Where Sinners Sleep

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Then she walked directly into a person.

The collision was immediate and total. She went one way and he went the other and they both hit the floor with a sound that echoed off every surface in the hallway and absolutely destroyed any chance of a quiet exit.

She landed on her hands and looked up.

The driver from last night looked back at her from the floor, one elbow propped underneath him, dark hair pushed across his forehead from the impact. He was wearing a plain white t shirt and he looked younger than she had registered in the dark of the car, with a face that was all strong angles but had something open about it that would have been almost boyish if not for the way he was currently looking at her.

"Can you not watch where you are going?" she hissed.

He raised one eyebrow. Just one. Very slowly. Very deliberately.

"I think," he said, "that you walked into me."

"I think," she said, "that you appeared out of nowhere directly in my path."

"You were the one moving."

"And you were the one standing in a dark hallway like some kind of obstacle that nobody warned me about."

He looked at the ceiling briefly as if requesting patience from it. "Why does everyone in this house always blame the person who was standing still?"

She got to her feet and straightened her hoodie. "Why does everyone in this house like to blame women? I was clearly minding my own business."

"Minding your own business," he repeated, and something shifted in his expression, not quite a smile but sitting right next to one. "Right. And what exactly does minding your own business look like at this hour? Sneaking out? Running away?" A short pause. "Or were you looking for something that does not belong to you?"

She went completely still.

He was still sitting on the floor.

She looked at him for exactly one second.

Then she reached down, grabbed the front of his shirt, and in one smooth movement that her body knew better than her brain did, she put him back on the floor with her hand wrapped around his collar and her knee beside his shoulder and her face approximately six inches from his.

"How dare you," she said, and her voice was very quiet, which was worse than shouting and she had always known it. "How dare you call me a thief. After everything your boss put me through last night, after all of it, you are going to sit there in your own hallway and call me a thief?"

The driver's eyes were wide. Not scared exactly. More like someone doing a rapid and genuine reassessment of the situation.

"I was not actually" he started.

"Do not," she said. "Do not finish that sentence."

A sound from the end of the hallway.

Footsteps, light and quick, and then a voice that was warm and bright and completely unbothered by what it had just walked into.

"So you must be the girl he brought home last night."

Evelyn looked up.

Still with her hand gripped in the driver's collar, still with her knee beside his shoulder, she turned her head and looked at the girl standing at the end of the hallway.

The girl looked back at her and then looked down at the driver pinned on the floor and then looked back at Evelyn, and the expression on her face was one of pure and complete delight.

She was stunning in the effortless way that some people simply are, like they were assembled by someone who was really paying attention. Blonde hair the exact same shade as Kit's, falling loose around her shoulders. Blue eyes so clear and bright they looked almost lit from the inside. She was younger than the voice had suggested, smaller too, wearing an oversized cream jumper and holding a mug in both hands and looking at the scene in the hallway like it was the best thing she had seen in a very long time.

"And you already have the driver in a chokehold," she said, and the delight in her voice was completely genuine. "I have been waiting two years for someone to do that." She lifted her mug slightly, like a toast. "I am already your biggest fan. I want you to know that before we even exchange names."

Evelyn released the driver's collar and stood up slowly.

The driver sat up, rubbed his neck, and looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man who had several things to say and was making the smart choice to say none of them.

The girl walked toward her, mug in both hands, completely at ease, and stopped a few feet away and looked at her with those blue eyes in a way that was not rude but was extremely thorough. A full look, top to bottom, taking in the oversized hoodie and the worn shoes and the swollen eyes and the general appearance of someone who had experienced a great deal of last night.

"Hi," she said, and her smile was so immediate and so warm that something in Evelyn's chest did something she was not prepared for. "I came to find out your name. I am Coco." A small pause. "Kit's younger sister. Which I understand is a lot of information given that you have presumably just met him and he is" she searched briefly for the right word, "a lot. But I promise I am the better version. I am significantly more fun and I have never made anyone cry." She tilted her head. "What is your name?"

"Evelyn," she said, and it came out slightly rough from the crying and the floor and the general disaster of the last twelve hours.

"Evelyn," Coco repeated, trying it out, nodding like it had passed some internal test. "Good name." She looked at her for one more moment with those clear bright eyes and then said, with complete sincerity and absolutely zero cruelty, "I think you need a shower. Come on. I will find you something to wear."

She was already turning toward the hallway like it was settled.

Evelyn stood where she was for a moment.

She thought about the front door. She thought about the drive and the trees and the city somewhere beyond them and the three dollars and forty cents in her hoodie pocket and the gangsters and the CCTV camera and the organ harvesting and all of it sitting out there waiting for her.

Then she thought about her reflection in that mirror.

She turned to follow Coco.

And stopped.

At the far end of the hallway, half in shadow, Kit stood.

She did not know how long he had been there. He was still in last night's clothes, the bloodstained suit jacket gone now, just the white shirt, and he looked like someone who had not slept. His eyes were on her and she felt them before she saw them, that specific quality of attention that she was already learning to recognise as his.

She looked back at him.

The hallway between them was not long but it felt like a significant distance. The mark on his jaw from last night had faded to almost nothing. His face was doing that thing it did where it gave nothing away and yet somehow communicated everything, and what it was communicating right now, underneath all that careful blankness, looked almost like something she did not have a word for yet.

She looked away first.

She turned and followed Coco down the hall and did not look back.

Behind her, Kit stayed exactly where he was.

And watched her go.