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“I don’t think you’re a liar, Everly,” Blue said quietly, as if he knew exactly how important it was that he tell her that. That she hear it—for the first time since that night. “But you know things you aren’t aware that you know. This is just an example.”
Her throat was too tight. She managed a stiff, jerky sort of nod, and that only made it worse.
Because that steady gaze of his turned kind and almost took her knees out from under her. “Go on.”
She blew out a breath, trying to fight back all the messy things inside of her. Trying to keep herself calm. “At some point after I looked at the time, I heard a noise from outside. Outside my bedroom, I mean. In the living room.”
“What kind of noise?” Everly started to answer, but Blue shook his head. “Don’t tell me the retrofitted answer. What you decided the noise must have been afterward, when you knew what was happening. What did you think it was when you heard it? Before you went and looked?”
Everly took a moment to think about it. She could remember it all too clearly, and yet somehow not clearly at all. As if it were part and parcel of that same dream.Thisdream. The sickening and seemingly endless dream, edged with fear and panic, that had taken over her life.
She remembered how hard her heart had been beating. That strange scratchiness in her throat. The way she’d sat bolt upright in her bed, listening for the next sound. Some part of her convinced that she’d only imagined the first one, whatever it was.
But every cell in her body had been screaming otherwise.
“I don’t know what I heard. It was... wrong.”
“If you know it was wrong, you know what you heard.”
Blue’s expression was implacable. And Everly couldn’t have said why it made her feel safe. Safe enough to keep talking, anyway. Safe enough to stand there in the eerie Alaskan intense blue, not-dark night and look inside herself more deeply for the answer he clearly thought was in there.
And because he believed it, she did, too.
“It was a soft sort of thud,” she said after a moment, as if she were testing out the truth of her words by tasting them, one at a time. “It sounded as if she was moving furniture. Like maybe she’d dropped something behind the couch.”
“So that’s why you got up? Because you thought maybe your roommate needed some help moving the couch around?”
“Rebecca is built like a ballerina. Willowy and fragile. She can do yoga for days, but I’ve never known her to move heavy things by herself. And certainly not in the middle of the night.”
Blue thrust his legs out before him, his boots making a faint scraping sound against the deck. And calling more attention than was necessary to the length of them, in case Everly might have forgotten howbighe was.
She hadn’t.
“So you get up,” Blue said. “You’re thinking to yourself... what?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to see what was going on.”
“Then that’s probably what you were thinking.”
“You really want this to be cut-and-dried, but it wasn’t.” Another wave of emotion crashed through her, and she tried to shrug it away. “It didn’t even take this long. I woke up. I lay awake for a while. Eventually I looked at the time. Then I heard another sound and I got up. It could have been fifteen minutes. It could have been fifteen seconds. I don’t know.”
“Sounds like you do know.”
Everly sighed. “If you say so.”
Blue laughed again, and she wondered, fleetingly, what it would be like to hear this man laugh when he really, truly found something funny.Precarious,something inside her whispered.Much too precarious for you to handle.
Because one thing she’d learned over the course of this last month was that she wanted no part of anything hazardous to her health, ever again. She hadn’t appreciated how pleasant her safe, predictable, mostly quiet life was. She hadn’t understood how lucky she was until she’d lost it all.
That wasn’t a mistake she planned to make again, assuming she ever made it out of this nightmare.
“So you open your door...?”
Everly stopped thinking about Blue’s laugh. It didn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter that he was so beautiful, in the way finely honed weapons were beautiful—lethal and gleaming and obviously sharp to the touch. What mattered was what he coulddo. What he and his friends were capable of.
“I opened my door. I remember feeling that I neededto be quiet, so maybe I did think that something bad was happening out there. Before you ask.”
“You don’t spend a lot of time listening to your body, do you?” Blue asked.