Where Sinners Sleep

Four Steps

The shouting woke her up.

Evelyn's eyes opened and for one completely disoriented moment she did not know where she was. The ceiling was wrong. The floor under her was hard and her neck ached and the light coming through the curtains was the pale grey of early morning and none of it made any sense until she moved and felt the door against her back.

Right.

She was on the floor.

She had cried herself to sleep on the floor of a stranger's spare room without even making it to the bed, which was right there, an actual bed with actual pillows, and she had missed it entirely because she had slid down the door and simply never gotten back up. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and sat there for a moment just breathing.

Then the shouting registered properly.

A woman's voice. High and sharp and coming from somewhere down the hall, words she could not quite make out through the walls but the tone was unmistakable. Someone was furious about something.

Evelyn sat very still and listened.

Her brain, which had not fully woken up yet and was therefore running entirely on instinct and panic, began to move through possibilities and none of them were good.

His girlfriend. That one arrived first and landed hard. He had brought someone home, some random girl from a bench, and the girlfriend had found out and was currently down that hallway losing her mind about it and any second that door was going to fly open and Evelyn was going to have to explain herself to a furious woman at seven in the morning with swollen eyes and yesterday's clothes and absolutely no good explanation for any of it.

His wife.

That one was worse. Significantly worse. A wife was a whole different level of catastrophic. A wife meant there were legal documents involved. A wife meant this man had stood in front of people and made promises and had then apparently spent last night with a girl he met on a bench and brought her home and put his jacket over her while she slept and called her Piccola and none of that was something a wife was going to take quietly.

But then her brain, which had clearly decided that girlfriend and wife were not nearly dark enough, took a sharp turn somewhere and did not come back.

He had told her last night what those men did to people they caught. Organs. Slowly. While you are still using them. He had said it so calmly. So precisely. The way someone speaks about something they have seen up close. The way someone speaks when they are not horrified by the information because they have long since made their peace with it.

What if he was not warning her.

What if he was not on the opposite side of those men at all.

What if this was exactly what it looked like. A quiet building at the edge of nowhere. No neighbours. No noise. No one who would hear anything. A man who knew too much about what happened to people who got in the way. A woman screaming somewhere down the hall. And Evelyn, sitting on the floor of a locked spare room, who had gotten into his car willingly and told herself it was the practical choice.

She thought about the way he had looked at her last night. That slow assessment. Up and down. Taking inventory.

She pressed both hands over her mouth.

She needed to leave. Right now. Immediately. While he was busy with whoever was screaming. While he was distracted. This was her window and it was closing and she was sitting on the floor thinking about organ harvesting instead of using it.

She got up.

Quickly and quietly she crossed to the mirror above the small dresser and caught sight of herself and stopped.

She had known she looked bad. She had felt bad enough to know. But the mirror was honest in the way mirrors always are when you least want them to be. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut, puffy and pink, the kind of swollen that only comes from hours of crying, real hours, not minutes. There were dried tear tracks on her cheeks and the shadow under her eyes had deepened into something that looked almost bruised. Her hoodie hung off her shoulders in a way that made her look smaller than she already was. Her hair was a disaster. The small gold studs in her ears were the only thing that looked the same as always.

She looked like someone who had survived something.

She turned away from the mirror.

The shouting down the hall had not stopped. Good. Loud meant distracted. She crossed to the door, turned the handle with both hands, slow and careful, and eased it open one centimetre at a time until there was enough space to slide through.

The hallway was empty.

She slipped out and pulled the door shut behind her without a sound. The voices were coming from somewhere to her left, further into the penthouse, and she needed to go right. Back toward the entrance. Back toward the front door and the drive and the trees and whatever was on the other side of them.

She took one careful step.

Then another.

Then she was tiptoeing, which she was fully aware looked completely ridiculous but was also entirely necessary, her worn shoes silent on the dark wood floor, shoulders slightly hunched, moving like someone who was trying very hard to take up no space at all.

She made it approximately four steps.