Eleven Night In PIne Haven

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Cora

Richard's shoe came down an inch from my duffel bag.

I stopped breathing. Through the gap between the pillar and the wall, I saw his polished toe and the cuff of his gray trousers. His gloved hand reached down, slow and unhurried, like a man picking up a coin.

“Please, God.” My nails dug into my own mouth. “Don't let him see me.”

"Packed light," he said mockingly, turning the bag over. "How thoughtful."

Cold sweat slid down my spine. My knees screamed from being folded under me, and I couldn't move them. I could only stare at his hand and pray.

My fingers closed around a chip of broken concrete. I didn't think so. I flung it across the garage.

It cracked against a windshield. A car alarm exploded into the silence, wailing and flashing red across the walls.

"Damn it," Richard hissed. He spun toward the noise.

I snatched up my bag and ran. A steel door glowed at the far wall, the green letters above it reading STAIRS. I hit the bar with my hip and fell through, and the door clicked shut behind me.

Darkness. Cold. The smell of dust and stale smoke.

I stumbled up one flight and collapsed on the landing, my chest heaving, tears running down my face. I pulled out my phone with shaking hands.

“When I come home, we're going through every single thing on this phone.”

One bar of signal. I held the phone toward the narrow window, and it flickered. "Please," I whispered. "Please, please."

Eleven months ago, I had made a secret email account on a library computer, under my grandmother's maiden name. I had never planned to use it. I only needed to know it existed, the way you need to know where the fire exit is.

I opened the folder named

“Recipes.”

Nineteen photographs. I didn't want to look. I looked anyway. A purple handprint on my arm. A split lip. A bruise on my ribs from the night he threw me against the counter. In every one, my face was trying to smile, because I had been too ashamed to cry.

I pressed my wrist to my mouth. Then I opened the voicemails.

“Pick up the phone, Cora,” his voice said, low and patient. “Pick it up, or you will regret it.”

“If you embarrass me in front of my mother, I will make you wish you'd never been born.”

My stomach rolled. I selected all thirty-one files and hit “Forward.”The little bar crawled across the screen. “Sending 1 of 31…” It stopped. Started.

The alarm went off. In the silence below me, a door opened.

Footsteps echoed up the stairwell. Slow. Patient. Click. Click.

Sending 14 of 31...

"Come on," I begged the phone, my tears dripping onto the screen. "Come on, come on."

Sending 27 of 31... I could see his shadow now, stretching up the wall, long and thin and unhurried.

Sent.

I breathed once, jagged. Then I opened the folder and pressed Delete All.

My thumb wouldn't move. Those photographs were the only proof that it had ever happened. If I deleted them, I would be the only person in the world who believed in them.

But if Richard found them, he would erase them for me. And then he would erase me.

"I'm sorry," I whispered to the girl in the pictures. "I'll come back for you."

I pressed “Delete.”

The shadow reached the landing below. A voice drifted up the dark, soft and pleased.

"Cora?" he called mockingly. "I can hear you breathing."

I clamped both hands over my mouth. My teeth clicked so hard that I bit my tongue, and I tasted blood.

“Please, God.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I'll do anything. Don't let that beast touch me again.”

Click. Click. He started up the stairs.

"I'm not even angry," Richard said sweetly. "I'm just disappointed. After everything I've done for you."

A sob choked in my throat. Every bruise on my body throbbed at once, as if they remembered him.

Beside me was a steel door marked P1, the same level as the garage and my car.

Four steps below. Three.

“Now, Cora. Now, or you will die in this stairwell.”

I stood on legs like water, shoved the door open, and ran.

"There you are!" the beast roared, and his footsteps exploded into a run behind me.

The garage was a blur of concrete and red light. “Cora!!!” he screamed, and all the sweetness was gone. "Stop right now, or I swear I will break every bone in your body!"

I screamed as I ran, a raw, ugly sound. The key scraped across the lock once, twice. I whimpered, "No, no, no, please." The lock turned.

I threw the bag across the seat, dove behind the wheel, and hit the lock a heartbeat before his hand hit the glass.

“Bang.”

Richard's face filled my window, red and wild, his teeth bared. He slammed his fist against the glass again and again. "Open the door, you stupid little"

I turned the key. Nothing. I turned it again. The engine coughed.

"*Please,*" I sobbed. "Please, please, please!"

It caught on.

I stomped the gas, and the tires screamed. Richard threw himself backward, and for one second his furious eyes locked on mine through the windshield.

"You will “pay” for this!" he shouted.

I hit the ramp at sixty. The barrier arm snapped across my hood with a c***k like a gunshot, and then I was out on the empty street.

I drove four blocks before I dared to breathe. A scream broke out of me, and then I was laughing and sobbing at once, my hands frozen to the wheel.

“I did it.

“Yes”

With tears dropping down my cheeks

I looked in the rearview mirror.

Richard stood alone in the middle of the road under a streetlight. He wasn't chasing me. He wasn't shouting.

He lifted his phone to his ear, and even from here, I could see him smile.