Page 34

MARISELA

I stared out the window as the little white dots ran circles around another slightly larger dot. The grass overgrown and wooden crosses looming along the side of the hill, an ominous mixture of the past and current residents. Neither more likely to escape this hellhole than the other.

I huffed out an annoyed breath and started all over again. One… two… three…

Counting was the only thing I had to occupy my mind. Twenty white dots and over a hundred crosses—it was hard to tell the exact number with all the foliage in the way—and more than half were bent, broken, or missing.

The breeze that rattled the cracked glass was nice, though.

Especially compared to the stale air of the room.

Other than the ants outside and the weird visit from the creeper in the lab coat, I hadn’t seen a single soul.

And the lack of human interaction was on the verge of giving me a reason to actually belong here with the rest of these nutcases.

Four… five… six…

I made it to seventy-seven crooked crosses before the sound of the door cracking open again had me spinning around and staring at…

an empty hallway. Until I dropped my glare and spotted the chair.

I recognized the whining of the wheels. He must have been the one groping me up in the icebox when I first woke up here.

The boy eyed me for a moment before reaching into his pocket and flicking his wrist in my direction. A red rubber ball hit the padded wall to my left with a soft thud , quickly falling to the floor and rolling towards my socks—the grippy kind that everyone joked about.

I bent down and picked it up, not bothering to adjust my gown as it bunched at the front and revealed what little you couldn’t see beneath the threadbare fabric.

Then I looked from the ball back to the boy taking up most of the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest and a single blonde eyebrow raised.

“Cut it in half and tuck the pieces behind your ears,” he said as he tossed a packet of bubblegum my way.

I caught the pink packaging midair. “Why?”

He shrugged a single shoulder. “Or don’t. Whether or not your brain gets scrambled really ain’t my problem, princess.”

The nickname gave me pause. I didn’t like the thing it did to my pulse or how my body instantly reacted to the thought of my shadow man. Or maybe he was never mine at all. Not if he was working with my father…

But I had more important things to worry about. Like the fact my door was wide open now. I rushed forward, only to have it slammed in my face before the lock clicked over the front.

I pounded on the metal with my fists, my knuckles bloodied by the time I gave up and yelled out, “What the fuck am I supposed to cut it with?”

“You got teeth, don’t you?” the boy yelled back a few seconds later. Which told me his room wasn’t far. That , or more than one of these fuckers was watching me.