Page 4 of Drown in You

I knew the second they got their hands on me. The second Stephen snatched my phone from my grasp. Whatever they had in store for me, they couldn’t let me call for help.

They’re not going to stop. They’ll never stop until they decide I’ve paid for what I’ve done. That I’ve paid my debt.

And I have an impossibly huge debt to pay.

Juliet reaches for my fingers and squeezes. “If they get their hands on you again, they’ll kill you.”

Chapter 2

Luke

My dream girl is dead.

She’s in a casket, skin almost translucent, hands folded together on her stomach. Her blonde hair has been drained of color, and she’s in an ankle-length white dress. She wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that if she was alive.

I rip off my jersey, pushing through the crowd to get to her as they lower her into her awaiting grave, casket still open.

“Stop!” I shout. “I need to put this on her!”

She should be buried in my jersey. The name Valentine stitched across her back until we’re both nothing but dust.

But they don’t stop. They don’t hear me, even as I scream my throat raw, the desperation clenching my heart as her coffin hits the bottom of the grave and they pour the dirt over her body.

I scream for them to close the lid. But no sound comes out.

My hands are see-through. I’m a ghost too.

I lurch awake, a cold sweat coating the back of my neck, my chest, my pits. Hop out of bed to toss water on my face and brace against the sink, bags beneath my eyes to mark all the sleepless nights that have come before this one.

I sneak back down the hallway to my room, careful not to alert Bud, who will wake the whole house. Coming home on break is always an adjustment. I miss sharing a house with the Devils who would all shrug it off if they saw me wandering around like a zombie at three in the morning.

Not getting away with that shit around my mother. Since I’ve been home, she’s plied me with chicken soup, grilled ham and cheese, saltine crackers, peanut butter sandwiches. Every comfort food she can think of.

I grab my phone off my nightstand to fire off a text to the one person I know is lying awake with me. A smile pulls at my lips when I spot the message already waiting.

Sienna

I want one of those old cameras where you can’t even see the photo you just took. You use it once and those are all the photos you get.

Sienna and I met on social media when we were angsty fifteen-year-olds. Our parents had just started dating, and when I found out Mike had an estranged daughter he hadn’t seen since she was nine, I snapped a photo in a mask, made a new account under the nickname Ten for my jersey number freshman year, and reached out to her.

I knew what it was like to lose a parent. Even if I’d never met her, I knew her pain. But I couldn’t reach out to her as Luke, son of her dad’s new girlfriend. She wouldn’t open up to me if she knew who I really was.

Not sure what I expected to come of it. Nothing, really. Figured she’d probably ignore me when I messaged her. But she didn’t.

Hi. I like your mask.

Right away, she was the sweetest girl I’d ever met. The kind of girl who didn’t deserve a shitty dad but definitely deserved a good friend.

That’s what we’ve been for each other since, even after our parents' brief relationship ended. She might not know my real name or face, she might believe the lie I fed her about living in California, she might not suspect the California number I acquired to text her is from an app, but everything else is real.

Ten

You know they actually put a camera on that phone in your hand. You can take as many pictures as you want.

As expected, her response comes seconds later.

Sienna

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