TRAPPED WITH MY STEP BROTHERS

Chapter 12

Ladina

"Gabriel! Gabriel, please wake up," I whispered in the dark.

Before his eyes even opened, his large hand reached out and grabbed my wrist. He held it tight. He was ready to protect me. Then, he blinked and saw my face in the dim light. His tight grip immediately went soft. "What is it?" he asked quickly.

"What happened?"

"It is in the study," I said. I was shaking so much that I could barely get the words out of my mouth. "The wooden door is wide open. The small stove is lit and burning. Somebody was just in there."

He did not even pause to think. He was up on his feet before I could finish my sentence. He leaned over and woke his brother.

Suddenly, all three of us were running down the hallway.

Gabriel ran first, holding the iron poker; Oliver followed, carrying the bright lantern to light our way. I followed behind both of them, running with my socks on. The wooden floor was freezing against my feet.

When we reached the door, the study was completely empty. There was nobody hiding in the corners. But the room felt alive. The metal stove burned inside. The clock sat on the shelf, and it was ticking, too. Tick, tick, tick.

I wrapped my arms tightly around my body to stop myself from shaking.

Gabriel did not accept that the room was empty. He was too angry. He tore through the entire house, searching everywhere. He checked every single door, every window. He stomped through the back mudroom and marched down the cold stairs into the basement. He looked for any sign of a break-in.

But there was nothing to find. Everything was still locked tightly from the inside.

The locks were exactly the way we had left them earlier that night. Outside the thick glass windows, the snow was still falling fast. If a visitor had walked up to the house, the snow had already buried their footprints. It looked like no one had come inside, and no one had left.

And yet, we all knew that someone had been here.

Oliver did not run around the house. He walked over to the wooden shelf and looked at the clock. He picked it up very carefully with both of his hands, holding it like it might burn his fingers. He slowly turned the clock over to look at the back.

"Every tiny metal screw has been put back in," Oliver said quietly. "I took this clock apart yesterday.

"He looked up at us. "Putting this clock back together should take a long time. At least an hour."

"A whole hour," Gabriel repeated, his voice full of anger and disbelief. "They were here for that long while we slept just down the hallway."

Gabriel lifted his hand and opened his fist. The brass key to the study rested in his palm. He held it up to show us, like a police officer showing evidence. "This key never left my hand. I held it the entire night."

"There is always a second key," Oliver said softly.

Oliver turned and walked out of the study. We followed him down the hall to the front closet. Inside the closet, a small wooden cabinet hung on the wall right next to the winter coats. I remembered seeing this cabinet on our very first day in the house.

Inside the cabinet, there were rows of small hooks. Each hook had a label under it. The words on the labels were written in neat, square letters. It was the handwriting of their father, James. The labels read: Kitchen. Mudroom. Basement. Study.

We all looked at the hook labeled Study. It was completely empty.

"Our father keeps a spare key for every single door in this house," Oliver explained. "Anyone who has ever spent a weekend visiting this cabin could know exactly where he keeps them."

"Then it is him," Gabriel said. His voice was completely flat and cold. "It has always been him playing this sick game with us."

"Or, it could be anyone else who has ever walked through that front door," Oliver argued. "We just do not know the truth yet."

"Stop making excuses for him, Oliver," Gabriel snapped.

"I am not making excuses for anyone," Oliver replied calmly. "I am simply telling you that we do not know for sure."

Gabriel grabbed a pot, went outside, and filled it with snow. He dumped it directly onto the hot stove and put off the fire.

Then, he grabbed an armchair and placed it in the middle of the hallway. He sat down in the chair, facing the closed study door. He laid the iron poker across his knees and looked at Oliver and me.

"Go back to sleep; I will stay guard," Gabriel ordered us.

"I cannot sleep," I said. "I am too scared."

"Then just lie down anyway," Oliver told me gently. "I will stay right here with you."

I walked back to my spot in the living room and laid down. Oliver followed. He pulled the thick blanket up over my body and tucked the edges of the blanket carefully around my feet. Exactly the way a parent would tuck in a small child to keep them warm. I let him do it. It felt nice to be cared for.

My body did not ask for my permission to rest. The heavy exhaustion pulled me down into the darkness, like a giant hand pulling me under the water. I fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up, the living room was no longer dark. It was morning.

Somewhere close to my ear, I heard a soft scratching sound. It was the sound of a pencil moving across thick paper.

I did not open my eyes all the way. I kept them almost closed and watched secretly through my eyelashes.

Oliver was sitting quietly on the floor. His sketchbook rested on his knee. He was drawing.

He looked over at my sleeping face. Then, he looked down at his paper and drew a line. Then, he looked back at my face again. Every single time he looked at me, he seemed to breathe out a long, slow breath. He looked like a tired man who was finally setting down a very heavy box.

All my life, my mother always looked at me to make sure everything looked perfect on the outside. Recently, Gabriel had started looking at me like he was a starving man and I was food.

But Oliver was looking at me in a completely different way. He was looking at me like he simply wanted to understand me. He wanted to get my picture exactly right.

"I know you are awake," Oliver said softly. looking at his paper.

"How do you know?" I asked, opening my eyes completely.

"You stopped snoring," he replied.

"I do not snore," I said quickly.

"You snore a little bit," he teased gently. "It is a very polite snore."

I laughed out loud. The happy sound actually surprised me. I had not heard myself laugh in days. It felt strange but very good.

"Can I see the drawing?" I asked.

He hesitated for a moment, looking almost shy. "It is not completely finished yet," he warned me. "It might be a bad drawing."

"I want to see it anyway," I said. I reached out and took the sketchbook from his hands.

I looked down at the page. There I was, drawn in dark pencil lines. I was asleep on the couch. The thick blanket was pulled all the way up to my chin. One of my hands was tucked sweetly underneath my cheek. My long hair spilled softly across the couch cushion. He had drawn every single wave of my hair, one careful line at a time.

But it was my face that made me stop breathing.

Since the very first day we arrived at this terrible cabin, I had a deep worry crease right between my eyebrows. I was always frowning because I was always scared. But in Oliver's drawing, that tight crease was completely gone. My forehead was smooth. In the picture, I looked like a normal girl who had never heard of a scary stranger on a tablet. I looked completely peaceful. I looked perfectly safe.

Looking at the girl in the drawing, I wanted to actually be her.

I looked closer. Oliver had even drawn a tiny, faint scar on my chin. I got that small scar from falling off my bicycle when I was only nine years old. I had completely forgotten that the scar was even there. I did not know that anyone else had ever noticed it. But Oliver had noticed it.

"Is this really what I look like?" I asked. My voice wobbled and shook with emotion.

"That is what you look like when nobody is asking you for anything," Oliver said quietly. "Yes."

My eyes started to sting with fresh tears. My hand automatically reached out toward the front of his warm sweater.

Oliver saw my hand reaching for him. He reached out and closed his warm hand gently over mine. He did not pull me closer. Instead, he eased my hand softly away from his chest.

"Not for that reason," he said softly. "I did not draw this to make you hold me. I only wanted you to see yourself the way that I see you."

I nodded slowly, because my throat was too tight to speak. A single, warm tear slid down my cheek and settled into the corner of my mouth.

"Good morning."

I jumped slightly. Gabriel was standing right in the doorway to the kitchen, holding two mugs of coffee with his perfect blank face, giving away no emotion at all.

He walked across the room and handed one of the mugs to me. Then, he stood behind me and looked down over my shoulder at the open sketchbook on my lap.

"It really looks exactly like her," Gabriel finally said. His voice was a little bit rough. "Except for the part where she is snoring."

"I told you both, I do not snore," I argued playfully.

"You absolutely do," Gabriel and Oliver said at the exact same time.

For a slip of seconds, sitting there with them felt like a perfectly normal morning in a normal, safe house.

I looked down at the drawing one more time to admire it.

That was when I saw it.

In the background of the drawing, Oliver had drawn the tall ceiling above the couch. He drew the exact spot where the ceiling beam met the stone wall. And right there, sitting in the corner, Oliver had drawn a tiny, dark circle. It was very small, no bigger than a little lentil.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to the tiny dark circle on the paper.

Oliver leaned in to look. Then, he suddenly reached out and snatched the sketchbook right out of my hands. All the warm color completely drained out of his face

"I did not draw that dark circle on purpose," Oliver whispered.

"Oliver, what do you mean?" Gabriel asked, his voice suddenly sharp.

"I draw exactly what I see, Dina," Oliver explained, his eyes wide with fear.

His voice dropped so low it was almost impossible to hear. "My eyes saw that tiny black spot on the wood. My hand drew that spot on the paper. And I never even realized what I was looking at."

The room went silent. Gabriel slowly placed his hot coffee mug down on the table without making a single sound.

My heart is pounding. I was terrified to look, but I knew I had to. Slowly, very slowly, I tilted my head backward. I looked past the stone wall. I looked up high, right along the dark wood of the ceiling beam above us.

Right there in the corner, a tiny, black camera lens looked right back down at us.