“He needs another body, Carrie,” Evan said, his voice dropping to a horrifying, hollow whisper. “He needs to fake his own death this time. And he wants to use me to do it. If he kills me and burns this house down with his own watch and ring on my body, the syndicate will think he died, and he can escape with the millions he stole. He’s going to sacrifice me. For real, this time.”
A heavy silence fell inside the room, punctuated only by the heavy breathing of the two of us hiding in the dark.
Outside, the footsteps retreated from the front door. For a fleeting second, I thought he was leaving. I thought maybe he was giving up.
But then, I heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps walking around the side of the house, brushing against the overgrown weeds. He was heading toward the back door. The kitchen door.
“We have to get out of here,” Evan muttered, grabbing his backpack and the burner phone from the table. “There’s a crawlspace in the floorboards under the kitchen rug, but it leads out to the side yard right near where he’s walking. We have to time it perfectly.”
We crept silently into the kitchen. The air smelled intensely of old grease and dust. Evan quietly slid a small, faded linoleum rug away, revealing a wooden trapdoor. He lifted it without a sound. Beneath it lay a dark, narrow dirt trench that slithered underneath the foundation of the house.
Suddenly, a loud shatter exploded behind us.
The glass pane of the kitchen window crashed inward, raining sharp shards onto the linoleum floor. A heavy, gloved hand reached through the broken glass, unlocking the window latch from the inside.
Evan pushed me hard toward the trapdoor. “Go! Now!”
I scrambled down into the freezing, damp dirt of the crawlspace, my elbows scraping against rough rocks. Evan climbed down right behind me, pulling the wooden trapdoor closed just as the kitchen window was violently hoisted upward.
Through the narrow cracks in the wooden floorboards above our heads, I saw the beam of a powerful flashlight slice through the darkness of the kitchen. Heavy boots stepped through the window frame, crunching loudly on the shattered glass.
We held our breath, frozen in the dirt like buried corpses. Above us, the footsteps moved slowly, deliberately, scanning the room. The flashlight beam swept across the floor, passing directly over the cracks of the trapdoor. I squeezed my eyes shut, praying my racing heart wouldn’t give us away.
The footsteps moved away from the kitchen, heading into the living room where we had just been.
“Come on,” Evan whispered, nudging my leg.
We crawled through the suffocatingly tight dirt tunnel, our hands sinking into the cold mud. The space was so narrow my shoulders scraped against the wooden floor joists above. After what felt like an eternity, we reached the end of the trench. A loose piece of metal lattice blocked the exit to the outside world.
Evan pushed the lattice open, and we crawled out into the chilly night air, hidden behind a thick patch of untamed blackberry bushes at the side of the house.
The street was dead silent. A few houses down, a flickering streetlamp cast eerie, dancing shadows on the pavement. Dad’s car—the sleek, black SUV I had known my entire life—was parked directly behind a white Honda Civic. The Civic’s engine was idling quietly, its headlights completely dark.
“We need to get to my car,” I whispered, pointing toward the end of the block where I had hastily parked.
