Page 23 of Safe in Shadow
“Okay, well. See you soon, Nyx?”
There was no answer.
I hope he’s friendly.
Maybe I should see someone about this...
Chapter Eight
Grace lay on her side, staring into bright sunlight, unable to convince her tortured muscles that today would be better, that today she wouldn’t beat them up. Well, not as much as yesterday.
Wine and too much food, possibly food poisoning, had made her hallucinate or have lucid dreams, or something crazy.
She rolled to her back and ran her hands down her sides, wondering...Was it real?
A finger slid through her curls, over her clit. No pain. No telltale sensations or traces of someone else having been inside of her.
A dream. A hallucination. Or just someone who has been working too hard, getting too drunk and sleepy. God, did I fall asleep in that tub? I could have drowned.
Grace got up and trotted to the bathroom, staring hard at the mirror as she sat on the toilet.
Therehadbeen a name. Of course, it wasn’t there now, but hadn’t there been letters in the steam last night?
Letters that made no sense. Nyx.
Which isn’t a real name, so yeah, that tracks with it being a dream. Sure.
GRACE BOUNDED DOWNthe stairs in a fresh tank top, sports bra, and a pair of cut-off denim shorts that were too small to wear in public but just right for sweating your ass off alone in a huge house that needed a lot of work. “First order of business—that dining room table,” she told herself, and maybe Nana.
No, the first order was putting on the Andrews Sisters, because Nana loved them. The second order was eating some cold leftovers, or maybe she would nuke them for thirty seconds, just to take the chill off, because Mrs. Yerchenko swore microwaving things would give you cancer, and Mrs. Yerchenko was healthy as a very stubborn horse, so Grace tended to keep microwaving non-frozen food to a minimum. With all the microwaved shit she’d been eating lately, maybe she’d be one big tumor in ten years, and wouldn’t that be a waste? The third order of business would be to haul that table into the area that would be the beautiful dining room. She could already picture it, pretty little tables for two and four, covered in whatever tablecloths she could find, but always whites and light colors, always a small vase or bowl of fresh flowers on them, all mismatched, but all okay.
“It’ll be real, Nana,” she whispered, pausing for a moment to look into what would be half the heart of her B and B—
And screamed, sank to the floor, and put both hands over her mouth to stop the high-pitched wail of terror that erupted.
Because the table that had been on the porch was now perfectly set in the center of the dining room, and the matching chairs she had purchased were set neatly around it.
“What the hell? How? Who?” Grace scrambled back up to her knees and ran to the front door, phone in her shaking hand. Someone had been in the house. Was someone in the house now?
She skidded to a stop at the stairs of the porch, “Fuck, my keys!”
No driving away without those.
Run to the road? Go back in the house with... Who? Some stalker who likes to move furniture in the middle of the night? Run into the woods?
