Chapter 5
JENNA
Iwalk home the long way. Not because I want to—my feet are done, the ball of my left heel rubbing raw inside my sneaker—but because I clocked a gray sedan idling near the pharmacy’s rear entrance twice in the last week.
Different days, different times. Probably nothing.
Delivery drivers use that block, but my paranoia dictates everything I do.
The neighborhood is doing its morning shuffle: a man walking a bulldog that wants to go a different direction, a woman in scrubs speed-walking toward the bus stop with coffee in a travel mug that’s seen better days. I move through them all, and no one looks at me twice. That’s the goal.
My paycheck clears today. I checked at the end of my shift, and refreshed the app in the pharmacy bathroom while the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
Two thousand, one hundred and fourteen dollars.
Enough to get to Portland and put a deposit down on a small studio.
Maybe further is better, somewhere that isn’t a city at all.
I’ve been thinking about Denver. Mountains will make it harder for him to ever find me.
The building door, then the lock behind me, then the stairwell. I pause on the landing and listen.
Nothing. Just the distant thrum of a television through somebody’s wall, a unit up and to the right, which would be 2C, which means Mr. Alvarez is having one of his insomniac mornings again. Normal. All of it is normal.
Third floor. My door.
I check the tape strip before I touch the handle. It’s still there, transparent and angled across the gap between door and frame at knee height, exactly where I put it before I left. I check the secondary strip up at the top corner.
Intact.
Inside, I run through my mental checklist. Window locks: both engaged. The thin piece of thread I loop across the bathroom cabinet is still tied. The books stacked on the kitchen chair angled to face the front door: undisturbed, spines flush against each other.
My go-bags sit at the foot of the bed. I crouch down and unzip the first one just far enough to see the orange marker I keep tucked inside the front pouch.
Still there.
I sit back on the edge of the mattress and press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Four months. I’ve been here four months, which is two months past my own limit, and the whole thing has been fine with no incidents.
The silver Camry from yesterday morning was probably just a Camry.
I strip off my jacket and lie back in my clothes, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looks like a dog running.
My brain wants to keep pulling at the threads and the feeling that’s been sitting wrong in my chest for days.
I keep reaching for it and coming up with nothing concrete, and nothing concrete means I’m projecting.
It means I’ve been doing this long enough that my nervous system throws up ghosts just to stay in practice.
I’m tired. I’m past tired—that hollow, scraped-out place behind my eyes where rest should be. The paycheck cleared. I’ll book something tonight, after I sleep. Somewhere with mountains.
I close my eyes. The dog on the ceiling disappears. The low hum of the city comes through the glass and I breathe out slowly, allowing my shoulders to drop.
Sleep comes, but it’s a fitful sleep—the kind where your body knows something your brain won’t admit.
I keep surfacing, catching fragments. My stepfather’s hands.
A door that won’t lock no matter how many times I throw the bolt.
I’m back in the basement and the light under the door illuminates and I know he’s standing on the other side of it.
I jerk awake.
Ceiling. Water stain dog. My apartment.
I lie still, breathing through my nose, heart already slamming. The clock reads 6:47 AM. I slept maybe ninety minutes. The room looks the same—
No.
Not the same.
The books on the kitchen chair. The spines aren’t flush. One is angled out, barely, maybe a quarter inch, like someone moved past them in the dark and caught the corner with their hip and didn’t notice or didn’t care.
My hand goes under the mattress before the thought finishes. I close my fingers around the handle of the knife I keep there—short blade, tanto point—and I’m already pulling my knees up, already getting my feet under me, when I see him.
He’s standing at the foot of the bed.
Not moving. Just standing. The early morning sun comes through the curtains, and in it I can see the shape of him—tall, broad through the shoulders, wearing dark clothes that have no logos, no texture, nothing to catch the eye or the memory. His hands hang loose at his sides.
And he’s wearing a mask.
Bone white. Fitted smooth against his face like a second skin, no features carved into it, no expression, nothing—just white below his eyes.
He doesn’t move.
He just looks at me.
The knife goes up.
He moves at the same time but not toward me, stepping sideways—the adjustment is so small and so exact that I almost miss what he’s doing until my blade cuts air where his forearm was.
I won’t stop. I pivot off the mattress and go for the door.
Three steps. I get three steps before his hand closes around my wrist, and he uses my own momentum to turn me, one smooth redirect that puts my back against the wall and his body between me and the exit.
I drive my elbow up toward his jaw. He deflects it. I go for his knee with the heel of my foot, and he shifts his weight, and I hit his thigh instead, which does nothing.
But his grip loosens. Half a second.
I’m already moving, slicing hard across my body with the knife, forcing him to step back. One step. Then I’m running again, and my hand hits the deadbolt, and I feel the lock turn under my fingers and think yes, go, now—
His arm comes across my chest and pulls me back from the door.
Not violent. It’s controlled. He’s holding me against him with one arm, his other hand wrapping around my knife hand at the wrist, and he just waits, steady and completely unhurried, while I fight him.
I throw my head back toward his face, twisting and trying to drop my weight suddenly. He adjusts for all of it. He adjusts before it, like he already knew every option and settled into the only position that neutralizes them.
That’s when it hits me, like stepping off a curb you didn’t see.
The tape strips. The books. The threads. He was here before and he put everything back. He knew my checklist. He knew my apartment. He’s known it long enough to learn what I look for and what I don’t.
My wrist goes slack in his grip.
He doesn’t loosen his hold, but his breathing shifts.
My brain splits clean in two.
One half is scrambling to figure out how to escape and whether I can get enough leverage to throw my weight forward and break his hold, whether screaming will bring Mr. Alvarez from 2C before it’s too late. The other half registers, with a clarity that makes me sick, that I can feel him against me.
All of him.
He shifts his grip to keep my arm pinned, and the movement presses him harder into the curve of my back, and there is no misreading it. He’s hard. Fully, unmistakably hard, and he’s not hiding it—not adjusting away, not pretending. Just letting me feel every inch.
My stomach drops, and my face goes hot, and I hate my own body for its response. It isn’t fear, or it isn’t only fear, and that’s the part that makes my eyes sting. Three years of building walls, and it takes thirty seconds of this man’s hands on me to find a crack I didn’t know existed.
Then I feel it—a pinch at the side of my neck. So fast I almost convinced myself it didn’t happen.
Almost.
“No.” My voice comes out wrecked. “No—”
I wrench forward, and his arm tightens, and I fight it, I fight it hard, fingernails into his forearm, feet scrabbling for purchase on the floor. The room doesn’t spin. Not yet. But the edges of it go soft, like the world is exhaling.
“Don’t.” His voice through the mask is low, slightly muffled, every consonant clipped into shape. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
There’s heat underneath the professionalism. Thin as a wire, but I hear it.
The floor tilts.
I look at the door. At the deadbolt, I almost reached.
I should have left two months ago.
The white mask is the last thing I see clearly—blank and patient above me as my knees go—and then my apartment dissolves into something warm and very dark, and I can’t find the edges of myself anymore.
Then nothing.