Page 131 of Into the Dark
“Everything okay?” he asks as he strokes his hand over my head.
“Yep, absolutely fine. You okay?”
He gives me a single nod and glances back over at Steph and Freddy. Fred’s holding a small tumbler of whiskey now as he leans in to kiss her on the forehead. She stretches her arms up and yanks him down to her mouth by fisting his jumper.
“You ready to go?” Jake asks me, quiet.
He makes his excuses about my workday starting super early and the drive back, and then Freddy and Stephanie are walking us to the door.
“Well, it’s been lovely having you two. We should definitely do it again sometime.”
“I’d like that.” I nod. “And the spaghetti really was divine. I wish I could bribe you for the recipe, though Jake would make a better of job of doing it justice than I would. I’m not much of a cook,” I admit.
“Well, you must have other talents, sweetheart,” Freddy chuckles, shooting a loaded glance at Jake.
Jake rolls his eyes, which just makes Freddy laugh louder. “Yeah, she has. Too many to mention. And she saves lives for a living—she doesn’t need to fucking cook.”
Something warm fills my tummy, and then Stephanie wraps her arms around me.
“It was so nice meeting you, Alex. I hope we do this again.”
“Me too, Steph,” I say, meaning it, though Jake pulls me out of the house as if he can’t get away fast enough.
“Thank fuck that’s over,” he grumbles as we pull off the driveway.
“So, Steph seems really nice,” I say when we’re on the road.
Jake doesn’t lift his eyes from his phone, but I feel his attention shift to me in an unseen kind of way. “She’s fine, yeah. What were you talking about when we were downstairs?”
“Nothing, really.” I shrug.
Jake turns his head to me.
“She was talking about Freddy—about how he looks after her. She mentioned about when she used to be a dancer.”
“That all?”
When I glance at him he has an odd look on his face. “Yes. Why?”
He shakes his head and looks back at his phone. “No reason. It’s good that she was nice, that’s all.”
“Why wouldn’t she be nice?” I laugh a little.
Jake doesn’t. He just brings his thumb up to nibble on the side of his nail, still tense even though the meal with Fred is over.
“I don’t get it. Don’t you like her? I think she genuinely cares about him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jake blinks, confused. “What? No, yeah, I think she does. She’s fine.” When he glances over at me again there’s this odd look in his eye—one I don’t recognize at first, until suddenly I do. I’ve seen that look before. More than once in fact. The realization feels like claws in my chest.
“Oh my god,” I whisper.
“What?”
“I can’t believe this…” I feel sick. Looking back, it’s so bloody obvious. The tension, which I thought was about me being there in Freddy’s house, was about more than that. The look to her as he left us alone, the searching look when he returned…
“Alex, you’re freaking me out. What is it?” He’s shifting in his seat now, and it only makes the claws hook into me a little further. Little needles plunged deep into my chest.
Up ahead, I see a break in the trees, and so I pull into the entrance to a private road. There’s a gate a little further up it, but it’s locked, and the road beyond it is shrouded in complete darkness.