Lynn crouched down. She felt numb. Her empty stomach rebelled again, but she had nothing left to throw up.
The boy sucked in another breath, then another.
His struggle was all the more painful to watch with images of the inevitable conclusion of his suffering fresh in her memory. “It’ll be over soon.” Lynn barely managed to get the words out.
The boy groaned. His eyes fell shut, but unlike his mom, he seemed unwilling to lose sight of the world around him. His chest rose and fell. With every exhale, blood bubbled up between his lips. When he tried to inhale, he choked and coughed, spraying droplets.
Dani jumped when the blood hit her, but only tightened her hold. The red drops stood out on her extremely pale skin. Her arms trembled. She continued to stroke his hair. Was she thinking of Toby, as Lynn was? Because she kept seeing Tobias in the boy cradled in Dani’s arms.
Lynn slowly reached out to take the boy’s hand.
He squeezed it with as much strength as he could muster, then inhaled and exhaled one more time. His grip lessened and then became non-existent. His body relaxed.
Seconds ticked by.
Dani sniffed. “I want to bury him.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Okay.” Lynn had been about to say the same. An eleven-year-old boy hadn’t thought up this plan. He was just a victim of it, same as them.
Dani continued to stroke his hair.
“Are you… you know? All right?”
Dani hesitated, then her head bobbed up and down almost imperceptibly. “Yeah.”
Had Dani believed her when she’d said the same a few minutes ago? Lynn certainly didn’t believe her now. She debated whether she should say anything, but then some of the hurt over Dani’s betrayal came back and she returned her gaze to the boy. What a mess this was, killing a child.
Dani lifted her hand from the boy’s short brown hair and pulled her arm out from under his neck. Slowly, she sat up and took the hilt of the knife with a slightly trembling hand. She slid the knife out. A small stream of blood trickled down over his woolen shirt, too quickly to be absorbed.
Lynn set her jaw. Bile rose again, but she forced it down. She pushed up and took a step back. The distance helped settle her stomach. “We should wrap him. We’ll bury him in the morning.”
Dani wiped her blade on the carpet. She took a deep breath. “Could you grab a blanket or something?” She nodded toward the beds.
“Yeah.” She turned to get one. When she clenched and unclenched her fist to chase away the feeling of the boy’s hand in hers, she realized she’d busted up her knuckles when fighting his mother. Her head throbbed.
They wrapped the boy so he was fully encapsulated and protected.
Dani stroked his head one more time through the thick layer of wool before she stood. “Let’s get him downstairs.”
Lynn could tell she hadn’t meant for her voice to break. Dani also hadn’t meant for her hands to tremble as she tried to put her knife away, nor for her knees to buckle as the first sob tore through her body.
CHAPTER 13
LYNN RUSHED FORWARD AND CAUGHT Dani as her legs gave out. It was a purely reflexive response, because she had no idea what to do next. She’d been comforted as a child, so she had some memories of that. As far as Lynn could remember, she’d never been on the giving end of such intimate human-to-human contact. Dani’s weight against her body made the next step easy. She lowered them both to the floor.
Dani brought her hands up over her face. Their legs tangled as Lynn tried to find a way to hold herself up with her good arm and wrap Dani up with the other. Dani crumpled further and gripped Lynn’s jacket high up her chest while the other arm settled around her waist. She buried her face into the crook of Lynn’s neck.
Lynn struggled not to tense. This amount of physical contact set off every warning bell inside of her skull. She could picture a thousand ways Dani could kill her from this position. They presented themselves to her in flashes of half-formed images of blood and violence. Rationally, she knew Dani wasn’t going to harm her, but years of always being on guard were hard to ignore. Just to make herself more comfortable, she pushed the leg with the knife in her boot out a bit, away from Dani and within easy reach.
Dani was still sobbing. Her body shook with each one.
Her hair tickled Lynn’s skin. Do something, Tanner! Get yourself out of this! Anna had always rocked her when she’d cried, so she started to rock Dani as well. She really wanted to put distance between them, but she was still determined to prove to Dani that she was a decent person—even though she knew she didn’t have anything to prove anymore.
Slowly, some of the tension drained out of Dani. Her grip on Lynn’s jacket lessened. After a few more seconds, her clawing fingers relaxed entirely and settled on the leather.
The positive result sent a wave of relief through Lynn. It was a good start. What else had Anna done to calm her? Lynn cautiously slid her hand up over Dani’s back.
It caused a momentary stiffening of Dani’s body, but when Lynn’s hand reached her hair, Dani relaxed again.
Experimentally, Lynn stroked. When Dani’s sobs turned to sniffs, she started to work tangles out of Dani’s hair with her fingers. This seemed to soothe Dani even more: she slumped against Lynn in surrender, something Lynn found equal parts terrifying, impressive, and endearing—all because she would never have put this kind of trust in another person. Unless she’s playing you again. But why would she? She already had Lynn committed.
Now that Dani wasn’t crying as hard anymore, a quietness settled heavily between them. The rain still came down, but this silence wasn’t about the absence of noise. Lynn experienced it as an extreme awareness of Dani’s body against hers—heavy, warm, and intimate. The anxiety she felt about letting anyone get so close lingered.
Dani sniffed. She gave no indication of discomfort beyond her inner turmoil.
Lynn looked around the room to find anything that would either further soothe or potentially distract Dani. Her gaze landed on what was probably the mechanism for the gate. The family—or whoever had lived here prior—had managed to cut a hole through the floor close to the wall. The gate extended down on two chains that ran through screw eye hooks in the ceiling above the hole. The chains were long enough to span the breadth of the room, where they ran through two screw eyes again. From there, they fell down past two hooked pins in the wall, just big enough to fit through the chain loops. With proper timing, lowering the gate was probably as easy as yanking the two chains off the pins at the same time and standing back while gravity took hold. Pulling the gate up was going to be a heavy, but doable chore if they both worked at it.
Lynn’s inspection had taken a few minutes. By then, stroking Dani’s hair had become a repetitive motion without much thought put into it. To Lynn’s great surprise, her anxiety level had come down with her distraction. Yes, she still was very aware of Dani’s body curled against her own, but she no longer thought about the many ways this could potentially be lethal.
Dani’s breathing had settled. She inhaled and exhaled deeply against the skin of Lynn’s neck. Her hand had fallen from Lynn’s chest to her lap, but the other arm was still wrapped loosely around Lynn’s waist.
“Are you okay?” Lynn kept her voice soft and friendly. She would be mortified to have collapsed so completely, and she didn’t want to give Dani the feeling she was judging her, just in case her collapse had been genuine.
Dani took a deep breath and scooted away until there was no more physical contact between them. She cleared her throat, wiped her eyes, and sniffed once. “Yeah.” She checked on Lynn. “Sorry.”