Page 75 of Pretty Threats

Before I realize what I’m doing, I’m dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt with two of my bags over my shoulder. As I emerge from the hall, I look around. There’s food on the kitchen island, but the three murderous assholes are all upstairs.

I grab my sneakers and carry them to the back door.

As quietly as possible, I shove my feet into my shoes before tiptoeing outside.

Then, I run.

By the time I’m off Killian’s property, my lungs burn and my heart races double time. I stand at the bus stop, gasping for breath.

My mind races as fast as my heartbeat. I feel like I’m about to have a panic attack. Constantly looking over my shoulder, I wait to spot them… coming for me.

Thankfully they don’t appear before a bus pulls up a couple minutes later.

As I climb the steps and drop into a seat, I have one burning concern. I escaped, so for now, I’m free. But I won’t stay that way unless I come up with a plan.

As soon as I get to campus, I have to find a safe place to stay. Not Meredith Hall. Somewhere Killian can’t get to me.

KILLIAN

I find an electronic side door into the server that houses the film department’s media. Getting into any part of GU’s system is a challenge, but the film school doesn’t have the same encryption as the administration network does.

When I locate Raine’s short film and play it, an eerie feeling overtakes me. In the film, there’s a little kid crawling around the carpet, and the camera has an extreme closeup of his chubby-cheeked face as he finds a toy truck, chews on it, and drops it. When he continues his progress toward the end of the couch, we’re in his point of view, with tight views of the grain of the carpet and a black sock.

When he clears the couch, an adult foot comes slowly into focus. It’s as white as the belly of a fish and deadly still. The camera pans slowly, but the body remains slightly out of focus, including the place where a needle sticks out of an arm.

I don’t move as the film starts again on a loop.

For the record, I wasn’t a toddler when it happened. I was six and a half. And whoever told Raine the details of my mom’s death deserves a punch in the fucking face.

Folding my arms across my chest, I scowl. I guess I should be pissed at her, too. Having heard the story, she didn’t need to use it for her fucking film. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t care.

The video plays, and I shake my head. There was no carpet. Or crawling on the floor. I came out of the bedroom in the morning and found her. Tried to wake her up. For a long time. She’d passed out before with a needle still in her arm and woke up. Deep down, I knew this time was different. She was cold and stiff. But I kept trying.

I didn’t know the code to unlock her cell phone and dreaded knocking on a neighbor’s door because all our neighbors hated us. We were dirty and broke. Drug-addicted and emotional. Did Marianne tell Raine that, too? That the place was filthy and so was I?

When Child Protective Services reached my dad and he brought me to his place, Marianne clucked her tongue and kept mumbling it was a shame and a disgrace. I didn’t understand some of the words she used, but I recognized the tone. My dad was disgusted by it all, too. And the thing he seemed to find the most disgusting was me. Looking back, I wish I’d told him to fuck off. Little kid Killian didn’t talk back, though. He just shut down.

My half brothers were all right. One of the brothers—Aiden, I think—told me not to worry about it. “Dirt washes off. Sweat, blood, dirt, all that, you just need to scrub it off in the shower.”

I’m told I didn’t speak for days. Just cried. I can’t recall. During that time, my memory—the one that remembers everything—broke down. I wonder if some of her drugs were still in my system and that’s why I can’t remember much from the early days after she died. My mom dosed me on the regular to keep me from whining that I was hungry. I’d sleep all night and half the day. Like her. Some of the drugs affect memory, even a photographic memory like mine.

A lot of my early life is like a movie. I watch fragments in my mind, and it’s as though they happened to someone else. That little kid is so scrawny and weak. He’s unrecognizable as me. I think he may have been afraid of things. Like starving to death. Like being left alone. But if that’s true, shouldn’t I remember what fear feels like?

Watching the film once more, a thought creeps into my head. Having a girl who tells stories for a living is a problem for a criminal who wants to keep a low profile. And she’s just proven she’s willing to use pieces of my life in her films. We’re going to need some ground rules.

After slapping the lid of my laptop shut, I grab my phone. It displays an alert, and I realize the phone’s fucking control center is open again. There’s some kind of glitch in the workflow on the new models. I go into settings to adjust the workflow to try to fix it.

Once that’s done, I jog down the steps and to the back bedroom.

“Raine,” I say as I grab the door handle. “We need to talk about your short film.” I shove the door open. It takes a second for me to realize she’s not under the pile of bedding.

The room’s empty.

My eyes narrow and shift to the footboard where her bag was hanging. That’s gone, too.

I back out of the room, check the media room and bathroom and then come out to the living room. Empty everywhere.

When I reach it, I find the back door unlocked.

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