Leaving the house was not a regular event for me. Delfino didn’t like me going outside. He didn’t like people “knowing his business,” he said, as though I was just some name jotted down in a ledger somewhere. Like my existence was part of balancing a checkbook.

On those very rare occasions I did leave the house, he acted as my surly chaperone. I remembered clearly the first time he’d begrudgingly taken me to the store to get pads because he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what kind he was supposed to get me. Red-faced, he’d shuffled behind me through the women’s health aisle and scowled at the clerk when she asked him if he’d found everything all right.

To any passers-by, I was sure he looked the part of a perfect gentleman. He held me, gently but firmly, by the elbow as we walked, carrying my bags and traversing the outer rim of the sidewalk to put himself between me and any cars. The reality was that he held onto me to ensure I couldn’t bolt, and used his body as a way to block any avenue of escape in case I managed to wrench away from him. Carrying a bag or two was the least he could do, given the actuality of our circumstances.

Today was different. Not only was I out of the house with someone whose company I actually enjoyed as an escort—but it was the most beautiful day I’d seen in recent memory.

The sun on my face hit that sweet spot between not too warm and not too distant, heating me through to my bones as a cool wind rustled the trees lining the streets. The neighborhood looked positively idyllic with its well-manicured lawns, cheerily colored (if a bit uniformly constructed) houses, and white picket fences bordering the sidewalks. Most people were at work this time of day, but a few retirees and housewives dotted the front yards, gardening or weeding or washing their cars. Many waved as we passed them, surprise plainly etched on their faces as they realized they were catching a glimpse of one of Delfino’s most prized possessions out and about.

As well as the young stranger she was with.

“If you can forget what’s going on here,” Leo said, smiling and nodding at a woman sunbathing on a lawn chair in her driveway, “it almost looks like a nice place to live. Y’know, if you’re into suburbs and the like.”

“After everything that’s happened to me here, I’m not sure I could stand the sight of a neighborhood like this ever again,” I muttered. A strand of my hair wriggled free behind my ear, tempted by the wind. God, how long had it been since I’d taken a walk just to enjoy the breeze? “I think places like this will always come off a little… disingenuous to me.”

“You shouldn’t let a dickbag like Delfino ruin the American dream for you,” he said, frowning as he reached for my hand.

I let his pinky skirt the edge of mine before pulling away. “No. Not until we get out of the neighborhood,” I whispered, and obediently, Leo slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket—a windbreaker on loan from Delfino—instead.

But what Leo had said made me think. He’d called this place the American dream, and on the surface, he was right. Pleasant Lakes as a whole was what most people thought of when they heard those evocative words. We were thriving small-town America at its finest, all “good morning, neighbor!” with our bedroom walls painted in the most tasteful shade of eggshell you ever did see. We had seasonal festivals the whole town gathered for—save for Delfino and the girl he was holding prisoner, of course—and carolers on Christmas and parades on holidays like the Fourth of July and Memorial Day. We did our best to live up to our name, and on top of that, we were boring. Completely unassuming.

We were postcard-picturesque. Stepford for the twenty-first century. But just like Stepford—and America in general—there was a darkness lurking underneath our star-spangled exterior. Not all was as it seemed here in Quaintsville, USA, and no amount of handmade charm was going to erase that knowledge from my mind.

This, I was pretty sure, was the American reality: that the dream was just a cover-up for the nightmare. It made me wonder: whose dream was this, really? It sure as hell wasn’t mine.

We exited the neighborhood onto a backroad that led downhill and through a covered bridge to Main Street. It was a little-traversed part of town, and the solitude it afforded made it one of the prettiest. Tall evergreens loomed on either side, shifting and swaying in the wind, the songbirds in their boughs quietly crooning as we passed. This was when I allowed Leo to take my hand; immediately, he twined our fingers like he’d never let me go.

“Didn’t really get to see this part of town last time I was here,” he admitted. “We kinda stuck to the east side and downtown proper.”

“Where the bar and the motel is,” I said, side-eyeing him with a grin. “Or were, I guess I should say.”

Leo looked down at me, lifting his brows. “They’re gone?”

I nodded. “Delfino had them bulldozed right after you guys left. Said he didn’t want to attract any more riff-raff.”

“Fucker.” He ran the pad of his thumb over the length of mine. “What’s a guy supposed to do for fun now?”

I pursed my lips in faux-pensivity. “Hm. I’m not sure. Up until now, I thought we’d done a pretty good job of making our own.”

Leo smirked and squeezed my hand. “Touché,” he said, and I leaned into his body gently. There were few things hotter than a cocky, self-assured knave like Leo Richards admitting defeat.

Once we made it to the covered bridge, we had to say goodbye to hand-holding again. I stole a glance down either side of the path before leaning up and kissing Leo on his cheek. His scruff felt so good beneath my lips I was tempted not to pull away, but the occasional bike-riding citizen could easily do us both in. Regardless, Leo held me for a moment and we listened to the sound of the brook babbling beneath our feet. The calm before the storm, so to speak.

“We’re going to make a little detour before we go to the grocery store,” I told him. It was something I’d been planning since last night—one of the reasons I’d hardly slept. “That all right with you?”

Leo released his hold on me just a little. “Depends on where we’re headed.”

“The body shop,” I said, “where Delfino is supposedly getting your bike fixed.”

His face darkened. “I’ve been wondering about that. Seems to me those repairs could’ve been done ages ago.”

I nodded. “That’s been my concern, as well. I think Delfino’s trying to keep you here. I just don’t know for what. If your bike isn’t fixed, it’s confirmation of that, at least.”

“Which’ll just leave us with the why,” he murmured, glancing back behind us, then down the road that led into town. “You’re sure about this, though? Lu, if we get caught…”

“We won’t,” I assured him, gripping the tight bands of muscles in his back. He grunted softly, a reminder that his ribs still weren’t fully healed. I wondered if he’d been in pain for most of our walk. If he had been, he hadn’t said anything—which was exactly what I’d expect from a man whose pride meant so much to him. “Delfino expects us to be out. This time of day, we won’t have much of an audience. And the shop doesn’t actually open until noon. We’ll be fine, as long as we’re careful.” I smiled reassuringly, even though anxiety was making mincemeat of my insides. “Come on. This way.”

I pulled ahead of Leo. He didn’t let go of my hand right away. Instead, he let my fingers slip through his like grains of sand back into the ocean. I didn’t let him see my face, nor did I see his—I couldn’t bear it—but it broke my heart.

We walked, silent and side-by-side, taking a right at the fork rather than the left we should have if we wanted to get to the store on the fastest route. As I’d anticipated, however, the streets were nearly devoid of people. There was the little old man who ran a hot dog stand on the corner—had for twenty-five years now, or so I was told—and a couple of shoppers flitting between stores, but other than that, Leo and I were alone.

Well, not completely—a police car passed us at one point, and I saw Leo’s hackles raise. I elbowed him furtively, indicating that he shouldn’t stare, shouldn’t make any kind of eye contact if he could avoid it, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Maybe it was the natural instinct of a biker to try to assert dominance over the local PD, or maybe Leo was just releasing some of the pent-up aggravation he’d been accumulating during the course of his stay here. Whatever it was, it drew a bit more attention than I’d counted on. The cop did a three-point turn after he passed us, then pulled up to the curb and rolled down his window.

“Hey there, Luce.” I recognized him by voice alone—Sheriff “Just Call Me Tom” Rigby, one of Delfino’s friends. He was friends with all the cops in town, in fact. I guess he had to be, considering what he was getting away with here. “Where are you and your, ah… friend off to?”

I did my best to refrain from shooting Leo a withering look. The plan had been not to attract attention to ourselves, but as usual, his temper had gotten in the way. “We’re headed to the store, sheriff. Father Delfino wants chicken cordon bleu tonight.” For good measure, I took a grocery list out of the pocket of my coat and held it up with a smile.

Rigby squinted at it behind his aviators. “Well, I’m sure he’ll be pleased as punch you’re taking care of that for him. Except…” He grinned wide, like he’d caught us red-handed in some kind of crime. “…grocery store’s that way.”

Despite my burning desire to do so, I did not roll my eyes. Instead, I said in a peachy-sweet voice, “Well, I know that, silly! But Mr. Richards here hasn’t been shown around town yet, and he’s been laid up in bed so long I was worried he’d forgotten how to walk.” I smiled up at Leo, encouraging him to do the same. He managed the barest of expressions that wasn’t a scowl. “Exercise is so important to recovery, as I’m sure you know.”

Sheriff Rigby’s smile wavered. His brow creased. “Yeah. Of course. Everyone knows that.”

Not you, I thought, keeping my expression pleasant and placid. You had no idea. But you didn’t want to look stupid. If there was anything I’d learned in my time with Delfino, it was that a man would often operate against his own best interests in order to save face.

“We should be going,” I said, putting the list back in my pocket. “Don’t want to keep a busy man like yourself tied up. It was nice seeing you, though, sheriff.”

“You too,” he murmured, but his cruiser remained in place, even as Leo and I turned a corner and disappeared from view.

“You have to keep your temper in check,” I hissed at him, quickly choosing one of the side-streets that would lead us to the body shop and hopefully throw Rigby off our scent. “For God’s sakes, Leo. Weren’t you the one who told me we had to play it cool in the first place?”

Petulantly, he shrugged. “I don’t like cops.”

“Neither do I,” I reminded him. “Especially not that one.” The cops in Pleasant Lakes were all on the take, every single one of them, but Sheriff Rigby actually seemed to relish his corruption. It was like when Delfino rolled into town, all his wildest dreams had come true. Like he’d been waiting for just the right moment to let his true colors show.

“We have to play it cool, though,” I continued, looking both ways before coming out of the alley on the opposite side. “What’s more important to you: getting the hell out of her sooner rather than later, or shooting a cop a dirty look?”

“You kinda got me in a box with that one,” Leo said, and I rolled my eyes.

“Patience is a virtue.”

“Sadly, I’m a sinner.”

“Hopeless,” I muttered, shaking my head as I hurried on down the road. “Hopeless, is what you are.”

We walked in relative silence for the next ten or fifteen minutes, stopping a few times along the way to let Leo breathe. I didn’t envy him those broken ribs; they gave him one hell of a stitch in his side every time he walked for too long, and I’d noticed even with the breaks, his bouts of shortness of breath and pain were starting to ramp up in frequency. Thankfully, the body shop wasn’t far off by the time the sound of his slight wheezing began to worry me, though how we were going to get to the grocery store and back was a problem I wasn’t sure I had an answer for.

The shop was a squat, square building surrounded by a dirt lot and bordered on all sides by a high chain-link fence. Inside the lot were a few rusted shells of cars that had been scrapped God only knew how long ago, the innards all missing and the doors taken from their hinges and baking in the sun. Nothing out there seemed recent.

And they were, as expected, closed. Leo and I stood in front of the main entrance, examining the hours printed in black lettering on the glass panel beside the door. He squinted.

“So, how do we get in?”

I looked over at him. “Big, macho biker like you doesn’t know how to pick a lock?” I asked.

Leo snorted. “Don’t believe everything you see on TV. Besides, bikers are more likely to break in than go through the trouble of jimmying the lock. We’re not exactly subtle.”

“Touché,” I admitted, smiling at him as I took a couple of bobby pins out of my hair. “Good thing I came prepared.”

He stared at me as I went to work, standing so that he blocked any view of me from the street. “Christ, Lulu. Where’d you learn to do that?!”

“I didn’t just search ‘honey pots’ last night,” I said, coaxing the tumblers in the lock to obey me. “I figured we’d need a way in, so I looked that up too. Spent half the night practicing on Delfino’s study door.”

Leo shook his head at me in wonder. “You really were up all night.”

I shrugged as the lock finally gave way. “I like having a plan.” And then I removed the pins, gently pushing the door open and stepping inside with Leo in tow.

“What if he has an alarm?” he whispered, gingerly closing the door behind us and securing the lock again. “Could be a silent one, for all you know.”

“You really think anyone here in town has a proper security system?” I asked him, heading around the front counter where the door to the garage was. “Come on, Leo. People here get dogs, not ADT.” I tried the handle. Thankfully, this one was unlocked. “Your bike should be in here. Are you ready to find out what’s going on?”

Leo hesitated, looking around again, ensuring no one was peering at us through the windows. Then he nodded, rubbing his side beneath his windbreaker. “Yeah. I think it’s high fuckin’ time we caught up to this bastard. He can’t stay one step ahead of us forever…”

I nodded and opened the door. But apparently, Leo was wrong.

I felt it before I heard it—a slight tremor beneath my feet, a faint rattle in the pane of glass overlooking the road. The knob in my hand vibrated ever so softly. A prickling, animal fear started in my nape, followed by cold buds of sweat blooming between the small hairs. Quickly that electric dread coursed down my spine and I froze, listening hard for the sound I knew was coming, no matter how much I tried to tell myself it was impossible.

According to the Kübler-Ross model, the first stage of grief is denial.

But it was impossible to deny that sound, the one I always listened for so intently, the one that haunted me with phantom echoes that seemed so real they set my heart to pounding. These, I realized, were not the conjurations of my memory, but very real—existing here and now. Portents of doom. Air raid sirens in the form of the rickety purr of a shitty Chevrolet.

No… he couldn’t have possibly…

The second stage, they say, is anger.

“Hurry up—in here!” I told Leo, gesturing wildly to the garage beyond. “Delfino’s coming!”

Leo wrinkled his nose. “What? How the hell do you know? And why would he—”

I ground my teeth hard and hissed at him, “Just shut up and get in the garage!”

The third stage is bargaining.

I closed the door quietly behind us as we crossed the threshold into the darkened garage. Faint light streamed in through small windows near the very high ceiling, offering us no escape—at least not without a very tall ladder. The only other avenue of exit was through the door out to the junkyard, but that would leave us exposed. And I was pretty sure Leo couldn’t manage to scale a chain-link fence in his condition. I was also pretty sure that the guy who ran the shop had a dog.

Leo took my hand and dragged me behind a rack of tires at the far wall. It didn’t provide a tremendous amount of cover, given all the gaps, but it was better than standing in the middle of the room. We crouched low, shoulder-to-shoulder, and I silently prayed it would be enough to save us.

Please… if we get caught…

Depression is the next symptom on the list, followed by acceptance. I experienced both in quick succession, first in the form of the nauseating realization that we were screwed, and finally in a sort of razor-edge numbness that settled into my body like pins and needles—like I’d swallowed a mouthful of Drano that extinguished any hope inside me with a patchwork quilt of chemical burns.

Protectively, Leo slipped an arm around my shoulders. “It’s going to be okay,” he breathed into my ear.

I shook my head at him as the sound of the engine abruptly died. “No. It’s really not.”

Several tense moments of silence passed, followed by a slight change in pressure as the front door of the shop opened up. I sunk my teeth into my lower lip to keep from whimpering when the interior door leading into the garage swung in as well, revealing not just one, but two pairs of shoes.

Delfino being here was bad enough, but the fact that he had someone with him made it so much worse. I squinted through the tire racks, trying to steal a surreptitious glance at the second party. Leo squeezed my hand.

“No,” he whispered through his teeth. “Keep your head down.”

“Dunno why Gerald doesn’t open up sooner,” a familiar voice mused. That was Sheriff Rigby, who Leo and I had run into not half an hour earlier. “Of course, that damn fool sure does love his benders.”

The sharp, crystalline notes of Delfino’s voice rose to answer. “Doesn’t matter. We don’t need him here for this.” And both pairs of shoes moved farther into the room.

I held my breath as they neared, then unexpectedly veered off toward the corner of the shop that sat directly to our left. Leo’s fingers clenched around my arm and he gently, but firmly, tugged at me to follow his lead. Very slowly—too slowly, I thought, for the pace at which Rigby and Delfino were traveling at—he maneuvered his way around to the shorter side of the rack. I followed his lead, desperately hoping that my sneakers wouldn’t squeak on the concrete floor.

There wasn’t enough room for us to remain side-by-side now. I had to duck beneath Leo’s arm, my back to his chest, and let him hold onto my shoulders for support as Delfino and Rigby approached a tarp lying over a shadowy heap. I wet my lips, only letting out my breath once they began to continue their conversation.

Delfino said, “Here it is.” And he nudged the tarp with the tip of his foot. “This is what needs disposing of.”

A rush of relief passed through me, leaving me lightheaded. Behind me, I felt Leo’s shaky, strained breaths come just a little slower. No mention of me or Leo, which meant neither of them knew we were here. It meant that whatever Delfino was up to, it had nothing to do with me.

But then what were they here for?

“Well, looks like Gerald’s already started taking it apart,” Rigby said, reaching down and pulling the blue plastic cover away. “That’s step one, I guess.”

Underneath the tarp was a collection of gleaming chrome parts, many of which looked bent in odd ways. They’d been separated from a sleek metal body that I couldn’t mistake for anything other than the very thing we’d come here for: Leo’s bike. It was in pieces.

Now Leo’s chest pressed hard against my shoulder blades, inflated with rage. I could feel his blood coursing through him, the war drum of his pulse. His face was hot against my hair. Hold it together, I silently begged. For the love of God, just don’t lose it now. Not here. Not yet…

“It’ll need to be more than just dismantled if we’re going to make sure our new friend isn’t just going to up and leave us,” Delfino said to Rigby. “I want the parts disposed of. When someone eventually comes looking, there should be no trace left of Mr. Richards. I don’t want anyone even imagining he might have been here. Not at all.” He turned his head slowly, hands in his pockets. Even in such a casual stance, there was something about him that just radiated power. “Understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Rigby said with an eager, placating nod. He stood upright again after replacing the tarp and began dusting off his hands. “I’ll have the boys come by and start finding places to sell them off to.”

“Make sure that you file off the serial numbers,” Delfino said. “Remember, not a trace. There’s no point going through all the trouble of hiding a body if you leave a trail of breadcrumbs leading right to it, is there?”

“No,” Rigby answered. “There sure ain’t.”

My stomach turned, hard, and I had to close my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging. So that was what these two were planning—to kill Leo? But why? What could he possibly have done to deserve this? What kind of threat did he pose?

I was aware of what a monster Delfino was, certainly. That didn’t come as a shock in the slightest. But the cavalier way he talked about it… the way Rigby accepted it without a second thought… It was like they were discussing what to do with a fish they’d just caught. This wasn’t how we were supposed to talk about other humans. This was how hunters talked about animals.

“Saw them on the way here, you know,” Rigby mentioned as he and Delfino strode back toward the door again. For the second time, Leo and I were forced to move. “Headed to the grocery store, or so they said.”

“Oh?” Delfino replied impassively. “And how did they seem to you?”

Rigby chuckled. “Oh, they’re definitely fuckin’. You can tell just by the way he looks at her. How close they stand to one another.”

I felt my blood drain from my face. So Sheriff Rigby knew, just from looking at us, what Leo and I were doing whenever Delfino left the house. I glanced at Leo to see his lips pulled in a grimace. Were we really that transparent?

I half-expected Delfino to explode, or at least for him to blow one of those derisive snorts through his nose. Instead, he only nodded, smirked, and replied with but a single word.

“Perfect.”

Then the two of them slipped back out through the door, closing it behind them. Several moments later, I heard the front door to the shop open and close again too, but I dared not move until the sound of Delfino’s Chevy became too distant for me to follow anymore.

I looked over at Leo again, but he was already looking at me, his eyes hard.

“I guess you were right,” he said darkly. “You were just a honey pot all along.”