Chapter 21 Thea
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THEA
The acrid chemical smell hits the back of my throat first. It’s unnatural, manmade and alive with poison. I cough, but nothing comes out. Air claws at my lungs as the floor tilts under me, slick with something that also has a bleach-like smell.
Maybe that was where they cleaned up her body in the bathroom. Her bruised, marred body carried out on a stretcher with no decorum or dignity. They hauled her off, covered with a sack, and then soaked the room in rancid chemicals.
My skin stings, but then there’s a sound, a sharp hiss, and for some reason I know it. A valve turns the moment before the air turns toxic and—
I can’t breathe.
“No …” The word dissolves in my mouth as it goes dry and my vision tunnels. An odd smoke curls around me, yet through it—hands. Gloved, dark, and … closing the door? I stumble after him. For some reason, I know the hands belong to a male.
My bare foot thuds into something, and I trip, lurching forward before I can catch myself.
My palms scrape against the concrete ground while the air in my lungs punches out.
I push up, to chase the hands seemingly still moving through the thick smoke, but I freeze.
It wasn’t debris I’ve tripped over; it’s …
a body. My ankle is hooked through her arm, and I scream as Beth’s eyes stare up at me, unseeing.
I choke and crawl on my knees toward the metal door. I pound my fists, the sound of each whack bouncing back, mocking. My head swims, but just as the smoke drowns me, it thins into a mist.
The concrete becomes carpet, and the hurling of my cries fades into angry shouts.
I know that agitation. It crawls down my spine.
“You used the last of the money!” His voice rips through the room. A living room.
“She needed new shoes.” My mother’s soft, delicate voice pleads. Mom? My mom is gone.
I look up from my hands and knees, and there he is. Phil. He stares at my mother sitting on the edge of the couch while spewing his venom.
I whimper, and his head whips toward me, eyes bloodshot. My mother’s form poofs away as he prowls forward.
“Perhaps you’ll be the only thing worth something in this house.”
My stomach turns. “No—”
He ignores me.
His face grows larger until the room disappears entirely. “Someone might actually pay for that face.”
I try to back away, but the carpet shifts beneath me like water. My feet sink into it. His hand reaches out, and for a heartbeat, I’m too frozen to move.
The words hit harder than the smoke. I can’t breathe—not from poison this time, but from shame.
Behind him, shadowed figures move, faceless and waiting.
Their hands open like they’re ready to take what he’s selling.
The smoke rushes back in, pouring from their mouths and filling my own lungs.
I claw at my throat, tasting the chemicals mixed with rotten betrayal.
Then somewhere in the haze, someone is screaming—maybe me?
Hands grab my shoulders. A voice—low, yet real. “Wake up.”
The dream shatters.
I jolt upright, flailing, then scream when the tangled sheets won’t free my ankle. Chained. I’m chained.
Slade’s grip is stern. He reaches out to grab my wrist as I fight with the bedding strangling me. His touch grounds me. Real. He’s real, and I’m really here. Back in the safety of the lake house guest room and utterly free from any chains.
“She was dead. Beth … And then the smoke. Phil. He sold me, he …” Tears patter on the crisp linens as Phil’s taunting words and Beth’s unseeing eyes color my memories.
“It was a dream,” Slade grunts. When I finally look at him, he’s still dressed in the same suit he carted me off stage in, despite that having been hours and hours ago. He backpedals.
“No. It was a nightmare, and I’m living it. I can’t do this. I can’t be here. Why am I here?” I huff out through the tears.
He stalls out before he turns. “Sleep,” he grumbles.
“I can’t.” My voice cracks. “Every time I close my eyes, I’m back there.”
His shoulders stiffen. “You’re not.”
Silence stretches between us. He exhales a heavy breath. “Sleep,” he rumbles again.
I desperately shake my head.
“Try. I’m working.” His gaze flicks toward me, unreadable. Those words hang in the air, rougher than he probably meant them to be. His jaw flexes once before he turns, muttering something I don’t catch. Then he stumbles out my door, closing it behind him.
I sink back into the plush bed, but the sheets are scratchy, and each time I try to close my eyes all I see are their faces. Juliette’s as I’m hauled off stage, the disdain in her snarl. Did the other girls get Culled because of me? Due to Slade’s interruption?
Shadows crawl across the ceiling, the trees and hedges outside slicing through the blinds. I flip the pillow, then thrash the blankets off with my legs before turning over myself.
It’s all wrong. Nothing feels right. Why me?
The air is heavy, and when sleep doesn’t come, I resort to picking the skin around my nails while staring across the room to the bathroom. The small tugs sting, but in the silence of the room, between my rapid heartbeats, they’re semi-soothing.
My mind won’t shut up. “Try. I’m working.” Slade’s words bleed into my thoughts. The ones I still can’t believe he’s spoken. “Wake up.”
I wish I could. I wish I could wake up and my mother still be alive, my parents in a loving relationship. I’d have a clearly defined future, and I wouldn’t be the subject to EV’s Market.
Ugh!
More tears spring up, hot and sudden, and they roll down my cheeks and catch on my upper lip.
I shove the suffocating covers off and swing my legs over the side of the bed.
Standing, I pad barefoot across the wooden floor, the chill biting at my soles.
Once, twice, three times I pace before grabbing the door handle and slipping out.
I creep forward, shoulders tight, eyes flicking down the stretch of hallway in both directions. A faint light comes from his cracked office door at the end of the hall, and I press myself to the wall to move toward it. “I’m working.”
It must be two or three in the morning. Working?
As I get closer, a version of some sort of talk radio rushes from the room, and the staccato taps of a keyboard clack away.
Quietly, I hover outside the door, listening before peeking through the crack, though I can’t see much of the room.
I imagine the desk and computer inside, and I file that away.
A possibility, perhaps. The sparse bookshelves I noted before are lined with gray- and brown-colored books.
Such a difference between this and his room. Those comics.
When the typing on the keyboard becomes more aggressive, and what sounds like a fist blows on the desk, I jump back and spin, hustling back toward my room.
Though I can’t sleep and nagging questions about Slade DuPont occupy my thoughts.
Drawn upstairs, I wander there, grateful that while security seems to pace outside the front doors, they don’t hover in every corner of the house.
Slade’s suite is the only room on the upper level, and his door is cracked.
With a nudge, it opens farther. I’m not sure why I’m drawn to it.
The last time I was here, I’d been half asleep, half panicked.
The memories from that night cling to the air as I push inside—the warmth of his sheets, the scent of fresh laundry and linens.
When I push the door open another inch, it’s still the only room in this house that feels real.
Not curated to perfection with polished coastal furniture.
An odd sensation fizzles up my spine. It shouldn’t make sense, but in a way it does. Everything here is him, and the room itself is buried beneath the restraint of the rest of the lake house. Like Slade and his silent, poised demeanor. Though his voice is buried down in there somewhere.
I shouldn’t be here. I’m fairly certain Slade extended his only modicum of hospitality to me when he offered his bed before, but I can’t help the way my fingers trace the framed posters on his wall.
My reflection bounces back at me in the glass frame, and I blink at my swollen eyelids, clumped lashes, and blotchy, salt-streaked cheeks.
I sigh, spinning slowly in a circle to take in his room. The color, emotion, and life that I’ve been starved of for the past weeks are all here.
As I slide my fingers over the bookshelves, I can’t help but think this wood is solid.
I trail my pointer over the dust-free shelves, careful not to bump any of the plastic sleeves displaying the comics.
The colors are bright and slightly overwhelming, but one in particular catches my eye.
Perhaps it’s because the title looks like those bubble letters I used to doodle all over my notebooks in high school.
A throat clears from the doorway, and I spin, snatching my hand away and tucking it behind my back. Slade stands there, arms crossed, one leg crossed over the other as he leans into the doorframe.
I swallow, eyes flicking past him toward the exit wondering just how many strides it’d take to get past him and away. He follows where I’m focused and smirks but not before his brows tighten, drawing down and eyes assessing a way that makes my skin prickle.
I chuck a thumb over my shoulder. “Looks like quite the collection.”
He dips his chin.
“This one—” I point to a bright yellow one with brazen colors, but my fingers accidentally connect with the plastic display case, and it tips over.
The comic wobbles and then gives way, tumbling off the shelf.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry!” I fall to my knees, reaching for the case to turn it over in my hands.
I don’t see any breakage, but—shoot. I sit back on my knees and lift it up to him.
He still hasn’t moved from the doorway.
“I think it got scratched. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—does it damage the comic book inside at all?”
He tilts his head to the side, and when I shuffle forward on my knees a bit, he stiffens.
Looking up at him, I wince. He’s mad. Considering it’s one he keeps in a fancy display, I’m sure this is his favorite, or perhaps a rare one?
It’s a Batman comic with No. 1 in the upper left corner.
The characters on the cover seem to soar across the page with capes and wings, with a city sprawled behind them, but it’s not fancy.
When I blink up at him once more, he shakes his head. Wait. What did I ask him? Oh, right, damage. I flip it over, curious, and he steps closer, arms now more relaxed and at his sides. He stares at the comic, and I wonder if touching it bothers him.
“Is this one rare?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Expensive?” Oddly, my curiosity is piqued. Especially because there are like forty more of these in cases just like this and six times that just in plastic sleeves.
“Yes.”
“Huh.” I read somewhere once that some comics can cost thousands of dollars. I remember thinking that was insane, especially because they said you can’t even read them. “This is probably one of those several-thousand-dollar ones then.”
The corner of his mouth twitches, and I respond with a soft smile of my own. Then he crouches down in front of me, and I flinch back, caught off guard. He jerks a thumb into the air.
“Higher?” I ask.
He nods.
“Yikes. Twenty thousand?”
“Millions, Thea. Millions.”
My eyes widen, and I shove the comic back onto the shelf with a wince. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. It’s probably akin to me riffling through someone’s million-dollar watch collection or probing an expensive art piece like it were a touch-and-feel toddler book.
He watches, those glasses slipping ever so slightly down his nose. He’s measured, logical, but then beneath it, there is something quietly endearing.
We stare at each other. I shouldn’t find him attractive—that terrifies me. But …
“Why am I here, Slade?”
He shakes his head, turning toward his extensive comic collection, and he fingers the edge of the shelf with his nail. He doesn’t meet my gaze.
“Because …” He swallows. “I couldn’t not save you.”
More silence stretches until there’s an ache deep in my chest. He won’t look at me, and maybe that’s for the best because I’m not sure what he’d see if he did.
He says save me, but something in his voice is more like a confession than an excuse.
Part of me wants to step closer, to believe he means it, but everything in me threatens to unravel.