“You are so small,” Samuel said to my mother. “I always underestimate you.”
He slid a knife from his back pocket as he walked toward her. I saw a gun tucked into the waistband of Martin’s pants. And Eli…what did Eli have? The scent of cigarettes…
I didn’t have to overpower them. I didn’t need muscles and doors. There’s a way out of everything. She had taken it, once. It wasn’t perfect, maybe wasn’t even right, but she saw the chance, and she took it.
She built our life out of blood money, and I existed because of it. Everything that sustained me, from the walls that surrounded me to the blood running through me, came from darkness and lies.
But this is what nobody else understood except me.
She had built herself a cage, with bars and concrete and locks. She had been serving time for it. Seventeen years’ worth. A life sentence.
For me.
Stories take on a life of their own, but this one was mine.
—
I lunged for Eli, my hands going around his waist, dragging down his body, trying to force us both to the ground. There was yelling—someone calling for Eli to stop, someone calling for me to stop, but I didn’t. He stumbled, braced himself against a wall, and he fought me off easily. But he didn’t hit me, wasn’t too rough, and I thought it was because Samuel was watching.
From the ground, I saw Samuel and Martin exchange a look. A frown. The room filled with tension, but I stayed curled up on the ground, trying to catch my breath. I kept my hand tucked against my stomach.
I needed one thing. Just one. And now I had it.
“What are you doing?” Samuel asked as I pushed myself to standing. His face twisted in confusion.
I let out a noise that sounded almost like laughter.
I felt the dust and grime from the basement floor like a chill on my skin. Felt the bruises like a challenge, the fear like something whispering my name, urging me on.
“Find something to bind her arms,” Martin barked at Eli.
“Wait,” I said, and everyone froze. I felt their eyes shift from my face to my hand—at what I was holding out in front of me, over an open box. My hand was trembling, but I didn’t know if it was from the fear or something else. Something stronger, simmering in my blood.
“Do you know,” I said, “what you’re standing in the middle of?”
Samuel turned the knife in his hand, the blade catching the light in the corner.
“My entire basement is combustible.”
I thought of Ryan, slowly backing away. The fire extinguishers throughout the house. As if all of it was waiting for a spark.
There were the stairs behind me, and the hole in the floor in the room to my right—and then there was this.
I held Eli’s metal Zippo lighter in my hand, flicked it once, watched as the flame danced over the metal. “Nobody moves,” I said.
Martin had his gun aimed at me, but Samuel raised his hand. “You want to play, kid? Let’s play.”
He took the gun from Martin’s hand and pointed it at my mother.
“What will you do, I wonder,” Samuel said. His head was faintly cocked to the side, as if he really was that curious. Curious to see what I was made of. And I was scared to find out. Fear reveals things, but so does what we do with it. So does this.
What was I afraid of?
That I would not be forgiven.
That I might make the wrong choice.
That I had taken too great a risk.
That nobody would truly love me, once they knew me.
That I might be made of too much darkness.
“Kelsey,” my mother gasped in warning. But wasn’t this what she had prepared me for? Not just to run, but to stand my ground? She taught me, above all, to survive. She taught me to weigh risks, and dangers—to see them everywhere. To act.
And I was doing it.
Eli’s head twisted toward the stairs first. Then Martin’s. And then I heard it, too. Sirens, faintly calling. Getting closer. But I didn’t feel any relief. Instead, the tension grew, the room practically tingling with a new blind rush of terror.
They had no reason to hand us over. They were violent, the police had said. It was the reason my mother left them in the first place—because they had blood on their hands, and now so did she.
This was about to become a hostage situation. And they had no remorse, nothing worth bargaining for. They had a gun, a knife, two hostages, and walls closing in on them.
All I had was the lighter and some hope.
“How did you get out of here the last time?” Samuel asked. He seemed too calm, like the fear could not touch him—and that made me suddenly more afraid. As if he was missing some basic human emotion, and its lack had turned him cold and remorseless.
“Drop the gun and I’ll show you,” I said.
He smiled. “You know I’m not going to do that.”
I looked from him to my mother to the stairs. I could not go with him. I could not. If we went with him, we were dead, or we were taken. Either way, we were gone. This I was sure of.
Everything my mother had taught me, all the things she’d fought to keep hidden, all of it was leading to this. Right now.
“Mom,” I said in warning.
Martin still had ahold of her.
My mother closed her eyes.
I had become the thing we always feared. The danger in the world. The unknown, existing out in the vastness. An unforeseen turn of events.
A shadow in the corner of your eye—blink and you might miss me.
The flame still flickered in my hand. And then I dropped it.
In the event of a fire. Stay low to the ground. Know the exits. Crawl toward safety. Know the way by heart, by feel.
But nobody prepared me for the thickness of smoke, how it suffocates even as you escape.
Nobody prepared me for the heat.
Nobody prepared me for the sound. A crackling. A whoosh. The screaming.
Nobody prepared me for the thousand doubts that piled one on top of the other in the moment that followed, insisting I had made the wrong choice. The fear that threatened to paralyze me once more.
There was a series of explosions as one box ignited, and then another, and another—chemicals bursting as the fire spread throughout the room.
I heard footsteps on the stairs, and I called for my mother. Her name scratching against my throat. The smoke choking me as I sucked in air to call for her again.
I sank lower, my face pressed to the concrete, and I wondered what I had traded my shot at safety for. What we all had traded.
Somewhere, a fire alarm blared. Somewhere, sirens approached. Footsteps fled. The heat radiated all around me.
Move, Kelsey.
I started crawling in the opposite direction from the footsteps—to the closest exit. I felt for the sides of the open safe room along the floor, the metal hot to the touch, and scrambled for the compartment in the floor. Shut the door against the fire. Shut the door against the smoke. It’s the safest choice.
I couldn’t do it. “Mom!” I called again, but the fire was too loud—I was shrinking into myself, my world growing smaller—
I couldn’t see anything, just felt for the compartment—my hands connecting with warm flesh, jerking back.
“Kelsey?” A low voice, a cough.
“Mom?”
The safe room door slammed shut, the noise trapped behind it, though the smoke and heat lingered. I couldn’t see her in the dark, with the smoke billowing all around us.
Her hands brushed mine on the floor, and she said, “You found it.” She coughed again in the thick smoke, even though the door was closed.
“Kelsey, listen,” she said. But then there was yet another explosion from just outside the door. The entire foundation shook, rattling my bones.
“We have to move,” I said.
—
I made my mother go first, because I remembered the feeling I had, sitting on the ledge. Debating whether to go. I didn’t want to give her the choice. I didn’t want to know which one she’d pick.
I slid down after her, breathing in the smoke-free air. Her hand connected with the side of my face first, then gripped my shoulder. “There’s a tunnel,” she whispered, leading me in the darkness.