Page 157 of Unwrapping Deviance

A scream tears through the house. A blood curdling shriek that raises every hair on my body and slams my heart into my ribcage.

“Mira.”

Abandoning my place guarding my brother, I tear back inside. I thunder across the living room and slam my whole weight into the kitchen door, snapping the hinges and sending the barrier into the wall behind it with a crash.

I come to a halt, fingers coiled in anticipation of breaking someone’s face open. But there’s no one there, except Mira who whips around with a fresh scream before she sees me.

She’s ashen and visibly trembling and my blood scorches in my veins.

“Someone was at the back door,” she pants.

I don’t ask who. I don’t give a fuck. I grab the knife she’s left on the table and undo the locks.

“Lock it!” I snap over my shoulder as I charge through the screen door.

I don’t move off the porch until I hear the crack and snap of the locks behind me.

No one will ever know how grateful I am she didn’t argue or worse — try to come with me. As crazy as I am about her and am fully prepared to kill the fucker who scared her, I would not have been gentle with her.

Something crunches under my boot heel. The gritty grind has me glancing down at the scattered ashes from the burnt bacon. The puddle of grease has stained the rotting wood that runs from the upturned pan a few feet away.

Mira wouldn’t have tossed it. I know judging by the ring of oil marring the railing right above the upturned pan that she’d left it there to air out. Whoever had been on the porch must have knocked it over, and someone had been there; there’s a set of boot prints sprinting down the steps smearing bacon grease and charred remains down towards the path leading into the forest.

“Chris!” Daniel rounds the side of the house, breathing hard. “Where’s Mira?”

It hits me like a truck. The realization that I’d been tricked. They lured us out. Lured me out the back, leaving the front open and unguarded with Mira alone inside.

One glance at Daniel and I know he realizes it, too.

We both scramble to the back door, both pressing against the glass, searching for Mira, but the kitchen is empty, and the door is locked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

MIRA

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“Stupid bitch!”

The crack of his backhand sends a flood of copper liquid to fill my mouth. It’s a combination of mine and his from the chunk I took out of his filthy palm with my teeth.

If I survive this, I’m going to need to be tested for all manner of diseases. The two assholes from the hardware store still look as filthy and foul as the last time I’d seen them, only, now, they also seem feverish with an excitement that is making my stomach knot.

They caught me off guard back at the house. I had my back turned to the backdoor, focused on Christian standing on the porch through the window.

Gap-Tooth came up behind me, clamped a hand over my mouth. Despite all my kicking and thrashing, he hauled me across the living room and out the front door.

Tufty had the truck tearing out of the clearing before the door even shut behind us.

The ride was a fight between Gap-Tooth and me. It was him trying to pin me to the seat and get under my t-shirt and me kicking and clawing every inch of him. I was only saved by Tufty telling him they were supposed to wait.

“She’s going to be pissed if you get carried away the way you do sometimes,”he’d said sharply.“And I miss my turn because of it.”

Gap-Tooth had huffed like a petulant child but dropped back in his seat. He ignored me the rest of the four hours throughmiles of unpaved dirt deep into the forest. Not a single soul dwelled here where the canopy is so thick, the early afternoon hits more like late evening.

The lodge, a sturdy structure with heavy log walls and a square shape, sits hidden in a wide clearing, draped in a murky gray-green hue. The only clear thing I remember beyond that, before I’m dragged inside, is the silence.

Maybe I couldn’t hear anything over the vicious cracking of my heart, but even the wind seemed afraid of this place.

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