Chase Alexander Curtis sat next to him, bound and gagged with duct tape—the dead man could only be his brother. I raised my aim to his chest, and his eyes widened in fear. Desperate, inarticulate sounds came from behind his gag. The smiling man was no longer smiling.

Unfortunately, his terror wasn’t directed at me. Curtis was looking over my shoulder.

Chill bumps popped up on my arms and dread churned in my stomach. But before I could turn to see what he was so scared of, pain slammed into my skull, and the room spun around me. I fought the loss of consciousness, but darkness surrounded me from the periphery, a betrayal by the very element I was born to embrace.

The last thing I saw before my eyes closed against my will was the woman’s hand that plucked my gun from my grip.

Twenty

Sera

The ringing of a cell phone woke me up, and it took me a second to realize I wasn’t hearing my own ringtone. And one more second to remember I no longer had a cell phone. After that, everything else came crashing in, and for a moment, my loss—that fresh remembrance of it—was too thick to breathe through. As it was most mornings.

When I’d pushed it all back again, back into memory, where the pain was manageable, I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, but Kris’s phone stopped ringing before I could answer it. The screen showed one missed call, from Anne.

Kris. He’d been in my bed. Or rather, I was in his.

I twisted, but I knew from the lack of warmth on my left side that he was gone before my gaze ever fell on the empty half of the bed. Still, the memory of the night before surged through me—shared grief, comfort through touch, and a mutual pleasure so perfect that in that instant, nothing else had existed. No pain. No fear. No memories. There’d been nothing but the two of us, and in that moment, I’d been sure we could actually be together. That maybe we were supposed to be together.

But now he was gone, and the bed was cold.

I glanced at the alarm clock and groaned over the numbers—it was barely five in the morning—then stretched to turn the lamp off again, when what I really wanted to do was pull on a bare minimum of clothing and tiptoe downstairs to curl up on the couch with Kris. But if he’d gone downstairs, he’d gone downstairs for a reason.

So I burrowed farther into the covers and closed my eyes. But sleep didn’t return.

Kris’s phone rang again, less than two minutes after the first missed call. I picked it up and scowled when I read Anne’s name on the screen again. Why was she calling him in the middle of the night?

What if this was some kind of emergency?

I pressed the accept call button, before I could overthink it and lose my nerve. “Hello? Anne?” I said, and for a moment, there was only silence on the other end. Then someone exhaled into my ear.

“The spider is dead,” a child’s voice said over the line, and I realized I was talking to Hadley. “The web is a trap.”

“What? Hadley? Is something wrong?”

“The spider is dead! The web is a trap!” she shouted, and her high-pitched scream skewered my brain, then bounced around the inside of my skull. “The spider is dead! The web is a trap!”

I held the phone away from my ear to save my hearing, and I had to half shout to be heard over her. “Hadley! Put your mom on the phone.” But she was still screaming those same two sentences. “Hadley!”

“Hadley!” Anne’s voice echoed mine from the other end of the line, and a plastic clattering followed as her phone hit the floor, but I could still hear the child screaming, and her mother trying to calm her down. “Hadley, what’s wrong? Who’s on the phone? Did you have a bad dream?”

“Anne!” I shouted, desperate to be heard over them both. I didn’t know what spider she was talking about, but I understood both “dead” and “trap.”

Something was horribly wrong. And the call had come on Kris’s phone.

I was still shouting at Anne, trying to get her attention, when my bedroom door flew open and crashed into the dresser against the wall. “Sera?” Kori had her gun drawn and aimed at the floor. “What happened?”

She stepped inside and Ian came in after her, similarly armed, and they automatically scanned separate halves of the room, looking for the threat. When they found none, their gazes returned to me, then slid down from my face. Which is when I remembered that I was naked. And holding Kris’s phone.

“It’s Hadley.” I held the phone out to Kori as I pulled the sheet up to my chest with my free hand. “She’s freaking out about a spider, or something.”

Kori set her gun on the end table, then took the phone and listened as Anne tried to calm Hadley. Ian turned around while I pulled my borrowed pajamas back on, and as I tugged the shirt into place, Kori handed the phone back to me. “They can’t hear us, and I can’t get to them until Anne turns off the infrared grid.”

Her house had state-of-the-art security, which—Kris had explained—Ruben Cavazos had paid for, in order to protect his love child. Noelle’s biological daughter.

“Is that Kris’s phone?” Van said from the doorway as Kori slipped past her into the hall, and I realized that my shouting into the phone had woken the entire household. “Where is he?”

“Downstairs, I guess.” I stood and held the phone a foot away from my ear, and could still hear Hadley screaming.

Kori stepped back into my room a minute later wearing jeans beneath the T-shirt she slept in, with her own phone in her hand.