Page 49 of Splitting Secrets
I don’t bother telling him that rest won’t find me. Not when my mind is such a chaotic mess. He never gives me a chance anyway, because once he says the words, the image of him flickers out again until it disappears altogether, and I’m left all alone.
We spend three more days in the cabin, carefully tip-toeing around like ghosts to avoid being seen or heard by anyone from Ravenshurst. Nights are the worst for all of us. We’ve each formed a new phobia of the dark, yet having lights on can call unwanted attention to the cabin. It’s a battle we fight each time the sun sets, and one we nearly lose before it wakes up again the following morning.
Tonight is no different.
It’s been snowing for days. The cold is much more manageable with extra layers of clothing and blankets, but it still makes the most menial tasks increasingly difficult.
“What is he going to do with us?” Jonah wonders aloud for the millionth time.
We’re all lounging in the living room together, a single candle lit on the small sofa table in the center of us.
We’ve spent hours coming up with hypothetical scenarios for what our future holds and considering all of our options. We always reach the same conclusion, though: Raze is our only viable escape. None of us are equipped to hike through the woods for the days it would take to get to Infinity Heights. If we ever got there, we have no money or resources to get ourselves further away from the Midnight Syndicate. Even if we could, we decided it would be a futile attempt. The Syndicate has members across the globe that we don’t even know about. Escaping them isn’t possible. And even if we did, they would only send Raze after our families as retaliation.
The conversation always ends up here, with one of us questioning what Raze wants with us to begin with. How does he benefit from helping us?
“Hopefully he comes back soon so we can ask him,” Beatrix sighs, tightening the blanket she’s wearing across her shoulders.
“And before we run out of food,” Ava adds wearily. “We’ve only got two more cups of rice and a couple of cans of vegetables to get us by.”
“We can ration,” I suggest, if only to try to ease her mind. But she’s right. If Raze doesn’t come back soon, we’re going to have to make our way into the woods and find food ourselves, which puts us at risk of being seen.
It doesn’t matter. We’ll do what we need to do to survive.Together.
We haven’t seen Raze since the first night he brought us in. When we woke up the second day after sleeping well into the afternoon, we discovered he had dropped off more of his old clothing, food, and glass bottles of the tincture he claimed would heal us. There was a note on the table, but all it said was that he would be back soon.
We waited an entire twenty-four hours before mustering up the courage to drink whatever was in the tincture. They forced me to go first, and we sat for a couple hours afterward to ensure there were no real side effects before they followed. Two days later, all of our wounds are practically gone.
The room is silent as we each fall victim to our own minds. I have no idea how much time passes before there’s the distinctive sound of snow crunching beneath tires just outside the front window. It takes us a beat to register what’s happening, and each of us shares a terrified look when it dawns on us.
There’s a vehicle approaching the front of the cabin.
We each hit the ground at the same time and I signal for them to army crawl toward the bedroom I’ve been sleeping in. There’s a window along the back wall where we might be able to slip out unnoticed if we have enough time.
“It could be Raze,” Ava points out, though she continues to crawl directly behind me.
A car door slams, followed by footsteps in the snow.
“If it is, I want to see before we let him in,” Beatrix mutters. “Someone should get up and check.”
We nearly break through the doorway of the bedroom when a key slides into the lock and the doorknob twists. We freeze in place as a cool breeze flows through the whole cabin. Raze steps over the threshold, quickly swinging it back shut.
He spins and looks around the dark space, his brows furrowing when he doesn’t immediately spot us.
Jonah shifts beside me, and Raze’s eyes drop to the floor, where the four of us are cowering against the wall.
“What are you doing?” he asks, his posture firming.
My gaze falls to his arms, where he’s got a heap of something black draped, but his hands are otherwise empty. Disappointment coils in my belly when I realize he hasn’t brought us any more food.
“We should have established a special knock,” Jonah complains, grasping the table beside him to climb to his feet.
Raze’s frown deepens as he blinks back at Jonah like he’s a puzzle he can’t figure out. “Why would we have done that?”
“How the hell else were we supposed to know it was you and not some random old guy from the Syndicate here to whisk us back into those cells,” Beatrix answers agitatedly. She swipes the dust off her pants and stands up straight, matching Raze’s confident posture.
His face loosens as understanding settles in. He looks directly at me to explain, “None of them would bother coming out here in the cold. They’d send their little pets to hunt you down. As luck would have it, I killed them both this morning.”
The confession falls so easily from his mouth, I can hardly believe it. The four of us stare back at him with slackened jaws, our brains struggling to process the magnitude of his words.
