so close to death before, so close to danger.
Don’t think about it now.
Savannah returns, putting a teacup and saucer on the table in front of me. Oh, it’s sweet. I inhale the steam and wrap my hands around it. Tea is relaxing. Tea could make me feel better.
“It’s good,” Savannah prompts, and I look up into her bizarrely bright eyes. She looks too excited for tea. Some instinct in the back of my mind warns that I should throw the tea on the floor and sprint for the door. My pulse heightens with it. But I’m being paranoid. It’s tea. I watched her make it. Savannah’s mean, but she’s not dangerous—at least not as dangerous as any man who comes in here, including Zeus.
“Why are you being nice to me?”
She narrows her eyes, expression darkening, but it’s gone in a flash, so quickly I’m not sure if it was ever really there. “You said you didn’t feel well.” Savannah folds her arms over her chest and pouts a little. “This isn’t a good place to be off your game. If you don’t want it, then….” She reaches for the saucer.
“No.” This place is a web, and I crashed through it on the first day, disturbing the balance. Maybe if I drink this tea, it will make it easier to survive. That’s all I need to do—live long enough to make it out. I put on a big smile. “Thank you for the tea. It—it smells great.”
It really does, and that’s probably why I overshoot it when I raise the cup to my lips. A single ice cube floats at the top, nearly melted.
“My mom taught me that trick,” says Savannah, and her conversational tone is off. We do not share stories about our lives, me and Savannah. I think of the hate burning in her eyes when she walked into Zeus’s office. The triumph she took in swallowing his cum. The tea goes down wrong, and I cough, sputtering, until she slaps me on the back.
“That happened fast,” she murmurs, almost to herself, and I put down the teacup. It rattles against the saucer, tea sloshing over the rim of the cup, and for reasons I can’t explain, I sweep it up with a finger and put it in my mouth. It’s too much. I can feel my expression falling into the neutral blank I use with my father. My pulse pounds under my skin. Where is everyone? Savannah and I are the only ones left in the dining room, and I am officially the woman in a horror movie who wanders around cooing at original light fixtures until she dies.
“I feel much better.” I stand and take a step back, and my chair tips over. Savannah catches it, but it brings her in awkwardly close. The heat of her body brushes against my shirt while I slip away. A moment of hesitation makes me falter at the door—maybe I should clean up the teacup, at least—but no. Cold fear spills down from the top of my head to my wrists.
Tea is supposed to be calming.
I feel less and less calm on my way up the stairs. The elevator would be faster, but I don’t want to stop moving; I want to get to the bedroom and shut the door. My heart beats harder and harder with every step, painful punches on the inside of my ribcage, and my temples throb in a matching tempo. On the last landing, my shin catches the lip of the final step and both knees go out.
It should hurt. Bruise. But I don’t feel anything on my shins, only the cool surface of the handrail I caught myself on. Gravity shifts. I tighten my grip and hug the wall. The pull toward the bottom of the stairs is so strong it’s almost irresistible. The staircase is steeper than it seemed. More blood to the head, blood to the heart. It has to be outside my body now.
And—and. Someone’s after me. Generally, but also now, someone is creeping at the bottom of the stairs. If they catch me on their way up, I’ll die, but if I move, I might fall and die. My skin feels like it’s turning inside out. Oh, God. I can’t die here, on the stairs, after everything. Everything, nothing, nothing matters if I break my neck.
I have never clutched anything as hard as I’m clutching the handrail. The tips of my fingers are losing feeling. Eventually, they will peel away