She unzipped the pouch and peered inside. “Holy shit. You’re not kidding.”
Ryan shook his head. “You think they’re here for money? Really?” His eyes bored into mine, like he thought I knew better. Of course I did.
Annika took the other bag, ran her fingers over the edges, fanning the money.
Cole stared at the door. No code on this side. Just a lever and a wheel. Just a little bit of muscle.
“I don’t want to die for a couple grand,” he whispered.
“You’re not going to die,” I said. But I looked at Ryan, asking. I looked at the monitors, waiting. The longer nobody came, the less of a chance they would at all. Ryan swapped out the fabric he was holding against Cole’s side for another piece, and I could see it was soaked through. Ryan didn’t meet my eye.
Annika let out a low laugh. “This isn’t just a couple grand. Try twenty.”
My shoulders stiffened as all eyes turned to me.
I shrugged. “My mother doesn’t trust anything online,” I said, hoping it was true.
Cole narrowed his eyes, coughed, winced. “Your mother is batshit.”
“My mother is gone!” I said, my hand to my mouth. Everything trembling, everything wrong. I pointed at the door. “They—”
“Okay,” Ryan said, placing a hand on my own, pushing it back down. “It’s okay.”
I stared back at him. Shook my head. No, it wasn’t, and he knew it, too.
He knelt beside Cole again. “Enough,” he said. “You need to stay calm. You need to stay still. Keep pressure on this.”
Cole moved his hand to his side, pressing down, and flinched. “I’m just saying, that’s a lot of money to have just sitting in your floor. Maybe not for you guys,” he said, looking between Annika and me. “But for me and Baker here…”
I didn’t think they really knew each other. They were both seniors in my school, but they ran in different crowds. But now that I thought of it, they must’ve overlapped at parties or classes. Now I wondered how much they really knew about each other. Cole’s house wasn’t small by any stretch of the imagination. It was bigger than this one, probably. But his wasn’t turned into a fortress. It was typical, a middle-America two-story cookie-cutter house, on a street of similar homes that reminded me of the neighborhood my mother was taken from, years earlier. I had no idea where Ryan lived. The article in the paper said Pine View, but I’d never heard of it. All I knew of his upbringing was that he came from a long line of firefighters. It was in his blood, he’d said.
They were both eyeing the money. Even Annika was staring at it, appreciatively.
“You really think they’re here for this?” Annika asked.
Ryan was watching, and I didn’t answer.
“Offer it,” Cole said. “Either way, offer it.”
I tilted my head to the side, looked to Ryan—waiting for him to come up with a better idea. Trying to read the expression on his face.
He leaned his head back against the wall as he sat beside Cole. Seemed to concede something, either to me or to them. He did not say a word.
“He’s right,” Annika said. “That’s a lot of money. Even if they’re not here for it, maybe it will change their mind.” She held the pouches out to me.
Did this amount of money have the power to do that? To change someone’s plans? It must, if they were all looking at it like this. I took the money from Annika. “Okay, right. And how exactly am I supposed to do that?” I asked. “Slip a note under the door? Dear Intruders: Take this and leave us alone. Signed, the people stuck inside the safe room.”
Ryan choked on a laugh.
Annika gasped, and I thought she was close to tears again. “It’s not funny. Kelsey, really?” She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure exactly who I was.
Ryan shook his head back and forth, his eyes now focused on me, his lips curling into a grin. “She is really funny, though.”
“There’s something wrong with the both of you,” Cole said. “Snap the hell out of it. Look where we are! Someone shot me!”
I bit the inside of my cheek, couldn’t help myself. Folded in two, clutching twenty thousand dollars and trying not to cry all over it. My mother was gone, and we were trapped in a room, and her nightmare was literally standing on the other side of this wall.
I thought of Ryan’s face when he noticed the bullet lodged in the window. And me laughing when he brought out the harness in the car. Because something cracks inside you, short-circuits your emotional grid, your body saying Enough, enough.
Turned out there had been nothing wrong with us. With my mother. With me. Turned out we had reason to live the way we were living. All the fears: legitimate. Everything had been for a reason.
You’re not paranoid if they’re really after you.
Ryan and I were forgetting the room we were in now, and I could see how my mother could forget her entire captivity, too. You disconnect. You go somewhere else.
I drifted across the room, reached my hand down for Ryan. He used me for leverage and stood up beside me, and I stopped thinking of the walls, the blood, the men.
Enough, enough.
I wanted to make Ryan smile again. Even if it was because I was being completely ridiculous. I felt the delirious laughter bubbling up and over, urging me on.
I depressed the key on the walkie-talkie again, listened to it beep, and said, “Hello, intruders,” and Ryan tipped his head down, grinning with half his mouth. We were somewhere else. Anywhere else. Sending text messages to each other, captions of moments frozen in time, meaning layered under meaning. “I’d like to make you an offer you cannot refuse.”
I let go of the button, dropped my arm beside me, Ryan smiling in a way that made my heart squeeze, shaking his head at me. He wasn’t trapped in a room with no escape. I wasn’t responsible for the lives of three other people.
He took a step closer—and the walkie-talkie beeped in my hand, cutting through the static.
“We’re listening,” a low voice replied.
It was suddenly so quiet I was sure I could make out four distinct heartbeats fluttering through the room. My hands tingled. The room sparked. Shadows and fears, come to life.
A chill ran through the room, and I expected to see the cold puffs of breath from everyone else as they stared at the device in my hand. Ryan placed a hand on my elbow, like he was offering to take the walkie-talkie from me. But this was my house.
I raised the phone to my mouth, pressed the button. “Hello,” I said. Not quite a question. Not quite a statement.
A pause of static filled the room, and then, “What’s the offer?” The words were clipped and deliberate, emotionless.
I stared at Ryan, at Annika, at Cole.
“Do it,” Cole said.
“And then what?” Ryan asked. “We give it to them, and trust they’re going to walk away? Leave us alone?”
“And how do we just give it to them,” I asked, “without opening the door?”
“Do you have any better ideas?” Cole asked. There was a small puddle of blood forming below him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if he’d gone numb, into shock.
Annika was chewing on her thumbnail, staring at the door.
I did not, as it turned out, have any better ideas.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed the button on the phone. “We have money,” I said. “Around twenty thousand. It’s yours, if you leave. We’ll leave it outside the door, but you have to wait upstairs. We have to see you on the cameras. Outside. Before we open the door.”
The static continued as we waited. No response. The silence stretched out, becoming something real, filling up the empty crevices, turning my muscles tense and putting my nerves on edge.
“Maybe they’re deciding,” Annika said, shifting from foot to foot, scraping her heel against the concrete as she did. “Maybe they’re talking about the split.”
Ryan shook his head. “No, this was a stupid idea. This isn’t how things work—”