22. Hannah

Hannah

P icture this.

You’re sound asleep, dreaming of the way your boss's shirt clings to his biceps when he’s working under a car (hot right?) when a sharp rap drags you out of your dream and into the darkness of the room around you.

My eyes feel like they’re full of sand when I blink against the blackness surrounding me.

My first thought is a panicked why is it fucking dark?

My second thought?

Who the fuck is knocking at my door?

Slowly, I sit upright in bed. Did I hear that or was I imagining it?

As if to confirm my suspicion, the sound of three, quick heart-stopping knocks sound from the darkness beyond my bedroom door.

Oh, fuck.

My chest feels like someone’s injected me with lead as every hair on my body stands straight up.

Swallowing a shaky breath, I force my legs to carry me out into the pitch-black void that is my living room. Remember my thing with the dark? Well, it’s here in full force and I can feel the invisible hands grabbing at me from the shadows, even as the threat outside knocks again.

Three quick, harsh taps.

That’s not a normal knock.

Slowly, so as not to alert the person I’m here, I peel back the curtain the smallest bit to peek out to the front porch.

I have to crane my neck, but I can just barely make out the back and shoulders of a man pressing into the front door.

Instantly, I fall back, slapping a hand over my mouth to silence my squeak.

“Let me in . . . please . . . ”

My heart drops to my stomach as the sick, almost childlike voice sounds through the door.

I don’t know who the hell that is.

“Hannah . . .” He whimpers my name like a prayer and it feels like the weight of the world comes crashing down on top of my chest.

How the hell does he know my name?

Three more taps sound, followed by silence. I back up until I run into the wall, like if I press my body into the plaster hard enough, I’ll slip inside and out of sight.

The silent ringing in the air is louder than anything I’ve ever heard before.

That is . . . until those taps start from my bedroom window.

I bolt for the room, just as the man tries to tug the window open and fall back, watching the shadow through the thin white curtain as if there’s a spotlight on me.

Diving for my phone on the bed, I start to dial the cops, but what the hell are they going to do? Show up in an hour after the man has either murdered me or wandered off and tell me to lock my doors?

I know how our justice system works and there’s no charge for knocking on someone’s house.

So, I do one better and dial the only person I know that’s scarier than anything knocking on the window at two in the morning.

“Hannah.” Mason’s voice is gruff and full of sleep, but he answers on the second ring. Under different circumstances, it would make my stomach do a little backflip, especially after Friday night. But right now, in the face of whatever psychopath is outside my window, I don’t have room for much else but fear.

“Mason,” I whisper, working to keep my voice low, even though it shakes when the man pounds his fist against the window pane.

One.

Two.

Three.

What’s stopping him from breaking the glass? From getting in if that’s what he really wants?

“What the fuck was that?” There’s rustling on the other end of the line and I imagine him slipping out of bed.

“Someone’s trying to break in.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper, my voice choked as fear slips through my veins like ice. “He knows my name.”

The shadow steps away, a hand remaining and I watch that hand as it slowly, deafeningly slips across the window until it too disappears. I

“Hannah . . .” the man cries, banging the glass of the small bathroom window next.

“Grab a knife from the kitchen and get to the bathroom. Lock the door. Don’t come out until I call for you, okay?”

The rush of thoughts spiraling through my head drown out the sound of his voice. Like what if he gets in? Is he connected to unknown ? Missy? What if they sent him?

What if they hurt Mason?

“Hannah.”

“Okay,” I whisper, letting out a squeak when the man bangs somewhere near the back of the house. Then . . . everything goes silent, again.

“I’m on my way.”

“Okay.”

The taps start again, louder now. More deranged and uneven. Desperate.

“ Hannah .”

I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out but a breath of air.

“Breathe.”

I nod as if he can see me and tiptoe toward the kitchen.

“Where is he?” Mason’s voice is sharp, demanding my attention while I struggle to listen for the intruder.

“I—I don’t know,’ I stammer, tiptoeing into the kitchen and slinking along the counters to peek out the window in the backyard. Nothing. “It’s dar—”

Another bang sounds, this one only a couple feet from where I stand at the knife block and I let out a squeak in terror before I can stop myself. Immediately, I look toward the back door and with the sinking feeling of full-body dread, everything in me runs cold.

“Hannah. Get to the fucking bathroom,” Mason growls, practically feral on the other end of the line.

“The back door’s unlock—”

Just as I rush for the door, the knob twists in my hands and the man hurtles through, slamming into me and knocking me to my ass on the kitchen floor.

I scream as he topples over me, but all the breath leaves me with the weight of his body. He claws at me in the darkness and my phone skitters along the floor under the table.

That time with Missy flashes back to my mind, when she attacked me in her bedroom all those years ago.

” Help. Me ,” he roars, his face looming over mine in the darkness. I can’t see much, but I can smell him. The powerful scent of either ammonia or cat urine on his skin. His breath washes over me, a nasty combination of decay and poor hygiene as I fight against his hold. “ You did this to me!”

I don’t know who she is, but I manage to knee him in the groin and roll when he cries out in pain. I try to scramble to my feet, but before I can, he grabs my hips and drags me back, a feral sound leaving his lips.

“You did this,” he snarls, tugging at my hair until I feel strands rip free. “You made them do this to me.”

I twist in his hold, throwing my head back as hard as I can and despite the pain, the sickening crunch of his nose is what rattles my brain. He screams in agony, his hold lessening just enough for me to try to escape, hair be damned, but whatever he’s on either dulls the pain or makes him impervious to rage. He grabs me, pinning me down with his body weight on my back.

Deathly cold fingers clamp around my throat when I scream and it comes out a sputtering choke as he forces the breath from my lungs, cutting off my air supply. Tears leak from my eyes, and my skin burns from the lack of oxygen, but he doesn’t stop.

He’s going to kill me.

I croak, clutching at the linoleum, his fingers around my throat—clawing him, but he won’t budge. My vision blurs and then the edges start to grow dark, peppering like an old film when suddenly, the fingers are gone and I’m sucking in air like I just swam from the bottom of the Pacific.

I cough, gasping for breath as I try to come to in the commotion of the darkness surrounding me.

There are the cries of my attacker, but there’s also the feral animalistic growl of a very pissed off, very big Mason Carpenter, as he beats him into the floor on what used to be the table not even five feet away from me.

When the man’s cries turn to quiet whimpers, something big and dark skids across the floor with a metallic thunk .

Holy shit.

A tire iron.

“Hannah . . .” Mason murmurs, flipping on the light by the back door.

In this light, everything lacks its usual cheeriness. The man is alive, but he’s going to be in a world of pain when he comes down from whatever he’s on. His face is a bloody, beaten mess. His clothes are tattered, though I suspect they were like that when he arrived.

He looks like he’s on the brink of death. Sweat dots his brow, mixing with the blood in his thinning hair. His eyes are sunken and his teeth are yellowed and broken. I don’t know how much is Mason, but it’s clear the man is very, very sick.

It’s not until Mason drops down on his haunches in front of me that I realize I’m shaking like a leaf.

“Come here.” Mason’s voice is rough and strained, whether from the fight or something else, I don’t know.

He gently helps me sit up and then tugs me into his chest. I can’t look away from the man, though, whining in a puddle of his own urine on my kitchen floor.

“Little doe. Look at me.” It’s not a question. It’s a command. Gently, he lifts my chin to inspect my neck, his nostrils flaring at whatever he sees. I wince from the soreness, my eyes locking with his dark and stormy gray ones as shivers rack through me from head to toe. He searches my face, but he looks away before I can understand that look in his eyes.

Protectiveness? Possessiveness? Murderous?

All three?

“You’ve got to help me . . .” the man whimpers from behind Mason, seemingly not even on this planet anymore.

Instinctively, Mason’s grip on my waist tightens when he peers back to the man.

“What’s your name?”

“Help . . . Me . . .” he wheezes in response and Mason shakes his head. “They left me here.”

“Who?”

“Them . . . them, them, them, them . . .” He repeats the word over and over rocking back and forth on the ground. “It hurts so bad.”

“Going to hurt a lot more in a bit, don’t you worry.”

I jump, scrambling back into the kitchen island and Mason’s grip on my waist tightens, steadying me. The dark fed I saw at the shop a couple weeks ago is here, standing at the back door and staring down at the man on my floor with a look of quiet anger and disgust.

“You just had to let him piss himself, didn’t you?”

Mason’s jaw ticks, but he doesn’t respond. Instead, he slips his arms under me and stands, hoisting me up like a toddler being carted to bed. He carries me away from the man and the handsome FBI agent and into the living room before carefully depositing me on the couch. He reaches behind me, his shoulders tense and his face unreadable before he covers me up with a bright pink afghan from the back of the couch.

“I’ll be right back,” he says quietly, and before he straightens, he wipes a thumb gently under my eye to collect a stray tear that escaped.

Is this Mason Carpenter . . . comforting me? Is this the soft side he claims he doesn’t have? Hidden away behind the harsh, handsome exterior that he shows to the rest of the world?

He gives me one last look before he heads to the kitchen. I watch him go, gingerly laying my head back on the couch.

“Ew.”

Savannah Carpenter, looking like she just stepped off a runway, stands in the back doorway, looking down at the man on the floor with the same look the agent had.

“I told you to wait in the car,” the dark fed says and she just shrugs.

“I got bored.”

He shakes his head, turning back to whoever he’s on the phone with. I get the feeling they do this a lot.

So the FBI agent and the princess of LA . . . are an item? That doesn’t seem fair. They’re too pretty to reproduce together. Their kids will be gods among men.

It’s then, her blue eyes ghost over me.

And . . . I forgot she hates my family.

“Jesus, Mason . . .” she breathes, but he doesn’t say anything, stepping past her and bringing me a glass of water.

Come to think of it. Almost getting strangled to death did make me thirsty. It could also be the animosity in the room.

“Is that . . .?” Savannah starts, but when Mason fixes her with a hard stare, her lips clamp shut.

Oh. So his family really doesn’t like me.

Way to fuck it up for the rest of us, Missy.

“Drink. “ Mason hands me the water and I take a sip, wincing as it slips down my sore throat.

“Thank you . . .” I’m so surprised by my own raspy voice that I shut down completely. Mason lifts a finger to my lips, silencing me before stepping back. Two new people step through the back door—I guess my house is just the place to be at two in the morning on a Saturday night— and they make their way over to me.

“These people are going to look at your throat. I need to have a conversation with Prince, but I’ll be back in a minute.”

I nod, wincing when I realize it freaking hurts and he goes, leaving me alone with Savannah, Thing One, and Thing Two, the first of which looks at me like I am the cause of all that is wrong in the world.

Fuck. So much for making peace.

She’s quiet while the two . . . I don’t know, secret service EMTs check me over, watching me from across the room. Savannah has always been known to be cold and ruthless, but I’ve always admired her and assumed they were just rumors. That stare, though . . . she and Mason may as well be twins.

Finally, once they’ve given me a clean bill of health and told me I’ll be sore for a few days, the two fancy EMTs say goodbye, leaving me alone with just Savannah. The crazy guy is gone—more people in black, unmarked uniforms came and carted him off ten minutes ago—and Mason stepped out with Logan, as I’ve learned, to talk about God only knows what.

Is he cautioning Mason away from me? Warning him that I’m just like my sister and I’m just as much to blame for all the crimes she’s committed as she is? People see twins and don’t think that they can be polar opposites.

Well, Missy and I, as much as everyone wants to omit that fact, have grown to be polar opposites. I could never sit by and watch innocent people be hurt. Raped. Murdered. I couldn’t turn a blind eye for love because love shouldn’t make you have to hide it from the rest of the world. It shouldn’t tear apart families. It shouldn’t breed addiction and dementedness.

It should be warm. A place where you can go when the world is threatening to swallow you whole. Where everything makes sense and you don’t have to worry about the consequences of giving your all to another person and praying they hold it as closely to their heart as you do with theirs.

There are good parts of Missy and even if they can’t erase the bad, they’re still there and they’re what I think about when I get sick to my stomach with hate at all the terrible things she’s done.

Missy’s strong. Really strong. She could handle Mom’s CIA-like punishments in stride where I nearly had a mental breakdown. She’s powerful, sure of herself, and most importantly, she’s determined. Determined to get away from Mom and start a life of her own, no matter how much I disagree with how she did it.

I’m nowhere near as tough as she is.

“What do you want with my brother?”

I pause, my entire body freezing under the weight of Savannah Carpenter’s blue-steel stare.

“I don’t want anything from him.”

She regards me coldly, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back against the wall.

“I remember you, you know?” she says after a long moment. “Always side by side with your sister, two peas in a pod. Hard to believe the apple fell far from the tree.”

“Yes,” I mutter, just as frigidly. I don’t have the will to be polite. Not tonight and certainly not here. This is my house. “Very hard to believe, isn’t it?”

Her eyes narrow and she takes a step forward, stopping just in front of my coffee table.

“Mason may, but I don’t trust you. Your sister ripped our family apart and we’re just now putting it back together.”

“Did it ever occur to you that your family also ripped your family to shreds? Or did that not come to you somewhere in between your self-righteousness and pity party?”

I stand, albeit unsteadily from the couch, biting back the grimace from the tenderness in my neck. It’s not as bad as it was, but it’s sore and right now, all I want to do is go to bed, but I can’t.

I can’t stay here.

“You know,” I start. The plan was to walk away before I said something heinous, but she’s pissed me off. In my own home. Where I didn’t invite her. “I always admired you, Savannah. We never really spoke, but I thought you could see the good in people and not hold people accountable for the actions of their families. My sister may be a bad person, but she’s my sister.” She doesn’t say anything, but there’s this little moment when her eyes get wider where I know the reality of what I’d said sinks in.

Checkmate.

I turn to go to my room, but she can’t let it go.

“If you love him, or even care for him, you’ll let him go. He’s had a hard enough time. He doesn’t need to be mixed up in your problems, too. This family loves him.”

“Yeah, well—” I do, too. I stop myself.

Fuck, that’s not true.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

My heart swells and I curse myself internally for not seeing the signs before. I’m an idiot. Plain and simple.

And I’m falling in love with Mason Carpenter.

“Mason’s a grown man,” I say after a moment. “He’s welcome to do whatever he pleases. If he wants to walk away, I won’t stop him.”

It tastes like battery acid as soon as it leaves my tongue. My chest burns, my eyes grow watery, and for a moment, I think about crying.

But I won’t. Not tonight.

I need to leave.

“Have the night you deserve, Savannah.”

And I turn to go pack my bags.