Page 46 of Secret Shifters Next Door

“Wait,” I said. “Is this really my car?”

He looked confused for a second and did a double take before saying, “Oh, I see. Mr. Mills paid for a full detail job. He said he wanted it perfect for when you came and picked it up. Had us go ahead and put new brakes on her, too.”

I smiled to myself. It was a sweet gesture to go above and beyond like this. I thanked the clerk, then took the keys and pulled out my phone. I sent Tate a message, thanking him for taking care of things for me.

Normally he would have texted back almost immediately, but there was no response, and my phone was silent on the drive home. It got me wondering what kind of job he was on that forced him to go radio silent. Hopefully, he was safe. I didn’t like thinking that he might be in danger.

The house was eerily quiet when I stepped inside. For the last several days, either the girls or Tate had been here with me. The silence was welcome, but also a little strange. Once all the doors were locked, I tried to find something to pass the time while I waited for the girls to get home.

There was literally nothing I wanted to watch, and I had no book in my to-be-read pile. After ten minutes, I decided to mop the floors. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done it, so ithadto be about time for a thorough cleaning.

Once I had the mop bucket full of sudsy water, I went about cleaning the floors. The mindless work kept me busy. Moving from the living room hardwoods backward to the kitchen tile, I was both happy and disturbed to see how much cleaner they were as I worked. Apparently, teenage girls weren’t good at wiping their feet.

I was backed up against the sliding patio door, dunking the mop into the bucket of water again, when I heard the sound of breaking glass. The explosive sound made me freeze. Then the sound of raining chips of glass pattering around the tile had me glancing down, scared I was going to get cut. Never in my life would I have thought to run. An icy spike of fear lodged deep in my gut when the man in the ski mask and gloves walked through the broken door. In that split second, I realized I’d set the front door alarm, but had forgotten to set the back door.

Frozen in place, I watched him step through the doorway and reach out for me. My brain was still frozen, like it was on a delay. It was still processing the sound of breaking glass and hadn’t even begun to process the intruder reaching out for me. When it finally did send the signal to my legs, it was too late to run. His arm shot out like a snake and wrapped around my neck, yanking me toward him. His arm went across my throat, tightening like a steel band as he pulled me against his chest. I tried to rip away, but my feet slid on the wet floor. I stumbled, but he tightened his grip to hold me up. All the oxygen was cut off from my air canal. I gagged, trying to breathe and beating at his arm as hard as I could. Fear unlike anything I’d ever felt flooded through me. Adrenaline pumped into my body, and I clawed at his sleeve, trying to pull the arm away to catch a breath.

A whole new terror erupted when he started dragging me toward the door. He wanted to take me away, into the night, away from my home. An instinctual, animalistic panic chittered through my mind. If he took me, I would never come back, I knew it without a doubt. The pain in my neck was almost unbearable, and I wasn’t able to fight back like I wanted. The pull toward the door seemed like an inexorable finale to this nightmare I was living.

He began stepping through the door, pulling at me harder, as I still tried to fight. My vision was blurring and going dark around the edges. I was about to pass out from the lack of oxygen. My lungs burned and ached, every nerve in my body screaming for oxygen. He pulled me through the door, and all I could do was reach out and clutch at the frame. His pant leg hooked on a shard of glass, and he stopped to pull it free. That was when I managed to stretch the final inch I needed to grab the one thing I had left—the panic button installed on the door frame. Tate’s crew had put one at every entry door and in every room.

My hand slapped at where I thought it was. I couldn’t see it because of how the man was holding my neck. I couldn’t find the button.I couldn’t. Where the fuck was it? He freed his leg and pulled me again. I held tight with my right hand and slapped the wall one last time with my left. The tip of my ring finger brushed against the button, barely clicking it. Even a millimeter either way, and I wouldn’t have activated it. I would have been taken.

The shrill, earsplitting alarm erupted like an explosion in the night. Even though I knew it was coming, it shocked me with how loud it was, immediately making me want to cover my ears. My assailant was equally surprised, and the grip around my neck loosened. Even oxygen starved and already exhausted from the struggle, I used the chance I’d bought. Planting my feet, I yanked myself forward and ripped fully out of his grip. Once Iwas free, I sprinted away from him. For a terrifying second, my feet slipped and slid on the wet floor, but by a miracle, I stayed upright and ran for the stairs. The attacker screamed a curse, but the alarm drowned it out. His feet pounded on the floor behind me, but he wasn’t as lucky as I’d been. I heard the squeak of shoes on the wet floor and then the thunderous rattle of him falling to the ground. Grabbing the stair rail, I turned and took the steps two at a time, running with more speed and force than I knew I possessed. I came to the first room I found and ran inside, slamming the door and locking it behind me. The girls’ bathroom. I sat and put my back against the door, braced my feet on the vanity, and waited.

My breath hissed madly in and out of my nose as I waited for the thumping of his feet to come up the stairs, but I didn’t hear it. Had the alarm scared him off? My phone rang, and I screamed, actually screamed in fright. I put a hand to my mouth and tried not to whimper as I pulled the phone out of my jeans pocket.

Before I could say anything, Tate’s voice burst from the speaker. “Harley?” he yelled. “Harley, what the hell’s going on? My phone alerted me. A panic button got activated.”

I took a shaking breath and said, “Tate, someone broke in. He… he… he tried to take me.”

“Oh shit. It’s okay, my guys got the same notification. They should be there soon. Is he still there? Do you hear anyone?”

I turned and pressed my ear to the door and listened as best I could, but I couldn’t hear anything above the siren of the alarm. Almost as though the system had read my mind, the alarm abruptly stopped.

From downstairs, I heard men shouting, “Harley? Harley? It’s Steff and Blayne. We’re here. Harley?”

I sobbed in relief and spoke into the phone. “Tate, they’re here. Your friends are here.”

“Thank Christ. Let them know where you are.”

I cracked the door of the bathroom. “Up here,” I called.

In seconds, Blayne and Steff were in the bathroom with me. Blayne was awkwardly rubbing my back, trying to comfort me.

I put Tate on speaker. “Steff, you there?”

“Yeah, bud, we’re both here,” Steff said.

“Okay, cool. Don’t leave until I get there. I’m on my way. Harley, did you hear that?”

Feeling more in control of myself, I said, “Yes. I’ll see you soon.”

“We’ll be here,” Steff said. “We’ll work on whatever repairs we can do.”

For the next thirty minutes, I sat on the couch and watched as Steff worked on the door and Blayne pulled up the security feeds from my house. Steff cleaned up the broken glass as best he could, and then called multiple hardware stores trying to find someone to come out and replace the glass or the door itself.

Blayne finally came over to me and said, “I have all the footage compiled. Do you want to look through it?”

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