Taken While I Slept by My Stepbrother and His Friends novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Three Hundred Eighty-Eight

Her banking app shows $1.21 million gone, Gage admits he suspected for a week, and Laine decides to keep playing asleep, until breakfast puts another mug of tea in front of her.

I kept my eyes shut while my stepfather's lips were still on my hair.

Dwight straightened.

He tucked my phone into the pocket of his robe and patted my blanket twice.

The door opened, the hall light slid across the carpet, and the lock clicked behind him.

I lay there and counted to three hundred.

Then the closet door creaked, and Torin's voice came out of the dark.

"He's in his office. Door's shut."

I turned on the lamp.

Gage was already on his knees beside my bed.

His face was gray.

"Laine."

"Don't," I said. "Not yet."

Kipp climbed out of my closet with one of my scrub tops hanging off his shoulder.

"I need my phone," I said.

"It's back on the kitchen charger," Torin said, watching his screen. "He put it there on his way."

"I'll get it," Zane said.

He went out barefoot, two hundred and forty pounds of lineman making no sound.

He came back with it held out in both hands.

I opened my bank app with my own thumb.

I'd never once opened the trust account.

My dad's life insurance had sat in there since I was seventeen.

I hadn't wanted to look at a number that meant he was gone.

I looked now.

Three hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars.

"That's wrong," I said.

"It should be one point six."

Torin sat on the edge of my desk and leaned close enough to see.

"Scroll down," he said gently.

I scrolled.

Twenty thousand in May.

Fifty thousand in June.

Ninety thousand, a week before the Fourth.

Forty thousand, tonight, nine minutes ago.

Every transfer went to an account ending in 4471.

"One point two one million," Torin said. "Gone."

I opened the documents tab with shaking fingers.

A power of attorney sat at the top of the list.

It was dated May 9.

My birthday.

My signature was on the last page, loose and slanting downhill.

"I don't remember signing this," I said.

"He brought you cake," Gage said quietly. "On your birthday. With your tea."

I remembered the cake.

I didn't remember anything after it.

I looked at him.

He was still on his knees, with his arms on my mattress and his big scarred hands open.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

He didn't lie.

"A week," he said. "You slept through the smoke alarm test."

"Then the palm came down in the storm and you didn't twitch."

"I've carried people out of fires who woke up faster than you."

"A week."

"I told them." He tipped his head at the other three. "Not you."

"Why not me?"

"Because it's my father." His voice cracked on the word. "Because I needed to be wrong."

Kipp sat down on the floor with his back against my dresser.

"We all said wait until we've got him on camera," he said. "That's on all of us, not just him."

"I know whose fault it is," I said. "It's the man in the white robe."

I sat with my back against the headboard and my knees up and the phone in my lap.

"We call the cops," Zane said. "Right now. Tonight."

"And say what?" I asked. "He has my power of attorney. My signature's on it. He'll say I asked him to manage it."

"We've got eleven nights of him walking into your room," Torin said.

"With a key, in his own house, carrying my phone," I said. "He'll say I sleepwalk. He'll say I asked him to charge it."

Gage didn't say I was wrong.

"The tea," he said. "That's the thing he can't explain."

"Then I prove the tea," I said. "I prove he's drugging me. And then we call."

"How?" Kipp asked.

"I don't drink it, and I keep doing what I've been doing all summer." I looked at all four of them. "I sleep."

"No," Gage said.

"You don't get a vote."

"Laine, he was in here with you for forty minutes a night, and you didn't know what he was doing."

His jaw worked. "Neither did I."

"Now I'll know." I held up the phone. "And now so will you."

Zane looked at Torin.

Torin nodded once, slowly.

"I'll watch the hall every night," he said. "Every second he's in here."

"We'll take shifts," Zane said.

Kipp raised his hand like we were in class.

"I'd like it on the record that I hate this plan."

"Noted," I said.

I kept thinking about the last thing Dwight had whispered.

Two more weeks, sweetheart.

Then it's your mother's turn.

At six, the four of them went out my window one at a time, onto the soft dirt of my mom's rose bed.

Gage went last.

He stopped with one leg over the sill.

"Eat nothing he hands you," he said.

Then he was gone across the yard toward the pool house.

I didn't sleep.

At eight I walked into the kitchen in my ASU T-shirt with my hair in a knot.

My mom sat at the counter in her silk robe, yawning into her hand.

Dwight stood at the stove in a golf shirt, flipping pancakes and humming the same song he'd hummed in my room.

The four boys were already at the table, hungover and pretending to be.

Nobody looked at me.

"There she is," Dwight said warmly. "Sleeping Beauty."

He slid a plate of pancakes in front of me.

Then he set a steaming mug beside it.

It smelled like chamomile.

My mom reached over and squeezed my wrist.

"Drink it, baby," she said. "You look tired."

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