Page 80 of Like You Know

“Calvin.” Mom sounded reproachful. “I told you to reassure her, not send her a ransom note!”

“I thought I was. It’s been a very stressful fucking couple of days.” He sighed and leaned heavily on the counter. “I’m sorry, Amaya.”

“He saved you?” I asked Mom. I needed to have it confirmed again. “You’re OK? He’s not keeping you here against your will?”

“No, honey. We can leave if we want to.”

“No, you can’t!” Calvin sounded panicked. My anxiety spiked.

“Calvin!” Mom barked.

“Sorry, sorry. I just meant it’s safer if you don’t. I don’t want anything to happen to you. We have to be very careful about our next move. But, no, I’m not holding either of you hostage or whatever.”

“What the fuck is happening?” I collapsed onto the couch next to Mom. She brushed my hair over my shoulder, and I leaned into her touch.

“Cal and I have been planning to get out. With you finishing high school and going off to college or traveling, we were putting things in motion to move away from Devilbend. The business I mentioned was a new chapter of BestLyf—somewhere the organization doesn’t have a lot of members,” Mom explained.

“Why? Mom, BestLyf is a cult. Please, you have to believe me. They’re dangerous and they do all kinds of illegal shit.”

“I know.” She patted my arm, then frowned at me. “Wait, how do you know?”

A bitchy comment about how she’d know if she’d paid any attention to me over the last year was on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back. Old habits die hard. “Doesn’t matter. How did you end up ... here?” I gestured vaguely to her banged-up state and the time capsule of a cabin we were currently in.

“The new BestLyf chapter was supposed to be just a stepping stone. Once we had some distance from the headquarters in Devilbend and from Raine Clayton, we were planning to pull back from it and eventually separate ourselves from it entirely. We spent a lot of time making a plan, thought it out carefully, but ...” She looked at Calvin.

“But my mother is a fucking psychopathic megalomaniac,” he gritted out. The kettle started making a high-pitched noise, and he turned to take it off the heat, busying himself with making tea.

“Raine somehow got wind of our plan, and she didn’t like it. She’s very possessive of her son. And he knows a lot of things that could threaten BestLyf.”

“Oh, you mean how they run a bunch of illegal businesses and kidnap and kill people regularly? Yeah, I can see how she might be worried about that getting out.” I huffed.

They both gaped at me, and I shrugged, unfazed. I wasn’t the one who needed to explain herself right now.

“So, what’s the new plan then?” I asked.

Calvin placed two steaming mugs of herbal tea on the side table. “We lie low for a while. No one knows about this cabin. We take some time so your mother can recover, and we plan our next move.”

The sound of footsteps on the porch had us all swinging our heads toward the door. There was a knock, and Calvin pulled his gun out.

“I told you not to tell anyone,” he hissed at me. “Who did you tell?”

Before I could even reply, another knock sounded on the rickety wood. Then a woman’s voice came through the cracks.

“Come on, Cali-boy, open the door for Mommy. I know you’re in there!”

We exchanged looks, the blood draining from all our faces. It made the dark bruises on Mom’s cheek and eye appear even more stark.

“Calvin! Open this door right now!” Raine shouted.

Cal held his finger over his lips in the universal sign for silence and went to the door. “Mom?” he called, putting on a surprised voice.

“Amaya,” Mom whispered as she pushed me away. “Go to the door on the left and hide. Go now.”

I got up from the couch, but instead of hiding, I picked up the poker again.

Calvin hid the gun behind his back as he unlocked the door and opened it a crack. He said something I couldn’t make out. Then Raine laughed.

“You should know better than to lie to me, my stupid, sweet boy.”

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