Lethal Love novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: The Cot in the Back

I looked back through the shop.

Cosima was still asleep on the bench.

Gran was snoring in her chair.

I lifted the steel bar as quietly as I've ever done anything.

Oakley fell in through the door with the rain.

She grabbed both my arms, and her hands were like ice.

"Shh," I said. "There's someone asleep out front."

I barred the door behind her and sat her on the step stool by the stove.

There was a cut through her eyebrow and blood under her nose.

Her feet were black from the street and bleeding at the heels.

I filled a basin with warm water and put it on the floor in front of her.

"Feet," I said.

She put them in and made a sound.

I wet a dish towel and handed it to her for her face.

She just held it and shook.

"Who did this?"

"Two men. Last night. They came through my door."

Her teeth were chattering. "I went down the fire escape in my socks and lost them in the subway."

"Whose men?"

She looked at the floor.

"Oakley. Whose men?"

"I can't say his name." She was crying again, quietly now. "If I say his name, I'm dead."

"You might be dead anyway. You're in my kitchen."

"You're the only one who won't."

"Won't what?"

"Kill me." She laughed, a horrible little laugh. "You won't even key my car. I used to think that was pathetic."

I sat down on the floor across the basin from her.

"Why did they come for you?"

Then she told me.

She told it to the dish towel in her hands, flat and fast, the way she talked about my crooked seams.

Last summer a man her father knew had come to her with an offer.

There was a boy on a dating app. A rich boy with a debt to the wrong people.

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