Heart So Hollow (Dire Wolves Book 1), page 55
He leads me to the entryway and when I follow his gaze up the wall, I’m met with an eerie sight. There are two words scrawled across the light grey paint in bright red spray paint.
WHERE’S EMILY?
My eyes dart back and forth between Bowen and the message on the wall. He peers up at the writing with a sense of both agitation and curiosity.
“What is this?” I whisper, my throat suddenly parched.
Bowen glances at me and then back up at the paint, “The door to the deck was unlocked.”
I swallow hard, looking back up at the paint on the wall.
Popping a sliding glass door isn’t difficult, sweetheart.
“All my underwear are gone,” I say flatly, resigned to the fact that there’s no way I can hide something like that.
Bowen jerks his head around, “The fuck did you just say?”
“My underwear drawer—” I clear my throat, “it’s empty.”
Then, suddenly, my eyes are drawn to the wall next to the entryway. There are four knives—steak knives from the kitchen drawer—stabbed into the drywall in a row. Beneath each one is a crudely cut out piece of paper. When I look closer, I realize they’ve all been carved out of the large frame in the middle of the photo montage next to the bookcase. The glass is smashed and only silhouettes of four people remain, their images now pinned to the wall beneath each knife.
Hildy.
Jay.
Hannah.
Bowen.
The only person remaining in the framed photo is Evie, with her vibrant red hair and bright, contagious smile.
The whole sight makes my blood run cold and I have no idea what to make of any of it. I look to Bowen for any explanation, but he’s still taking in the bizarre scene.
Finally, he looks over his shoulder at me, “Your underwear are gone?”
I nod, unable take my eyes off the knives sticking out of the wall. Without another word, Bowen returns to his backpack sitting next to the front door, tears open the zipper, and starts digging around inside. I watch with a growing sense of panic as he lifts his holster, with his gun, out of the main pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to find him,” Bowen declares, tucking the holster into the back of his jeans.
“Who?” I squeak, my voice cracking.
“Lutz,” he barks from the door.
“Why?” I shriek as he reaches for the door handle.
Bowen stops abruptly and turns around, “Why?” He furrows his brow, “Because he broke into my house and stole my fiancée’s underwear like a sick fuck!”
I wave my arm frantically at the wall, “OK, but what does that have to do with all of this?”
“I don’t know, Brett,” Bowen shrugs, “since when does anything he does make sense?” then he motions to the wall above me, “I don’t even know an Emily.”
I knit my brow in confusion, “Yes, you do.” I glance up at the red paint and then back at Bowen, “Your ex-girlfriend’s name is Emily. Hildy told me about her.”
Why is he looking at me like I’m talking nonsense?
And, for the record, I know Colson came into my house and stole all of my underwear. He even returned the pair he kept all those years ago. What I don’t know is how he knows Bowen had a girlfriend named Emily, why he painted her name across the wall, shredded a photo from high school, and then stabbed knives through the wall.
Bowen’s irritation is palpable, “Do you want to talk about my ex or the fact that your fucking stalker broke into my house and stole all your underwear?”
“And what do you mean, find him?” I press, “Where would you even go?”
Bowen is unfazed, “Would you prefer I wait ‘til tomorrow when I know he’s at work with you?”
My stomach drops, “You can’t go there, I’ll get fired!”
“So?”
“Bowen,” I hiss, “You’ll get killed. If you try to get past the entrance, they’ll shoot you. And I know them, they’re bored and some of them are probably itching for a reason to fire off a few rounds!”
Batshit.
Bowen peers at me from the front door, clenching his teeth.
“Fine,” he concedes, storming back into the living room, “but if I see him anywhere near here, I’m calling Jay,” he turns the corner into the hall, calling over his shoulder, “and he can bring the coroner.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Brett
Present
“There are some things I still haven’t told you,” I glance up at Judy apprehensively, “and I don’t know if I want to go there yet.”
“That’s the beauty of this therapy,” she asserts excitedly, “you don’t even have to speak if you don’t want to. During ART, you think about all the details instead of re-hashing them and re-traumatizing yourself.”
“So, I don’t even have to tell you?”
She shakes her head, “Not unless you want to.”
Minutes later, Judy’s fluttering about, setting up a tripod in front of me with a light bar attached to the top. Even though she’s the most calming influence I’ve ever encountered, I still pick at my cuticles with a sense of foreboding.
“OK,” she sits back down in her red leather chair on the other side of the birch coffee table, “I want you to close your eyes and start moving them back and forth at a steady pace, along the light, while you think about that night. Pretend you’re watching it play out on a movie screen. Just breathe and concentrate on your eye movements while replaying the events in your mind.”
I do as she says and close my eyes, tucking my hands under my thighs so I don’t make myself bleed all over her ivory sofa. I take a deep breath and begin shifting my eyes back and forth behind the pink shadows of my eyelids.
Right…left…right…left…right…left…right…left…right…
It’s dark, but it shouldn’t be. Suddenly, he comes out of nowhere and I feel him grabbing me…dragging me…I’m fighting, arms and legs thrashing, screaming…
Left…right…
He holds me down. It hurts. He’s bigger, stronger, and no matter how hard I fight, I can’t get away. He’s so quiet at first, he doesn’t say a word, just shakes me like a wolf clutching a rabbit in its jaws. Why is he doing this?
Left…right…
He’s holding me down, now. I can’t move. Then he takes out the gun. I hear it…then I see it… and then I feel it. Cold, black metal on my skin, in a place where it’s not supposed to be. This is going to be worse than death…
Left…right…
He’s clenching my hair. All my muscles are on fire. I barely have a voice anymore. With my last breath, I scream his name.
Left…right…
And then, finally, I hear his voice.
●●●
It’s never loud in our house, and I’m reminded that’ll change with every twitch and bump deep in my belly. But I’m looking forward to it. After so much quiet, it will need to be loud, every corner filled with the echoes of new life. Screaming, whether happy, painful, sad, or scared—it means you’re alive. It means you’re not dead yet.
I usually enjoy the silence, lost in my own worlds jam packed with dramatic storylines and characters who feel like they’re my best friends. But right now, the silence is too loud. I don’t like when I can hear the subtle ring in my ears that’s only detectable when no one else is around, when it’s really quiet and I don’t have my characters to distract me.
I texted him about the cut wire, more so just to let him know. Even if my text gets through, I know he can’t do anything about it. I haven’t bothered calling my internet provider yet. Maybe I prefer to remain cut off right now. Maybe I need to sit in the quiet and concentrate. Sometimes I need to force myself to slow down, or else I fall back into my old patterns of avoiding uncomfortable scenarios.
The sun sets around 8:30 in the evening, so I know it’s late by the time I finish making notes in my outline for my next book. The spiral bound pages are covered in my purple handwriting, detailing the plot of the first book—a series that’s set in a small town not so different from the one I grew up in, where not everything is as it seems.
I’ve become an expert in that now—noticing things that are slightly off, peeling away the layers to find out what darkness lies just beneath the surface. Imagine if I’d been this perceptive for the last 25 years instead of the last one...
There’s usually music playing, whether from the speaker on the buffet behind the dining table or my headphones, but tonight the house is silent. I am silent. It’s the only reason I can hear the soft footfall of something in the grass just outside the window behind me. I hear it over the faint scratches of my writing, and my hand stills as soon as I detect it.
I hear sounds like this all the time, usually from whichever animal decides to pass through the yard at any given time, especially when the trees are fruiting or the garden is producing. The sound in the grass isn’t why I give pause, though, it’s the sound of the first plank of wood on the right side of the porch bending under an unknown weight that draws my eyes to the east wall.
Motionless on the far side of the cream sectional, I flatten my hand on my paper and stare at the wall. My pulse quickens and I hear a low rushing against my eardrums as I become more alert.
There’s a pause. Then the second plank bends, and then the third.
Sodapop sits on the back of the sofa, his feet curled under him. As soon as I look up, his head swivels and his eyes dart to the wall. He tenses, staring at the same spot as I am. He hears it, too. His shiny black ears twitch as he concentrates, trying to decide if there’s anything worth giving chase just outside the window.
The floorboards don’t creak per se, the wood is still too new for that, but very few things in this world are totally silent. Hunters—predators—rely on the distractions surrounding their prey to hide their presence. There are tiny sounds associated with the body moving; feet stepping over terrain, fur and clothing brushing against skin, limbs swaying with a gait, even a turn of the head. Just like any other night, it could be a raccoon, a deer, a coyote, or even a black bear wandering through.
That is, if a raccoon, deer, coyote, or black bear cared at all about how loud their footsteps are.
These are slow…sneaking…searching…stalking…
It moves across the porch, blending in with the swish of the night breeze through the forest and the whir of the fan at the top of the vaulted ceiling. My eyes move with it, tracking each footstep as it crosses in front of the window, the blinds shut to conceal it…and me.
Maybe it’s not an animal. Maybe it never was. Feet smaller than a bear, but bigger than a deer…
I shift my gaze across the living room to the bookshelves in the corner. There’s a black spotlight sitting on the very top. We usually use it for scaring off nuisance wildlife, but it’ll light up the entire yard all the way down to the road. I set my notebook down on the cushion, stand up, and slowly move across the room to the bookshelf. Gripping the spotlight in one hand, I take a step toward the front door.
But I hesitate. What am I doing?
I strain to listen and hear another soft footfall, and then another. I slowly reach up and slide the spotlight back onto the bookshelf. Even if I knew someone was out there, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t scan the porch, watch the beam of light move over railing and furniture, only to land on the face of an intruder, standing there, just silently looking back at me. My heart would stop and I would die of fright. Me and my baby would die of fright right here on the living room floor.
No, I know my limits. I’ll wait for daylight to do something like that.
Instead, I feel for my Glock, still tucked in the back of my shorts, and slowly make my way back to the sofa. I sit on the edge of the cushion, listening. Minutes pass, and there’s nothing else. The faint flexing of the floorboards, the soft footfalls cease, and it sounds like I’m alone again.
Sodapop is still looking at the wall, but his eyes are scanning it instead of focusing on a fixed point. His lean muscles relax under his silky fur, which makes me feel better. I sink back into the sofa cushions and adjust my waistband. Running my fingers along my waistband beneath my navel, I do inventory; I can bike 12 miles over rough terrain and I can run a 10-minute mile through the woods, even now. It’s a mantra for when the anxiety starts creeping in, before I can remind myself—and convince myself—that I am strong and I am the one in control.
It works like a charm, because I’m not who I was a year ago. I’m inside my house and nothing ever happens on my property without one of us knowing about it. I settle back into the sofa and immerse myself back into whichever world I’ve decided to create tonight. My heartrate slows, the tunnel vision fades, and it’s just me and Soda.
Maybe a half hour later, he stands up and saunters across the back of the sofa toward me. He makes a point to jump right onto my paper and then onto the floor. He continues across the floor toward the front door, headed for his daily nighttime jaunt. Right on schedule. As soon as he gets to the front door, he turns around and meows for me to let him out. I rise and trudge across the living room to the door, reaching for the deadbolt.
But before I can twist it, I give pause. Routine and structure are invaluable to someone like me. But, still, sometimes they can make you do very idiotic things. The human brain on autopilot is dangerous.
I drag my eyes up and down the wood, studying the door with a sense of foreboding. After a few seconds, my fingers loosen around the lock and my arm falls back to my side. I give the heavy oak door a once-over. Deadbolt locked. Knob locked.
I take a step back and look down at Soda, “Not tonight. You have to wait until morning.”
Routine and structure are invaluable, but so is intuition. We’ve been taught to ignore gut feelings, but they used to save us. They still do when we stop second-guessing ourselves and pay attention to things right in front of our eyes.
And, tonight, I heard something walk up the stairs onto the front porch.
But I did not hear it leave.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Brett
One Year Ago
By morning, the wall is patched, painted, and aside from the 9x12 photo missing from the middle of the photo montage, it looks like nothing happened.
But I know it did. And today I’m going to find out what did happen in this house while we were gone.
I haven’t pressed Bowen about the wall—why Emily’s name was painted across it, why Hildy, Jay, Hannah, and his faces were cut out of a photo with knives stabbed through them, and how that’s related at all to Colson stealing all of my underwear. I also haven’t told Bowen about my pills disappearing, but I don’t know why. It should seem like the least terrifying of everything that happened last night, but for some reason it’s the most unsettling to me.
Maybe because it makes you doubt yourself even more than you already do.
I’ll go to the pharmacy this afternoon at lunch. I’ll get Plan B, say a prayer, and hope for the best. Oh, yeah, and get a refill. I just want to have a normal day, a normal week, a normal life again. I’m not cut out for terror and drama. I try to leave that in my books.
My book…
I can’t think about that, either, so I try to busy myself with packing my work bag. Water bottle, snacks, laptop…
Bowen is otherwise his usual self, checking emails on his phone on the other side of the island and snapping the lid on my travel mug for me. I’m about to tuck my phone into the front pocket of my bag when it vibrates with a text. My heart sinks when I see the anonymous sender and, against my better judgement, I open it to see what cryptic, asinine message Colson has for me this morning.
UNKNOWN (6:49AM): You’ve been a bad bad girl Honeybee
That’s cute.
Maybe I’m just getting used to Colson’s antics. Normalizing…
But before I can even close the text, another comes through. This time, it’s a photo, and when I see it, it takes my breath away and sends a chill through my chest all the way down to my fingertips.
The first thing I recognize is Colson’s blue STI. And when I click on the image to enlarge it, I see him sitting in the driver’s seat and me standing on the other side of the car, propping the door open with my arm as I talk to him.
Colson didn’t take this picture. Someone else did. And Colson didn’t send this text.
Which means someone else knows everything.
●●●
I don’t know what it’s like to be in battle. But I imagine it’s a lot of tension while you wait for something terrible to happen, which is why I feel a bizarre mixture of fear and relief when Colson finally steps through my office door around noon. He’s carrying a paper bag from the sandwich shop down the road, which he drops on my desk on his way to his usual spot next to my window.
“Turkey and provolone on wheat with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and hot peppers,” he collapses into the chair, “and kettle chips.”
I shoot him a side-eye, “Did you do anything to it?”
“Is that a request?” he smirks as he checks his phone.
I stare at the bag and then peer at Colson out of the corner of my eye. He looks so normal. He’s acting so normal, bringing me unsolicited lunch—which I shouldn’t accept, by the way—and making himself at home in my office as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. But he was in my house yesterday, painting the wall and stabbing knives through photos at some point before I saw him at the park and he…
I swivel around in my chair, “Someone broke into my house.”
Colson arches his brow, “Did you call the cops?”
I glare back at him, “Do you want me to call the cops?”
He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms with amusement, “You think it was me?”
I’ve had enough of his infuriating non-responses, “Of course it was you,” I retort, “you know how to unlock doors and windows. You’ve done it before. People here ask you to do it all the time when they lock their goddamn keys in their cars! Who else would’ve done it? I had to go to Wal-Mart because they were the only place still open just so I had clean underwear!”
