Read Online One Wrong Move by Shannon McKenna - Free Book Online Page B

needed clothes, a passport, her laptop.
    The subway ride was difficult. Survival instinct prodded her to study her surroundings, but every time she looked at a person directly, the weight of that person’s life crashed down on her. She tried staring at feet instead. Feet said less than faces. Still, it was better now. If she kept the nobody here pulsing out, the gray fuzz up and strong, she blocked most of it. But it took every ounce of her concentration.
    The subway stop was a long walk from her house. Her nervous, ragged trot soon turned into a hell-for-leather sprint, skirt flapping, sandals sliding. Phone in one hand, glasses in the other.
    She finally reached the narrow brick row house she’d grown up in. It didn’t feel like a safe haven, but it had a door that locked.
    She longed for a shower, but her crawlies were creeping worse every second that went by. She just wanted to move. She gathered stuff in feverish haste, scrabbling in the drawer for her passport. She hurried up to her bedroom to change, the small room at the back. Years after Stan’s death, she had not been able to use the master bedroom. She could not sleep in a room where Stan had slept.
    Stupid, she told herself as she yanked off clothes and pried her fuzzy coil of hair out of the scrunchie. She should sell this place, buy something smaller. It didn’t look like she was on track to have a family.
    And she heard it. Squeak-pop.
    She went still as death. The warped stair, the fifth one, made that sound when a foot was put on it. Her insides froze. She listened ’til her ears ached. How the hell . . . ? The alarm should have gone off!
    There. A shush of fabric on fabric. The faint squeak of shoe soles against wood. Someone coming up the stairs. Slowly. Sneakily.
    Ghouls, chasing her. Helga, jabbing the needle into her arm, her eyes red dened, desperate. Yuri’s mutilated body. She stared around the room, stark staring naked, lungs clenched around a burning bubble of trapped air.
    No way out except for the window, but it was swollen shut, as warped as the squeaking stairs. The house was old and creaky, and she didn’t love it enough to take proper care of it. She’d never get that window open, not without a baseball bat.
    She grabbed her phone, her purse, and dove for the closet.
    She’d paid a considerable sum to a carpenter to design her closet when she’d moved in. It was the only change she’d made.
    She’d been reluctant to remodel the place until she was sure she could stand to live in it, but the closet was a must. The second bathroom that Stan had installed had created a recessed wall in the back bedroom. It made the closet space much deeper than a closet needed to be, so it had been a simple matter of having a false wall inserted there. A click, and a panel slid open, a space just wide enough for a terrified smallish person to slither into.
    Just a few feet deep. She’d been storing boxes of her mother’s old reference books in there, while she gathered the nerve to get rid of them, but there was space behind the stack of boxes. At eye level, to the side, a tiny knothole made a natural peephole.
    Nina pulled the outside closet door closed, and slid into the narrow aperture. Snick, the panel clicked into place.
    She shivered in the inky darkness. The challenge now was to keep her teeth from clacking. She fastened the manual latch from the inside, so that anyone touching the back panel wouldn’t accidently engage the opening device. The guy who built the closet had suggested a panic room, but that didn’t feel right to her. If the bad guy knew you were there, he could lay seige. You could be starved out, bullied out, burned out. She didn’t want to huddle in a bunker while her assailant banged and threatened.
    She wanted to be invisible.
    The door to her bedroom opened, with its shrill, dry creak.
    Nobody here. Nobody here. Nothing to see. Nothing to see.
    She kept her fear tucked in tight. Stayed very small. Her hand, clutching the