached his truck. “I brought you some coffee.”
The driver’s side door was closed, and the cab was empty.
I walked around the front of the truck, my breath fogging in front of me—and then I was stumbling backward.
I didn’t register what I had seen, not really.
I just had the sudden understanding that I shouldn’t be standing there.
The mug slipped from my fingers and disappeared into the snow.
I don’t remember the steps back, only the door and my hands shaking so badly I could barely get it open. The sound of it slamming shut behind me felt distant. My whole body trembled, and my breaths came in sharp gasps.
“Blair? What’s going on?” Ricky asked.
“He’s dead,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“What?”
“There’s an axe,” I whispered.
My mind snagged on the blade, on the way flesh doesn’t part cleanly when it’s torn open. I shook my head, as if I could dislodge the image if I tried hard enough, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Like us, it was stuck.
“What the fuck. An axe? Did he—did he hurt himself splitting wood?”
“It’s in his chest.”
The floor creaked. Jake stood in the hallway. He looked odd—awake, but not alert. His hair stuck up at weird angles, and his face was pale and discolored. He blinked slowly.
“Morning,” he said.
The word felt obscene, and neither Ricky nor I answered.
“What’s going on?” Jake asked, rubbing at his eyes.
I stared at him. My gaze dropped to the inside of his forearm. Dried blood clung there—brown and flaky. I didn’t know if it was from last night, from moving Noah, or from something else entirely.
Jake followed my stare and lowered his arm casually. “What?”
I looked at Ricky, at the faint smear along his neck, half hidden beneath his collar—also dry and flaking. There was blood on him too. Ricky noticed me watching him and wiped at his throat without thinking. His fingers came away clean, but the mark remained.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The cabin felt smaller than it ever had, the walls closing in not just with snow, but with doubt. And I had the sickening realization that I no longer knew what any of us had done in the dark. Or what we were capable of now.