Page 174 of Chaos

Forgetting everything I’ve ever grumbled and groaned about characters in horror movies who run towards danger instead of away from it, I do exactly that. I display a modicum of caution, carefully tiptoeing my way around the sharp shards littering my bedroom floor, before promptly throwing it to the wind. I charge downstairs, nevermind the fact I’m well aware that the assholes who justalmost killed mewill be long gone by the time I make it outside.

Except I never do. I make it to the bottom step of the stairs, and I freeze.

Fuck.

“Lottie?”

A panicked yell booms across the first floor. Floorboards groan under the weight of thundering footsteps. Hands cup my shoulders, drag down my biceps to my forearms, retrace their path so a palm can cup my nape, another on my cheek and guiding my gaze sideways. “Are you okay?”

I sway as the wild panic in dark eyes renders me a little wobbly. For a second, as they catalogue every inch of my entire body, I forget why my heart is pounding—it starts pounding for different reasons.

And then I mentally smack myself across the face for getting so distracted byeyeballswhen there is something much more worthy of my focus. “I’m fine.” I twist to face forward again. “Someone broke in.”

“What?” Finn moves around me and descends the last stair, a hand stretched behind him and planted on my stomach to stop me from following.

A rough, rasped curse falls from his lips.

Yeah. My thoughts exactly.Everyone’sthoughts exactly, evidently, because the rest of my bleary-eyed roommates mutter similar sentiments as they traipse downstairs.

“Woah.” Yasmin’s shoulder brushes mine, her eyes wide as she surveys the damage. “What the hell happened?”

Destruction.

That’s what.

Complete and utter destruction.

From what I can see, nothing escaped unscathed. The TV is cracked. It looks like someone took a knife to every single sofa cushion, the stuffing spilling out of the gaping wounds in the fabric. The fridge door hangs open on a single hinge, the contents tossed around the kitchen, smeared on counters, dropped on the floor, and it’s not alone down there.

Just like in my bedroom, there’s a fine layer of glass everywhere, threatening our bare feet, but that’s not what I worry about. It’s not what I zone in on, it’s not what makes everything else disappear as my ears start to ring.

No, that would be the lake of red staining the floorboards.

A deep, dark crimson that’s a lot thinner than blood, but just as vital to my livelihood—or at least it used to be. At least I’m trying for it not to be.

Someone sniffs. Adam’s voice asks, “Is that wine?”

My heart skips a beat.

“I thought we cleared out all the alcohol,” Theo muses before swearing quietly, as if he’s admitted a secret.

Finn glances at his friend, then drops his wary gaze to me. “We did.”

“What the fuck?” more than one person murmurs, thick bewilderment tainting the night air spilling in through broken windows and a wonky front door.

I, on the other hand, am not quite so confused.

“For the third time,” I grind out through gritted teeth, wishing like hell that I had the ability to incinerate someone with the sheer force of a glare. “I was asleep. I heard a noise. I—”

“What kind of noise?”

Eyeing the pencil poised against a tiny, stupid notebook, I wonder just how much trouble I’d get into for jamming it into my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s eye. A lot, probably. The uniformed entourage questioning my friends and stringing up caution tape would probably be on my ass in a hot second

“Footsteps.” I choose to oblige the ceaseless, repetitive questioning in favor of copping another charge. “Banging. An engine.”

Mark Monroe makes the same noise he made when he arrived on scene and discovered I was the victim of the reported crime he was here to investigate. The same noise I made when I realized that not only was I going to have to put up with some small town, big-booted deputy itching to throw their weight around via their badge, it had to be the deadbeat dickhead who dumped my pregnant sister. The same noise he made again the first time I recounted what I witnessed of the break-in. And the second time. The third time too, and probably the fourth, and the fifth, and the hundredth until finally,maybe, my words will penetrate that thick skull of his. “And you saw how many people?”

“I didn’t exactly have time to count them.” You know, on account of the brick that almost smashed my head in.

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