I stop dead in my tracks, lips on the soft, luscious skin of Darcy’s neck. I can feel her heart beating a million miles a minute, her voice vibrating through me.

“What?” I ask, letting my mouth brush her, and it works. Her hands tighten on me, and I’m rewarded with a wave of goosebumps on her neck.

I lick it, slowly, and I’m rewarded with another wave. Jesus, I could do this all night.

“Cops,” she whispers. “I think they’re—”

Darcy’s cut off by the unmistakable sound of a big wooden door opening and a man’s voice saying something, mid-sentence.

“—kids again, just do this and we’ll be back in a jiff,” the voice says at a conversational level.

“They never learn, do they?” a woman’s voice asks.

The man clears his throat loudly.

“ALL RIGHT, PLEASE COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS RAISED, YOU’RE TRESPASSING ON PRIVATE PROPERTY WHICH IS AN ARRESTABLE OFFENSE IN THE STATE OF WASHINGTON. THIS IS THE PONDEROSA COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE.”

“Oh fuck,” Darcy breathes.

We’re still tangled together, and even though I know that getting arrested would be an absolute fucking disaster for me and by extension the band, I almost don’t care. I just want them to fucking turn around and leave, because this feels like goddamn heaven and because there’s a part of me that’s afraid Darcy will back out again.

“Trent, you can’t get arrested,” she whispers, telling me something I absolutely already know.

I don’t move. I hardly breathe, keeping her wrapped tight in my arms, trying to figure a way out but just looping back again and again to Darcy’s mouth on mine. The noise she made, her goosebumps under my lips.

“Shhh,” I say, hoping that maybe if we stay perfectly silent right here, they’ll decide it’s nothing and just leave.

But Darcy shakes her head against my chest and pulls away, grabbing my hand. She glances over her shoulder at the door, and the sudden cool air against my front shakes me out of my reverie.

Dammit.

“Come on,” she whispers, squeezing my hand in hers.

Down below I can hear the two cops talking to each other as they move around the first floor.

“They’ll hear us,” I point out.

“Trent, they’ll find us if we stay here,” she murmurs. “And you know exactly what’s going to happen then and I’m not about to let Gavin murder me because I let you get your third strike for fucking ghost hunting.”

The officers downstairs are still clearing rooms, their voices echoing dully. Darcy’s eyes are steel, her voice sharp and protective and fierce and that’s what finally shakes me out of my reverie and into reality.

And in reality, she’s right: I can’t get arrested. I don’t even want these cops running my record, because they’re not likely to let me go afterward.

“Be quiet. Walk as close to the walls as you can, the floorboards are usually sturdier there. Whatever happens, just keep moving,” she says, her voice rushed and quiet as she pulls on my hand, leading me away from the staircase.

“We might draw more attention to ourselves by jumping out a window,” I point out.

She’s tiptoeing along, her back to a wall, and she looks at me like she’s almost amused.

“We’re taking the servants’ stairs,” she says.

We pass through a doorway, and while Darcy’s somehow perfectly quiet, a floorboard squeaks under my foot and I freeze, afraid it’ll happen again if I take another step. I can’t hear the cops downstairs anymore, so I don’t know if they’ve heard me, if they’re coming up the main staircase now...

“Keep moving,” Darcy orders me. “It’s an old house. Everything is making noise, all the time.”

She squeezes my hand again.

“Trust me,” she says, looking over her shoulder and almost smiling.

And I do. I trust her because I trust her, and because even though sneaking through the dark is completely out of my wheelhouse, it’s right in hers.

We both had our bad years. I spent mine in the dust and dirt of Low Valley where nothing I ever did was quiet or sneaky, where when I broke the law I did it good and hard and loud.

But Darcy’s were spent quieter, surviving Wisconsin winters in abandoned buildings, stealing food and clothing, breaking into houses and crashing on the couches of families gone for the winter. And she mostly did it without getting caught.

So when she tells me how to sneak around somewhere without the police catching on, I do what she says.

We get through two more rooms. The floor boards creak below our feet and my heart hammers on, chanting don’t stop, don’t stop, and we keep moving until we’re in a hallway with no windows at all, pitch-dark, the only light from a small hole in the ceiling.

We stop. I can hear Darcy breathing softly, and I press my back against the wall.

“Is this—”

Darcy whirls and claps her hand over my mouth, and in the almost-total dark I can just barely glimpse movement. I think she’s shaking her head, and then she slides her hand around my face, steadies herself against my shoulder, lifts her lips to my ear as she pulls my head down.

“They’re coming up the stairs,” she says, her voice so quiet I can barely hear it. “The back stairs are at the end of the hall. Hold onto the bannister, walk next to the wall, and pray they haven’t rotted through.”

Darcy doesn’t wait for an answer, just pulls me along in the dark, and I let her lead, groping along the wall until she finds the space and lets go of my hand.

The back staircase is narrow and dark, so dark I can barely see Darcy in front of me, moving silently downward. I’m less silent, less practiced in the ways of knowing where to step on stairs that haven’t been used in a hundred years, and when we reach a landing I stumble a little, bumping into the wall.

“You okay?” her disembodied voice whispers.

“Fine,” I answer, and we go down the second flight, the faint moonlight trickling in as we reach the first floor.

There’s a door at the bottom. Thank Christ, there’s a door at the bottom, because even though I can’t identify where I can hear the two cops creaking along the floorboards somewhere upstairs, and it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where we went.

I reach a hand toward the knob, but Darcy grabs my wrist and stops me. I let her, and she turns the knob slowly herself, her eyes wide in the darkness, listening for a squeak.

There’s nothing. She pulls the door open, but neither of us move.

On the other side, it’s completely boarded up. The boards are old and dried-out, cracked and weak-looking. There’s another creak upstairs, and Darcy’s eyes dart after it, nervously, and she bites her lip.

I eye the boards over the door. They’re not that strong. I can’t see any nails sticking out, and I take a step back, getting ready.

Hit it on the edge, maybe pop the nails out. Wouldn’t take more than a few blows, Darcy could get out pretty easy at least.

She grabs my arm like she can read my mind, which maybe she can. Even in the low light, even as she’s nervous about the cops’ footsteps along the floor above, she’s giving me a don’t be an idiot look.

I shrug.

She points to the next room, which has a row of shattered windows, and I swear she smirks at me before grabbing me hand again and leading me through this door into the room filled with light and the tiny, dull sparkles of old shattered glass.

In seconds, she finds the emptiest window frame. She walks up to it, old glass crunching underfoot, and inspects it like an expert. There are still glimmers of glass in the frame but it doesn’t look freshly broken, it looks old and weathered but still sharp. Still dangerous.

“Darce,” I murmur. “Don’t get—”

Before I finish the sentence, she’s whipped her long-sleeve shirt off and tossed it over the window frame, nothing but a black tank top underneath. As she hops up onto the window frame, her shirt covering the glass, despite my entire being I can’t stop myself from noticing the way the moonlight highlights her nipples through the tight fabric, the way her chest jiggles through the tight shirt—

She hops off the other side. I close my eyes and swallow, listen to the footsteps overhead, ever closer to the back stairs, remind myself that this is no fucking time.

Darcy’s face appears again on the other side, eyebrows raised.

Come on, she mouths, so I follow suit, over the broken glass beneath her shirt, onto the grass below. Darcy pulls me against the wall to the left of the window and we stand there for a long moment, backs against the wall, breathing hard.

I don’t watch her pant for breath. I don’t watch the way her chest expands and falls underneath her tight tank top, I don’t notice the way her nipples pucker in the cool night air or the way she leans her head against the stone wall as she breathes hard, her neck waiting and soft and perfect and even more tempting now that I know what it tastes like—

“Now’s the risky part,” she says.

I dart my eyes back to her face, and she’s watching me, desaturated in the moonlight, her expression somewhere between nervous and mischievous.

“Now?” I murmur, because despite how fucking bad it would be for me if I got caught, how fucking bad that would be for all of Dirtshine, this doesn’t feel risky. It at least feels familiar, like something I used to know but sort of forgot about.

But Darcy, saying I lied when I said I didn’t want this?

That’s fucking new, it’s untouched, it’s wilderness territory, a dreamscape, a land I’ve never visited before and can’t fucking wait to get back to. In comparison, cops are old hat.

“We’ve gotta run across the yard for the gate and hope they don’t see us,” she says.

“Wall’s closer.”

“The wall is seven feet high.”

“I can get you over.”

Darcy gives me a long, slow, sidelong look.

“Can you get you over?”

“Of course,” I say, hoping I sound confident because I’m not fucking sure. I’ve never climbed a mossy seven-foot high wall before, but I’m fucking certain I can get Darcy over and somehow, that’s more important.

She shakes her head.

“The gate is better,” she says. “If we get caught, you just make a run for it and I’ll try to let you get away. My record’s fine, all my juvenile shit is sealed, so—”

I walk for the wall, leaving Darcy mid-sentence because this was my idea and like hell I’m letting her take the fall if something goes bad. Yeah, I’ll be fucked, but I’d rather that.

“Trent,” she hisses, and I keep walking. The gate’s on the other side of the house completely but the wall’s not far from this side of the house, just around the corner from the window we got through. In ten steps I’m there, staring at this thing, starting to wonder what the fuck I was thinking.

Soft footsteps behind me and I turn. She’s glaring, but behind her I see a flashlight beam through the window, bouncing off a wall in the house.

“Goddamn it,” she whispers, and I crouch, lacing my fingers together in a foothold.

“Come on.”

“You can’t just fucking—”

“I’m not going over until you’re over and we both know it,” I murmur. “So hop on if you don’t want me to spend the best years of my life behind bars, Darce.”

“God fucking damn it,” she mutters, but she puts one foot into my hands, steadying herself against the wall, her leg straight and I stand, practically launching her upward. In a second she’s got her other leg over the top, stomach down on top of the wall, and then she takes a deep breath and disappears, a thud on the other side.

I’m not worried. I’m pretty sure Darcy knows how to jump off a wall like this without getting hurt.

But now I’ve got another problem, because lifting her was a fucking piece of cake and now I’ve got this wall to contend with. It’s made of stone but all the rocks in it are smooth, rounded, half-covered with moss and lichen so they don’t offer a single handhold or foothold.

I glance back at the house just as a flash of light washes across a still-intact window.

We left her shirt there, I realize. They’ll know we’re out here.

Fuck.

One of the cops walks into something, probably flashlight-blind, and I hear him curse. I hold my breath, desperately scanning the wall for something, because I’m afraid that if I try to just jump it my hands will slip, I’ll fall, and then I’ll be well and truly fucked.

“Hey,” I hear the female cop say.

“Yeah?” the other answers her.

“There’s fabric over this window frame.”

And they’ve found it, and I’m fucked if I don’t get over this wall right fucking now.

I’m out of options. I take a few steps back. Take a deep breath, flex my hands, and take a running leap at the thing.