Chapter Two
My eyes burn and my stomach churns as I stand at my open locker, staring blankly at the books inside.
It’s been three days since I last ate or slept.
The fire happened on Friday. After an eternity cowering in my bedroom, I finally heard sirens.
By the time help arrived, rushing us out of our house as they worked to extinguish the flames, it was too late. The woman who lived next door—Crystal, her name was Crystal—and her boyfriend were both dead.
I shook violently as my seven-year-old brother clung to my legs, listening to my mother blathering about how it could have been us, how the fire could have spread, clutching my four-year-old sister close and placing terrified kisses on her mop of pale blond hair.
I wondered if they were still alive when Vince Morelli spotted me in the bushes.
I wondered if my phone was still in those bushes, incriminating me.
Incriminating him.
The queasiness I felt in that moment never left. In fact, it only got worse. After the workers had all left the scene and night had fallen, I ignored my terror and snuck outside, kneeling by the shrubs and searching for my cell phone.
I didn’t find it.
Which meant someone else had.
Every moment since, I’ve waited for the police or a Morelli goon to show up on our front porch.
It hasn’t left much time for sleeping. My nerves can’t handle food. My hands shake like a drug addict in withdrawal.
At this point, I’m a pale, exhausted, nervous wreck.
My stomach makes an angry noise and I close my eyes for a moment, wondering how I’m going to make it through the day. I grab the books I need for class, each heavier than the last, and push my locker door shut.
Behind the door, propped against the locker beside mine, stands Vince Morelli. I jump back, squeezing my books tightly as my heart drops out of my rib cage, my back slamming against the cool metal door behind me.
The girl shoots me a dirty look before ducking back inside her locker to retrieve her book, then slams it shut and pivots, heading off in the other direction and leaving me alone with Vince.
He isn’t moving, hasn’t spoken. He just stands there in his dark jeans with a rip in the left knee cap, the black T-shirt that hugs his biceps, displayed more prominently with his arms crossed. Like all Morelli men, he has luscious, pitch black hair and chiseled features with dark brown eyes that pull you in and threaten to drown you with their intensity.
I’m already drowning, panic clawing at my insides while I try to make my mouth work.
As if he has all the time in the world to wait, he merely watches me.
He must know I haven’t turned him in, right? If I told the police what I saw, they would have already called him in for questioning, at the very least.
“Tommy asked me out!”
I jerk back again, turning to face my best friend, Lena Korell, as she beams at me, leaning against the closed locker beside mine and rolling her eyes dreamily.
I turn back toward Vince, but he’s gone.
Like my sanity is about to be, I’m pretty sure.
I try to listen as Lena goes on about her Friday night plans. Any other time I would be excited for her, but I do not have the capacity to be girly right now.
Hours later, I’m still pale and quiet at lunch, still without much to say about Lena’s date, hardly touching the slice of Oreo pie I ordered, dramatically reasoning that if I’m about to be offed by the Morelli family, I should at least have something delicious first.
I can’t stop watching for Vince. I imagine him around every corner, search for him at every table. Following lunch is English, the period we have together, and I debate skipping it, but I’m more afraid of him coming to my house to confront me. What can he actually do to me in a school building with security cameras and faculty members milling through every hall?
“What is your deal?”
I glance up at Lena without much enthusiasm. Her dark eyebrows arch expectantly up toward her dark, springy curls, and exhaustion mingled with defeat suddenly sweeps over me. Maybe it would be better to throw myself at Vince’s mercy and be done with it.
“You know my house nearly burned down a couple days ago, right?” I ask.
Lena rolls her eyes as she dips a fry in Ketchup. “Your house did not almost burn down.”
“It could’ve.”
“No, ‘cause you’re not a dumb shit who left her crack pipe going by the curtains and then nodded off to the point of not waking up when she’s on fire,” she states, without sympathy.
“They were human beings, Lena.”
“They were gross addicts who broke into your house and stole your television over the summer,” she returns.
“She had three kids.”
“All of them in foster care. I’m sorry, I know you’re a drama queen, but I’m not going to cry over the loss of scum of the earth with you.”
I want to tell her, but I can’t. I doubt she would be so glib if she felt responsible for not saving them, even if they were kind of shitty people. I can’t say that, so I keep my mouth shut.
Besides, I don’t need to bring anyone else into my mess. I haven’t told a soul what I saw, but I have an uneasy feeling with Vince lurking around, I’m about to have to tell someone.
---
The sound of a chair skidding across the floor startles the hell out of me. My head jerks up, fully expecting to find Vince Morelli straddling the backwards chair suddenly beside my desk, but instead I see Jace Bradford.
He’s giving me that little smile that made me melty a week ago, but I’m curiously unaffected, looking at it now.
“Hey.” There it is, the gravelly voice I was all hyped about a few days ago.
I can tell he expects to flirt, but I don’t have the energy for it.
Flashing him the least convincing tug of my lips ever, I make a point to look at my desktop, straightening my notebooks. “Hi.”
“Lose my number?” he teases.
“It’s been a rough few days,” I tell him. “There was a fire next door. My neighbors…”
“Oh, shit,” he says, rearing back a little. “Is everyone okay?”
Dread trickles through my veins, pooling in my stomach. Just the thought of the house fire makes me queasy—not to mention the lack of food and sleep.
“Pretty sure that’s my seat, Bradford.”
I’m pretty sure my soul falls out of my body as I look up to see Vince Morelli standing at the desk beside mine.
It’s not Vince’s seat, but Jace doesn’t argue. Standing easily enough, Jace swings the chair back behind its desk so Vince can sit down. “My bad, man.”
Vince leisurely watches me for a moment before he takes his seat, dropping a notebook and pen on the desktop. It’s a perfectly normal thing to do, but somehow it feels menacing.
Jace glances from Vince to me, then skulks away without so much as a goodbye.
My stomach somersaults as I shift in my seat, glancing back at the door. My previous thought about ditching circles back around, but the teacher is already standing at the front of the class. We have a test today, and if she sees me cut out, she may not let me make it up.
Not like I’ll be able to focus with Vince sitting beside me anyway.
He normally doesn’t sit beside me, and we do have assigned seats, so I wait for the guy who normally sits here to show up, or the teacher to say something about it.
Minutes like hours stretch on before the teacher tells everyone to settle down. She brings a stack of stapled papers and begins doing a head count at each row, passing them back. I wait for her to notice Vince next to me and say something, but if she does, she doesn’t seem to care.
As the tests are passed back, I dare a glance over at Vince. He isn’t looking at me, but he must sense my eyes on him, because he turns to meet my gaze.
I break eye contact immediately, looking down at my paper. I fidget with the stapled corner and run my fingers aimlessly over the edge. I try to look at him out of the corner of my eye, then I try to stop my leg from bouncing underneath the desk.
The burning question that’s been running through my mind nonstop the previous few days emerges again: why was Vince in that house? Was he responsible for the fire? Had he…wanted my neighbors to die? Had he killed them?
Had I, with my silence?
I try to focus on the test, but I can’t even get through the first paragraph.
Pushing back my chair and grabbing the paper, I make my way to the front of the room. The teacher turns, startled, since I should’ve only raised my hand.
“I think I’m going to be sick. I need to go to the nurse.”
It must show on my face, because she doesn’t argue, merely nodding her head, her eyes searching my face with a trace of concern. “Okay.”
I hustle back to my desk to gather my things. I avoid looking at him, but I can feel Vince’s hard gaze on me as I flee.
I don’t care. I can’t. All I want is to get the hell out of that classroom and never see Vince Morelli again.