Page 8 of Phobia

I rolled my eyes heavenward. It wasn’t the same, and he knew it. Puffing air up into my full fringe, the bright orange strands fluttered. “It’s a stupid nickname.” I didn’t need the constant reminder that I had bad teeth.

Adam turned around, his upper lip curving back.

He loved my teeth. He reminded me daily.

“You’re going to pay for that,” he warned me, running his fingers back and forth along his lips with thought. The space between us crackled with the predatory charge, and my body hummed to life again, my core clenching around nothing.

I shot him a heated smile, my insecurities melting away. “I can’t wait.”

Adam never looked away as he tugged his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out the amount needed for our admission—only for two, living up to his word. He fed it in the opening in the plexiglass, and with quaking, quick hands, the anxious girl punched in the total and offered him his change and our tickets. She was reaching for the phone, when a shadow fell upon her, shrinking the box office. A man, no older than Adam or Vince, lingered behind her, his hand swallowing hers when it bolted over her clutch on the phone.

She looked shellshocked, completely frozen in place, like her soul had left her body.

But he… he looked at her like Adam looked at me. His lips moved, murmuring something to her.

Her stare followed the slope of an arm attached to the man who dressed like he shopped where Vince did—Dead People R’ Us—and hadn’t seen the sun for at least six months. He donned black jeans and a black dress shirt a size too small around his biceps, rolled up to his elbows. His equally black hair was short and cropped to his scalp, and the bright green veins in his defined forearm flexed from where he gripped her.

Neither of them acknowledged us.

For a split second, it seemed like we were intruding on whatever was going on between them until he extracted his hand from hers and straightened, his spine uncoiling.

What was in the water in Rockchapel? Another giant was in our midst.

The softness in his expression evacuated, and the geodes of his gray, unyielding eyes turned hard when he regarded Vince. “Markov,” he said flatly, addressing Vince by his last name.

Was this why Vince tagged along with us?

Vince flicked his eyes from the girl back to the man, newfound interest erasing his stony expression. His boredom returned as he examined the mostly eaten apple. “Wagner.”

Wagner.He must own the museum or be related to the owners.

While Vince’s voice remained devoid of amusement, to the untrained ear, they didn’t hear what Adam and I did.

He was up to no good, and whatever he’d witnessed between the girl behind the till and Wagner, he was keeping in his back pocket for a rainy day.

Wagner gestured with his head for Vince to follow. Nodding, Vince took a last bite from his apple, depositing the core on the edge of the box office for someone else to clean up after him.

I sighed.

“Asshole,” Wagner muttered, leading him through a side door and disappearing from our line of sight.

Clearing his throat, Adam slung an arm over my shoulders, but I detected the lingering uneasy tension in his body. He didn’t trust Vince. That made two of us. “C’mon. Let’s go get the shit scared out of us.”

I smiled into his side, trying to push the Vince and Wagner interaction out of my mind. There was only one person getting scared tonight, and I knew it was me.

Chapter 3

“I wonder what Vince is up to,” Katrina said, her hand linked to mine.

I didn’t reply. I’d rather not know what Vince was up to. It was better for everyone.

At my silence, she posed another question, her attention trained on the glass display case under bright picture lights we stopped in front of. “Do you know them?”

We were on the main floor of the museum, having cleared the vestibule, and handed our tickets to the waiting attendants at the door. They donned black T-shirts with the museum’s logo on the breast.

The main floor of the museum had a checkered marble floor pattern, the harsh black-and-white colors softened under the ornate ballroom chandelier with tawny bulbs overhead. There was a deep, blood-red carpet runner leading to a wooden flight of bifurcated staircase that belonged in a mansion and not in a museum.

Then again, the structure had once belonged to one of the Rockchapel Founding Families two hundred years ago—a bunch of Puritans with a moral compass the size of Mother Teresa’s patience. So, it fit that the structure had over-the-top features.