I don't know why I felt the need to do this now. In hindsight, it was a really stupid thing to do. We'd just established that Rachel was a formidable opponent, and somewhere in this shadow-shrouded town she was plotting my demise. Going out after dark seemed like inviting trouble. But Rachel had already made one move tonight and I really didn't think she would make another. That didn't seem to be her style. She melted out of the shadows, struck, then faded away before we could catch her.

Even without her threat hanging over our heads, heading out now was foolish considering how emotionally and physically exhausted I was. But I couldn't help it, nor could I explain it. There was an urge inside me, the desperate need to share something with Luke before it was snatched away from me. Maybe it was the hope it represented, my determination that Luke and I would have a future beyond people hating us and trying to kill us.

"What are we doing here?" Luke asked.

I gazed up at the faded canary-yellow house sitting at the end of Sedgewood Avenue. If I thought that leaving it behind earlier would have lessened the weird certainty that this was supposed to my house, I was wrong. If anything the certainty intensified.

The clan's house was home to me now, but it would always belong to Samuel and Elena. This house was the one that could be my home.

Even though Ethan had broken the lock, I'd hung it back in place after we left. Weirdly, the thought of anyone sneaking into this house already made me feel like they were intruding on my property. I pulled the lock off the door, hiding it in a clump of overgrown grass. As I did so, I spotted a battered For Sale sign lying on its side where it must have been blown down by strong winds. No one had put it back up. No one seemed to care about this house. No one wanted it. Except me.

"Kiara, I don't understand," Luke said, eyeing the house.

I pushed open the front door and held out my hand. "Just come with me."

And he did because he trusted me.

I led him into the foyer and closed the door behind us. The house almost seemed to welcome me back, some ridiculous, sentimental notion I harboured that it wanted me here as much I wanted to be here. Immediately I felt foolish. It was just a house. It wasn't alive, it wasn't glad to see me, it was just a brick-and-cement construct, and it would never be mine.

Still, that didn't stop a girl from dreaming. And I could use a good dream right now.

"Just look at it," I said, turning in a slow circle.

"I'm looking." He wasn't really. Luke gave the foyer a cursory glance, then looked back at me, his expression bemused. "Kiara, I don't get it. What are we doing in an empty house in the middle of the night?"

My arms dropped to my sides. "I just...wanted to show it to you."

It had made sense half an hour ago. Now I just felt like an idiot for dragging him all the way out here. What had I expected, that he would gush over this grubby, empty shell of a house?

Luke closed the gap between us and put his arms around me. "What's this really about? And don't say nothing." He planted a small kiss on the end of my nose. "I know you too well for that."

I buried my face in his chest, tucking my head under his chin. "I don't know how to explain it."

His hands stroked up and down my spine. "Try. You know you can tell me anything, right?"

Of course I knew that. Luke was the other half of me – I couldn't keep secrets from him even if I wanted to. Finally I tipped back my head so I could meet his eyes. "There's just...something about this house."

"What sort of something?" His hands dipped lower, gliding along the small of my back.

Nothing for it but to take the plunge. "It feels like our house."

Luke's hands stilled, his expression curious. "What do you mean?" he said.

It felt even more stupid to say it out loud, but I'd started now and I couldn't backtrack. Besides, I had to tell him. He was the boy I loved. I shared my heart with him, and one day I'd share my body too. I wasn't denying him my mind.

"The first time I came in here, I felt like this was the house we were supposed to live in," I said. I pulled out of his arms and walked around the foyer. "Like I said, I can't really explain it, but it just feels right. I walked through that door and it felt like coming home. I can see us having a future here."

I stopped because Luke was smiling at me. "What?" I asked.

"You look so beautiful right now," he told me.

Heat flushed through me. Considering everything that had happened recently, I was pretty sure I was about as far away from beautiful as he'd ever seen me. I grimaced. Maybe not quite. My worst point was probably the night I'd got too drunk at a party and had passed out in Luke's arms. He'd spent the next morning holding my hair back while I had my head in a toilet. Maybe that was when I started to fall in love with him. Most guys would have run a mile and I wouldn't have blamed them. But not Luke.

I moved towards him almost before I realised what I was doing, and kissed him as if my life depended on it. He responded, crushing me against him, and swirling his tongue against mine until delighted lights sparked behind my eyelids.

"You know I want this as much as you do," Luke murmured against my mouth. "And I know that one day we will have our own space and our own life."

I knew what else he was thinking even though he didn't say it. We'd have all that, but not now. We still had Rachel and Leon to deal with, and none of us knew what to do about them. Plans for the future would have to wait.

But as I pulled Luke's head down for another passionate kiss, I was glad that I'd brought him here. I still felt silly about getting so attached to a rundown old house, but Luke didn't think it was silly. He never thought that about anything I did or said. I'd spent a long time hiding who I was, or wishing I could be someone else, and there would always be a part of me I'd have to hide from the world – it wasn't as if I could tell ordinary people about my dark and bloody past. But I didn't need to hide from Luke. With him I could truly be myself, and truly bare all the secrets in my soul.

It didn't take long for exhaustion to creep back in, crushing all my fuzzy feelings about the house. Once we got home, I literally crashed. There was no undressing, no brushing my teeth, none of the things that people normally do before going to bed; I just collapsed, face-down in the pillow, and plunged into sleep.

When I eventually surfaced, my room was in darkness – hardly surprising considering the black-out curtains. I stumbled from the bed to the window, and nudged the curtains aside so I could look out.

At first I thought I'd only dozed for a few minutes, then I blinked sleep out of my eyes and realised the greyish-black sky was dusk turning to night. I'd slept for an entire day.

My first thought was of Riley. Yesterday I'd completely respected Ethan's need to be alone with her, but now I needed to see my friend.

I paused for a quick wash and change of clothes, then I slipped out of my room and tiptoed to Ethan's. Voices drifted up from the kitchen, but I didn't stop to see who was talking. Ethan's door was closed. I turned the handle a fraction at a time, trying not to make any noise in case Riley was asleep. Despite my best efforts, a floorboard squeaked underfoot as I crossed the threshold into the room.

Riley was sitting in Ethan's bed, the covers pulled up around her. She was wearing one of his old t-shirts and, though he was several inches taller, Riley had enough curves to fill it out so it actually fitted her quite well. She looked up at me, and I just stopped where I was.

When I'd first met Riley, I'd thought of her like some mix of hurricane and rainbow, a wild spray of life and colour that exploded into my world and whisked me away. She'd always been full of life and spirit and energy, a crazy-haired, lip-pierced, eccentrically-dressed force of nature.

That wasn't the Riley I saw sitting in Ethan's bed. Her face was drained of colour but for a vivid red scrape between her cheek and jaw-bone, and there were greyish smudges under her eyes. She looked hollow and haunted, like someone had taken all that glorious energy and just sucked it right out of her.

I was frozen in place, gazing at the hollow shell of my best friend. Then a tear rolled down her cheek and the spell was broken. I rushed across the room and climbed onto Ethan's bed so I could pull her into my arms.

The door opened behind me, and I turned to see Ethan in the doorway. Riley didn't seem to have noticed; her eyes were squeezed shut. I sent Ethan a pleading look, silently asking for some time alone with her, and he nodded, backing out of the room.

Riley sniffled and sat back, swiping at her eyes. "I'm really giving this waterproof mascara a run for its money, huh?"

She'd cried away her makeup a long time ago.

"I'm so sorry, Riley," I whispered.

She blinked, a shadow of her old self flitting across her face. "Sorry for what?"

"For letting this happen to you."

She started to make a dismissive gesture, but halfway through, her hand just dropped into her lap. "It wasn't your fault," she said, in a quiet, very un-Riley-like voice.

"I shouldn't have left you –"

"Don't be ridiculous. You did what you had to."

Tears pricked my eyes as I realised I'd been waiting for her to blame me. After all, I was the one who'd pulled her into this whole mess in the first place. But I should have known that Riley would never do that.

"Did he...did he hurt you?" I asked.

Riley's hand clenched, bunching up the covers. "No, he..." She broke off and drew in a shuddering breath.

There was nothing I could say to help her through that moment. She was struggling not to fall apart, and all I could do was put my arms around her and hold her.

"He didn't hurt me," she said at last, but I felt the dampness of her tears soaking into my clothes.

Leon might not physically have hurt her, but the emotional wounds were there. Riley wasn't part of our world and she wasn't equipped to deal with this. Leon had snatched her away, tied her up, and locked her in a tiny room in the middle of the woods. It was enough to cut up anyone's mind.

After a while, Riley pulled away again. "But I'm okay."

She wasn't, but she obviously needed to tell herself that.

"Besides." She managed a grin that almost reached her eyes. "I knew you and Ethan would find me."

"Really?" I was humbled by her faith in me. I hadn't been so convinced. Most other people in her place would have been left traumatised, but Riley had coped with it, secure in the knowledge that, sooner or later, Ethan and I would come for her. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. My friends were the most important people in the world to me, and there was nothing I wouldn't do to protect them. Riley knew that. She knew that I'd never have stopped looking for her, and that between us, Ethan and I would have torn the whole damn town apart if that's what it took.

Her faith went a long way towards easing the guilt I felt over her being taken in the first place.

Riley squared her shoulders, looking a little more like her usual self. "So Ethan says I've got you to thank for taking care of my mum."

"I told her you were staying with me." In hindsight I wasn't so sure that had been the right thing to do. The police were better equipped to find people than I was. But the fact remained that involving the police would invite a lot of suspicious questions that we wouldn't be able to answer. It would have brought a lot of attention to the clan. But justifying why I'd lied to Riley's mum didn't change the fact that I could have gambled away Riley's life in the process.

Riley read my face. "Don't you dare think that wasn't the right thing to do."

I shied away from the memory of her lying on the outhouse floor, gagged and bound, and the awful split-second when I'd thought she was dead. "You could have died."

Riley was silent for a moment, her hands twisting and untwisting the covers. "Yes," she said. "I could have. But I didn't."

"It's not that simple –"

"Yes, it is." Her voice was returning to normal, though her face remained pale. "You made a call and it was the right one. I really don't want to talk about it anymore, Kiara."

Maybe she wasn't ready to talk about it at all, or maybe she just wasn't ready to talk about it with me. It didn't matter. I wasn't going to push her.

Riley looked down at the bed, her shoulders hunching with sudden tension. "Where is he now?"

"Who, Ethan?" I opened my mouth to call him but her next words silenced me.

"No, Leon."

I should have seen that coming. Of course Riley wanted to know what had happened to the man who'd abducted her. My refusal to involve the police meant Leon would never see the inside of a jail cell, and Riley knew that. Another reason why we needed to deal with him. Riley would never be able to walk the streets of her hometown and feel safe again if that man was on the loose.

"He's tied up in Greylark Aslyum," I told her.

She made a noise that was half-snort, half-hiccup. "Good."

I was glad that she didn't ask what was going to happen to him because I didn't have an answer. For now, in Riley's mind it was good enough that he couldn't hurt her anymore.

But that wasn't good enough for me. The others wouldn't have dealt with Leon without talking to me first and, since no one had done that, it was safe to assume he was still trussed up at Greylark. That meant a decision had to be made regarding his fate.

And it needed to be made soon.