“We’ll go at seven in the morning,” I tell him. “I want the kids to rest a little more. All right?” I look at my phone. “I’ll call Kezia and Javier to set everything up.”

In a quick move, Sam takes my phone and slips it into his pocket. “If Absalom has this number, you can’t use it to set up the kids’ shelter,” he says, and I immediately feel stupid I didn’t think of it. I must be more exhausted than I think. “I’ll wipe calls and contacts and leave it for someone else to steal. Better it stays on and leads Absalom on a false trail for a while.” He nods across the street, at a lit-up convenience store. “I’ll go get one new phone tonight. We use it to call Javier and dump it immediately. We don’t buy any more phones close to this location; that’s the first place Absalom will search for purchases.”

He’s right on every point. I need to think like a hunter now, but I can’t forget that I’m also prey. Melvin made me vulnerable before by luring me, manipulating me, to end up where he wanted me to be. Now we need to do the same to him.

For years, I clung to a terrible fiction of a marriage—a life in which Melvin Royal controlled every aspect of my reality, and I failed to realize or fear it. Gina Royal, the old me, the vulnerable me . . . she and the kids were Melvin’s camouflage for his secret, terrible life. On my side of the wall, I had only known that it all seemed so normal. But it never was, and now that I’ve left Gina Royal behind, I clearly see that.

I’m not Gina anymore. Gina was tentative and worried and weak. Gina would be afraid that Melvin would come hunting for her.

Gwen Proctor is ready for him.

I know in my heart that it all comes down to us. Mr. and Mrs. Royal. In the end, it always has.

 

 

2

LANNY

My little brother, Connor, is too quiet. He’s barely said a word all day, and he keeps his head down. He’s gone behind those walls he builds up, and I want to kick them all down and drag him out and get him to scream, hit the wall, do something.

But I can’t even exchange two words with him without Mom’s radar picking up trouble . . . at least, not until after the door closes behind her, and she’s outside on the motel balcony. I know my mother. Mostly I love her. But sometimes she doesn’t help. She doesn’t know how to let her shields down anymore.

Connor’s awake. He’s good at pretending to be asleep, but I know his tells; for two years when Mom was away—in jail and at trial, accused of being my dad’s accomplice—we’d shared a room because Grandma didn’t have much space, even though I was ten and he was seven and we were too old to be sharing a room. We’d had to be each other’s allies, watch each other’s backs. I’d gotten used to knowing when he was really out, and when he was just pretending. He never did cry much, not as much as I did. These days, he doesn’t cry at all.

I wish he would.

“Hey,” I say. I make it quiet, but not too quiet. “I know you’re faking it, loser.” He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move. His breathing continues smooth and even. “Yo, Squirtle. Don’t play.”

Connor finally sighs. “What?” He sounds totally awake. He doesn’t even sound annoyed. “Go back to sleep. You’re grumpy when you don’t get your not-beauty rest.”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, you wanted to talk. Not my fault you don’t like what I say.” He sounds normal.

He’s not normal.

I flop back on the bed. The bed smells like the dollar store, like old sweat and nasty feet. This whole room smells like the dollar store. I hate it. I want to go home . . . and home is the house Mom and Connor and I worked to make so nice. The one with my own bedroom, and a wall I painted with purple stenciled flowers. The one with Connor’s bugout zombie defense room.

Our house sits right on Stillhouse Lake, and it represents something I thought we’d never have again: security. My memories after the day we had to leave our first home—the one in Wichita—were a blur of plain rooms and gray cities, for years. We never stayed anywhere long enough to feel like we were home.

Stillhouse Lake was different. It felt permanent, like life was really starting again for all of us. I had friends. Good friends.

I had Dahlia Brown, who started out being the kind of girl I hated and ended up being my best friend in the world. It hurt to leave her back there, like some discarded, broken toy. She didn’t deserve that. I don’t deserve it, either. I had a sort-of boyfriend, but it’s a little bit of a shock to realize I don’t really miss him at all. I haven’t thought about him.

Only Dahlia.

We’d left our house just as it was, and I wonder if it’s been completely trashed by now. Probably. News of just who we are, who our dad is, had broken in the middle of all the craziness with Officer Graham, and I remember what happened to our old places when people found out. Spray paint on the walls. Dead animals on the doorstep. Broken windows and vandalized cars.

People can be really shitty.

I can’t help but imagine what our house by Stillhouse Lake might look like now, if people took out their anger on it instead of us. It makes my chest get tight and my stomach boil. I roll over on my side and angrily punch the cheap pillow into better shape. “Who do you think that text was from?”

“Dad,” he says. I don’t miss the slight inflection, the tiny hitch, but I don’t know what it means. Anger? Fear? Longing? Probably all those things. I know something my mom probably doesn’t: that Connor doesn’t really, really get why Dad is a monster. I mean, he does, but he was seven when our lives spun out; he remembers a father who was sometimes awesome to him, and he misses that. I was older. And I’m a girl. I see things differently. “Guess now she’s going to go after him.” Now I hear a different intonation. One that I recognize.

So I dig. “Makes you mad, doesn’t it?”

“Like it doesn’t you? She’s going to dump us like strays,” he says. This time, the cold, flat tone isn’t subtle at all. “Probably with Grandma.”

“You like staying with Grandma,” I say. I’m trying to be upbeat about it. “She makes us cookies and those popcorn balls you like. It’s not exactly torture.” I’m horrified the second the word drops off my lips, but it’s too late. I’m angry with myself, a searing red flash that sizzles in my nerves like they’ve turned into firecracker fuses. In the next second I’m back in a cabin high up in the hills, being dragged down into a basement. Locked in a tiny little cell not much bigger than a coffin, along with my brother.