Chapter 5
EMILY
She was on her third cup of coffee and had been awake since four-thirty when the compound started coming to life around her.
It happened gradually. First, she heard boots knocking dirt off against the front door, then distant clank of someone in the kitchen, the low rumble of male voices carrying through the walls.
Not alarming. Just present, the way a house settling wasn't alarming once you knew the sounds it made. A family waking up.
Emily sat cross-legged on the bed with her back against the headboard and her phone in her lap and tried to feel like a person.
She'd texted Chloe at five. It wasn’t too early.
She responded in under a minute, which meant she was at the coffee shop.
They'd gone back and forth for a while. They didn’t talk about anything heavy, just the particular shorthand of two people who'd been friends long enough to communicate in fragments.
Chloe had sent a string of questions about whether Emily had eaten, whether the bed was comfortable, whether anyone had been weird to her.
Emily: No, yes, and absolutely not. They brought me a blanket. Irish's dog slept outside my door.
Chloe: Irish's dog or Irish?
Emily: I think Irish has better boundaries than Clover. Plus, Irish has a serious girlfriend.
Chloe: I don’t think Rampage would have liked Irish outside your door.
Emily: He’s on the other side of the wall in the room next door.
Chloe: Of course he is.
Emily: It’s where his room is, Chloe. It wasn’t intentional.
Chloe: I doubt that.
It had almost felt normal. For about six minutes.
Then she'd put the phone down and the quiet had come back and with it the thing she'd been holding at arm's length all night, the image of the man in the ball cap trying her door handle.
The unhurried, methodical way he'd moved around her car.
Like he'd done it before. Like he expected it to work.
He was a lion stalking his trapped prey, just waiting for the opportunity to strike.
And, he had the upper hand. That was, until The Watchmen showed up. Just on time.
She remembered the information Rampage had given her.
Her car had been tampered with.
Marcus Delling had her phone number, her first name, her general location, and apparently the patience to set a trap and wait for her to walk into it.
She'd bought the squat rack two weeks after the listing went up.
She'd initiated contact. She'd showed up at his house, not once, but twice, and then, because she was a reasonable person who believed the best of people and also apparently had a death wish, she'd gone back. It was all a setup. Why? Why wouldn’t he have done it the first time? When she came with the U-Haul? Was it because she’d clearly stated that she was meeting someone for lunch and her best friend knew where she was? She hadn’t mentioned any of that this time around.
She pressed her palms against her eye sockets.
"Stop," she said to herself. Out loud. It helped sometimes.
A knock at the door.
"Yeah," she called.
It opened but it was not Rampage like she suspected. Instead, it was a woman she hadn't met yet, carrying a coffee mug in each hand and an expression that was warm without being performatively cheerful about it.
"I'm Savannah," she said. "Savage’s girlfriend. I heard you were up. Figured you could use reinforcements. Hot chocolate." She held up one of the mugs.
Emily took it. "Thank you. You didn't have to—"
"I was already making it." Savannah sat in the chair by the window like she'd been invited, which Emily found she didn't mind at all. "How are you doing? Honestly."
"Honestly." Emily considered that. "I feel like I got hit by a truck. Not literally. The truck just followed me. But emotionally, sort of like a truck."
Savannah's mouth curved. "That tracks."
"Is it always like this here?" Emily asked. "People just showing up with coffee and blankets and—"
"When someone needs it, yeah. And just between us, almost every girlfriend here has needed it from time to time.
" Savannah wrapped both hands around her own mug.
"This place looks like a lot of things from the outside.
On the inside it's mostly just people looking out for each other.
" She paused. "Rampage has been up all night. "
Emily looked at her.
"Not telling you that to make you feel guilty," Savannah said.
"Telling you because you should know who you're dealing with. He doesn't do anything halfway. You're under his protection — he’s already declared it to everyone. And being under his protection means something real to him. He’s not doing you a favor and you aren’t a burden, not with Rampage. He's decided you’re worth protecting and that’s that. "
Emily didn't know what to do with that information, so she drank her coffee. It was delicious.
“This is so good.”
“I put a packet of hot chocolate mix in first, add the coffee and then some heavy cream. It’s my version of a mocha.”
“I’m making a mental note to buy some hot chocolate when I get home.” Both girls laughed.
"Chloe said you're in her book club," Savannah said.
"The Naughty Girls, yeah." Something loosened slightly in Emily's chest, the way it always did when she thought about the group. Her people. The women she'd found by accident and kept by choice. "You know Chloe well?"
"Getting there. Tyler introduced her to Rampage and he shared her number and info with us. We all love Tyler around here." A small smile. "She's good for him. You can see it."
"She really is." Emily stared at the window.
The sky outside was going pale at the edges, that particular gray-blue of a Colorado morning not quite decided yet.
"She called me baby last night. On the phone, when I was—" She stopped. Laughed softly, a little embarrassed. "She’s never called me that before and she’s been my best friend for a while now.
I know she didn't mean it like anything.
But somehow the word alone helped. Isn't that stupid? "
"No," Savannah said simply.
Emily glanced at her.
Savannah met her eyes with an expression that was knowing without being invasive. "It's not stupid. Being called something soft when you're scared, goes somewhere deep. There's nothing wrong with needing that."
Emily looked back at the window.
She thought about the books. The ones she read in bed with her door locked, dog-eared the pages of, felt embarrassed about in a way that coexisted uncomfortably with the fact that she'd read some of them three times.
She thought about the passages she'd highlighted, the scenes she'd returned to, the specific thing she was always chasing that she'd never been able to name cleanly out loud.
She'd come closest, once, drunk on wine at a Naughty Girls night, telling Chloe that what she wanted was someone who would just handle it.
Handle her. Not in a way that took anything away but in a way that gave something back.
The part of herself she kept tucked down small because there was always something to manage, always a next thing, always her own two hands being the only ones available.
Chloe had looked at her with an expression that said she understood perfectly and had more to say about it.
Emily had changed the subject. She knew her friends identified as littles and had found their Daddies. She just wasn’t quite ready to admit how badly she craved the same.
She heard heavy steps approaching before hearing the knock. It wasn’t light like Savannah’s, but more deliberate.
"Come in," Savannah called, like it was her room.
Rampage opened the door. His eyes went to Emily first, the same quick check as last night, looking her over from head to toe as if he was cataloguing, assessing and deciding she was intact. Then to Savannah.
"Savage needs your help downstairs," he said to her.
Savannah stood, unhurried. Touched Emily's shoulder as she passed, it was light, there and gone. "Come find me when you're ready to come down. I'll introduce you to the others."
Then she was gone, and the door was mostly closed, and it was just Rampage in the doorway looking at Emily on the bed with her cold coffee and what she could only assume was exceptional looking hair.
"How'd you sleep?" he asked.
"I didn't, really."
He nodded. Like that was the answer he'd expected. "Thank you for telling me the truth, baby. Savage has a preliminary report on your car. Thought you would want to hear it.”
"Okay." She set the mug down and straightened. "Tell me."
"Fuel line was tampered with. Done carefully, not enough to fail immediately but enough to fail after miles of driving. Someone who knew what they were doing and knew where you’d be going.
" He paused. "The marketplace account is fake.
Three months old and the number he gave you is a burner phone.
Dax is running it against two open cases out of Denver. "
Emily felt the blood leave her face.
"Two open cases," she repeated.
"Yeah."
"So, he's done this before."
"We don't know that yet." His voice was even. "What we know is this isn't someone who acted on impulse. This was planned. You were chosen specifically, or you fit a profile he was looking for. We don't have enough yet to say which."
She sat with that for a moment.
Chosen. She'd been chosen. And not in the way she’d always hoped to be. Someone had looked at her profile and had decided she was the right shape for whatever deviant plot they had planned. The hair on her arms stood up and she suddenly felt nauseated.
Then the soft, floaty thing that had been sitting in her chest since the parking lot, the one that made everything feel slightly unreal as if she was living in an alternative universe, started to sharpen into something harder. Less fear and disbelief and more anger.
Good, she thought. Anger was better. Anger was something to stand on. How fucking dare he. The curse word, even only muttered in her head, stopped her thoughts cold. She was not one to use that sort of language and it sounded foreign to her.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"You stay here while we run down the leads. You don't go home yet, we have a feeling the car was tampered with at home or your work, and you don't contact Marcus Delling for any reason. Don't respond if he reaches out, screenshot anything and send it to me directly."
"Okay." She wanted him stopped. If it meant heading to Chloe’s house for a few days, she’d do that.
"I mean it about not going home alone."
"I said okay." She held his gaze. "I'm not going to argue with you about my safety. I understand what last night was."
Something in his expression shifted. Barely perceptible, but there.
"Good girl," he said.
He pulled the door almost closed and then stopped.
"Lily is downstairs," he said, without turning around. “She's been where you are. Well, not the same situation, but scared, and blackmailed by some bad men. She asked if she could bring you breakfast."
Emily blinked. "She asked?"
"She asked me to ask you. Didn't want to push."
Emily thought about that. Someone who understood about not wanting to push. Someone who'd been scared too, who was now asking permission to bring a stranger breakfast.
"Yeah," she said. "Tell her yes."
He left.
Emily sat there listening to his boots retreat down the hallway and thought about the word chosen and the two open cases in Denver and the fake profile that was three months old.
Three months.
He'd been building toward this for three months.
She'd almost made it easy for him.
Her phone buzzed. Madison in the group chat, sending escalating strings of concerned emojis. Then Holly. Then the whole group came online at once, everyone sending texts in the way they always did, the beautiful chaotic noise of women who loved each other loudly.
She started typing back.
Down the hall, she heard voices. Then a laugh. It was deep, unexpected, and gone quickly. Rampage, she thought, though she couldn't be sure. She hadn't heard him laugh before.
She wanted to hear it again.
She pushed that thought down and kept typing, incredibly grateful once again for this group of girls who’d become more than friends. They were her chosen family.