The orange orb of the sun had begun to illuminate the sky, peeking around tree branches like light streaming out from beyond a cracked door, but the world went colder once Amelia and Henry were completely under the cover of the evergreens. Everything was darker here, dark enough that her eyes could play tricks on her, that she could start to believe that massive, shadowy specters were looming over them instead if she let herself dwell on it for more than a fraction of a second.

She watched her breath fog in the air in front of her. She watched the compass on her phone, steering them in the right direction—just because she'd come to Hollow House before unfortunately didn't mean that she'd taken the time to stomp through all of the adjacent woods just in case she'd ever need to know her way around. She felt Henry's hand holding hers, the only fragment of warmth for what felt like miles even though she knew that they were barely out of sight of the car.

They were treading as lightly as they could; fortunately, the piles of dead pine needles were much quieter beneath their boots than crunchy fallen leaves would have been. They weren't even close enough to the house yet to be in any danger of being heard, but there was no such thing as being too cautious at the present moment.

"Henry?" she whispered, shifting closer to his side when the sudden scuttling noise of a squirrel running down a tree trunk nearby made her heart jump in her chest.

"Amelia Rose," he whispered back, nearly smiling.

"Thank you for going along with my crazy ideas..." she swallowed. "I'm...I'm so sorry if I'm misleading us. If I let you down."

He faltered, his steps slowing just slightly. "You couldn't let me down, not if you tried. You've done way more to try to help her than anyone ever would have asked of you."

He held her hand a little tighter as if trying to put an end to the conversation, to say without words that he didn't want to hear her protest his point. Now wasn't the time for second-guessing, not when they were mere strides away from Hollow House. Amelia realized that she could already see the treeline ahead, which would open up into the field behind the house.

If there was anything else she wanted to say to Henry, now was the time to say it.

Her mouth was dry, her pulse pounding in her ears, and she gripped his hand harder to stop him. She looked up at his face, at the lovely blue of his eyes and the flush that had risen on his cheeks from the cold air, and realized that there was so much she hadn't said.

"If something goes wrong in there..."

"Don't say that. We can't afford to think like that."

Amelia exhaled through her nose. "Alright," she said thinly. "I just–"

Rather than finish speaking, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him, slipping her phone into her back pocket so that she could lift that hand to the contour of his cheek instead. For just a moment, just one more moment, she needed to forget where she ended and he began. She wasn't ready to relinquish him to whatever waited for them inside, not yet.

"Don't," he eventually breathed, the rhythm uneven. "Don't be like that and kiss me like it's the last time you're going to."

"It's not." One last swift kiss on his lips. "It's for good luck."

"For good luck," he murmured back.

"So," Henry asked as they crouched near the treeline, looking out on the backside of the old manor in the near distance. "How are we getting in?"

Amelia had already thought about this and although none of the options seemed great, she'd come up with a Plan A.

"There's a big window in the kitchen, over the sink," she explained. "The last time I was here, it didn't even have a screen and the locks didn't shut properly, so there's a small chance we might be able to pry it open without breaking the glass."

Because they could, of course, just chuck a rock or something at any of the lower-level windows and then try to crawl through—or even try to break through the back door—but they'd be announcing themselves very loudly.

The biggest risk of the kitchen window approach was that...well, there might be someone in the kitchen. But with the number of windows on the back of the house, the chance of getting spotted was an inevitability that they'd just have to try to work around.

"We'll try to keep low," she continued. "Run to the side of the house, then listen for noises nearby. If it's quiet, we can peer around the front and see if his car is there."

"And if it is?"

"I haven't thought that far yet."

There was no infinity of time at their disposal to stand around and think—twelve minutes had already passed since they left Liam in the car—so all they could do was run. And so they ran, ran across the stretch of yellow grass. Amelia first, Henry behind her. And her heart was in her throat the entire time, her eyes tempted to wander upwards and see if Colton was there in one of the upper windows, watching them, but she had to watch where she was going and so all she could do was keep her eyes ahead of her and run–

Amelia was panting when they reached the side of the house despite how short the distance had been. Her lungs didn't feel capable of holding much air this morning, but her breathing began to steady once she processed that they'd at least made it this far, that Henry was right beside her again.

They listened. Aside from a brief rustle through the trees from the wind, there was silence all around them, and after a long, heavy moment of holding their breath and still hearing nothing, Amelia started to edge towards the front of the house and nervously peered around the corner.

Nothing again.

"Okay," she whispered, barely audible even to her own ears. "I'm going to try the window."

Much to her relief, the kitchen window at least didn't appear to have been repaired in the months since she had come here with Colton. There was still no screen; the frame looked like it could crumble apart at any second. She'd had her fingers crossed that it would have been neglected in favor of fixing the other, more obvious issues inside the house, but every single element of this plan was just hopeful guesswork.

She felt the dry, chalky texture of dirt on her palms when she placed them near the bottom of the window and pushed upwards as hard as she could, and for a horrifying several seconds, it didn't work. The glass didn't budge, not even the slightest, and so she started to believe that he must have gotten the latches replaced. But when Henry came to help her and they both shoved with all their might, it finally gave way and creaked open.

It was going to be a tight fit, but they'd make it work.

She wasn't sure which part was more difficult: having Henry hoist her up high enough that she could flop through the window or not making an ungodly amount of noise as she tumbled inside. The sink faucet nearly jabbed her in the ribs and she tensed when she saw dirty dishes lying in the basin.

Colton might not have been home at that very moment, but he definitely had very recently.

Henry was tall and nimble enough that he managed to clamber inside on his own, but she watched the way his expression morphed just as hers had when he saw the state of the sink, the edges still slick with water. Now that they were inside, even whispering felt too dangerous, but he was looking at her for instruction.

Basement? he mouthed.

Amelia was a fraction of a second away from nodding yes before she realized that they could also very easily get trapped in the basement if there was someone hiding in the house who decided to lock them in, and if that happened, there was no telling if her cell service would work well enough down there to send Liam an SOS. She drew her phone out of her pocket to type a message in her notepad, the only way she could think of to communicate with Henry right now.

let's check the rest of the house first

He kept close behind her, close enough that she could feel his breath on her shoulder, as they crept towards the stairs. A chill brushed its fingers along the back of her neck—the inside of the house was nearly as cold as the outdoors—and she tried not to shiver.

Getting up the stairs was torturous. Amelia could hear every creak, every groan of the old wood beneath their feet declaring their presence no matter how hard they tried to be quiet, and in the back of her mind, she could hear a tiny clock ticking away—how many minutes did they have left before Liam assumed they were in trouble?

All of that promptly left her mind when she saw that a light was on in the room at the end of the hall. Henry sucked in a hushed breath behind her and she sensed he was thinking the same thing as she was.

One way or another, they were about to find out who was behind the door.

It could be Colton. They could be surrendering themselves right into his hands.

It could be Lily. Henry might be mere footsteps away from being reunited with his missing half, his purest love.

It could be no one. It could be someone else.

But even if they'd wanted to turn back now, they'd already passed the point of no return.

Again, Amelia reached for his hand, felt his fingers intertwine with her own. Whatever this was, they were in it together.

Her other hand hovered near the gun, just in case.

In this house, deadly silent as it was, there was no real way to go about pushing open a cracked door in a stealthy manner. Henry, either realizing this or simply growing sick on the anticipation, moved ahead of her to nudge it open and see what was inside once and for all.

It was a bedroom, plainly furnished. There was a standing lamp in the corner, a nightstand, a metal-framed bed. And on that bed was a girl wearing loose-fitting clothing, her face hidden behind a book as if this were just any other regular, leisurely Sunday afternoon, but Amelia would have recognized the dark, disheveled hair that fell down past her shoulders from anywhere.

Lily.

She dropped the book in surprise, and there it was, the face that had been immortalized in pictures yet never actually seen in the flesh by Amelia. Until now. Her cheeks looked hollower now, her eyes more feral, but she was absolutely the girl in the photos.

The face that looked painfully alike to Henry's, that was looking at his for the first time in nearly three months.

But she didn't look happy, or even relieved. She looked petrified.

Something wasn't right. Alarm bells started sounding off in Amelia's head as Lily clambered up from the bed and rushed forward to grab Henry by the shoulders.

"You have to get out of here." Her voice was raspy, sounding like she hadn't been using it nearly enough, but Amelia could still hear the desperation of the plea beneath it. "He's going to be back any minute."

The words, the reality that Colton was nearby, triggered an instinctive, panicked response in her brain while Henry, completely shattered and made whole all at once, gaped at his cousin. He seemed stuck in space and time, like he'd waltzed right into Medusa's lair and didn't expect anything to actually happen when he looked her in the eyes.

Amelia fumbled for her phone, her fingers shakily opening her messages with Liam.

NOW

"What are you talking about?!" Henry managed to splutter, jolting himself back into motion. "We're getting you out of here."

But Lily was fervently shaking her head no, no, no, no.

"He promised you'd be safe as long as you stayed away," she whimpered. "The letters were supposed to keep you away."

Before Amelia could even fully register what had been said, Lily was suddenly looking at her instead of Henry. But it wasn't hostility that Amelia saw there in her features, in her wide doe eyes and the slight quivering of her lips. It was...dread.

"Are you Amelia?"

Her throat tightened. "How do you–"

"He's told me about you. He showed me pictures of you. And he said..." Lily swallowed, looking even more pained than she had a moment before. "He said that he knew how to hurt you. And that I wouldn't want that because...because Henry loves you."

A stifled, surprised noise fell off Amelia's lips. She hadn't considered that Colton might ever say anything to Lily about her, and she felt like she'd been punched in the gut as all of the fragments of the full picture started to assemble themselves in her mind. It suddenly made much more sense why Lily would have been allowed to sit around in here unsupervised when she could have tried escaping as easily as Henry and Amelia had just gotten in.

This wasn't a physical prison; it was a psychological one. Colton had kept Lily just comfortable enough to make her genuinely believe that staying with him was better than whatever harm he'd inflict on Henry if she tried to make a run for it.

And so she'd stayed in hell for Henry's sake.

"Why would you ever do that for me?"

He sounded completely and utterly devastated, like he'd stuck her hand in his chest and dug his heart right out. Amelia knew that this had to be one of his worst nightmares come to life: for Lily to believe she was helping him while he had been a tormented shell of his normal self without her.

But Amelia also knew how convincing Colton could be, how he could string along a person for months with his half-truths and clever lies. Especially when that person felt so weak compared to him. And she saw in Lily's eyes that she was still convinced, that she'd been drawn too deep into Colton's madness even with Henry standing right in front of her begging her to come with him.

"You can still get out of here," she pleaded. "There's still time for you to go–"

From the doorway behind them, a voice drawled, "Is there?"

The three of them whirled around, Henry and Amelia instinctively placing themselves like a human shield between Lily and Colton. Colton, who had somehow managed to silently sneak up on them like a predator hunting his prey, only revealing himself once he was ready to pounce. Had he been in the house this whole time, softly laughing to himself?

He was casually leaning against the doorframe, looking almost bored. "Did you really think you could just stroll in and out of here?"

"Yeah, actually," Amelia blurted before Henry could come up with a different response. She just needed to stall for a few more minutes—Liam had gotten her message, right? There was no way she could check now. "And we made it pretty far."

"Not far enough."

Let him gloat, she thought. Colton's ego was his Achilles heel—she just had to keep him talking. She needed to ask questions. Luckily, she had a lot of those.

"Why did you send me after her in the first place?" Amelia demanded, straining to keep her voice steady. "You were the one who tipped me off about that search party, but why go out of the way to make yourself innocent when I wouldn't have suspected you?"

He shrugged nonchalantly enough to make her want to punch his pretty little face even more, which she hadn't thought was possible.

"I thought it'd be a one-and-done deal," he admitted. "I knew you weren't going to find anything, obviously. I thought you'd show up and then leave and that would be that.

"I never expected you to shack up with Caruso here so quickly–" His eyes floated to Henry, who was glaring. "–but when I saw you having coffee with him the next day, I knew something was up. I decided to keep tabs on you both and then you went and made that a lot more difficult by breaking up with me. Feisty little thing you are."

His gaze drifted over Amelia's shoulder now—to Lily. "Almost as much as her."

Amelia had to hold Henry back from rushing toward him. Even with the gun, they couldn't afford to be the ones who made the first move to physically escalate this. If she had a weapon, Colton surely did too, and he'd know how to use his a hell of a lot better than she did.

He grinned a little bit at Henry's clenched fists, clearly amused and not at all threatened. "I knew that you leaving me only made it even more likely that you would run to him, so I didn't try to stop you. It didn't matter anyway, not when you kept dropping leverage right into my hands anyhow. You wear your emotions all over your face, Amelia."

"Better than being a sociopath," she said flatly.

Colton ignored her comment. "You thought that you'd be helping your case by showing me how much you cared about finding her, but all you were ever doing was giving me more to work with. Coming to my work in the middle of the night like that, begging me for help so soon after you'd left me? It was pathetic. I knew you wouldn't go to all that trouble over a stranger—I knew it had to be about him. It was more than enough for me to spin a compelling story to Lily here."

Amelia and Henry both flinched at the sound of her name on his tongue, and she found herself wishing that she'd managed to do more damage back when she'd been forced to bite it to get him off of her.

"And yet," Colton mused. "I couldn't help myself. I had to test my theories, to see if I was right. I have to say, you two played your parts splendidly."

Amelia snapped, "What are you talking about?"

She was met with a scathing, condescending, but also somehow flat expression. "Sending him out to talk to me when I messaged you? Henry must have thought he was very intimidating, but I only left quickly because I'd already gotten everything I needed to know."

The way he spoke about Henry and Amelia's relationship like they were merely pawns in his master plan was making her feel sick. But she couldn't give up yet.

Come on, Liam.

She lifted her chin slightly, trying and probably failing to look haughty.

"You knew I was with Henry," she said. "And yet you were still sloppy with your letters. I don't know how you plan on sweet talking your way out of this one."

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that."

Had she not felt so terrified, it would have seemed as serendipitous as it was in the movies.

Barely, just barely, she suddenly heard it: the distant wail of sirens.

A lot of them.

Behind her, she heard a small gasp of realization from Lily. Watched the color drain from Colton's face as he realized that they hadn't come here alone.

And there was no time left for him to lay so much as a finger on any of them, not unless he wanted to leave behind a fresh crime scene with his prints all over it.

Which left him with two choices: surrender or run.

Amelia knew which one he would pick.

As Colton turned on his heel and fled, she gripped Henry's hand as tight as she could, keeping him firmly at her side. She could feel it in her bones that it wasn't a small part of him that wanted to chase after the bad guy, to make sure he got his vengeance, but vengeance didn't make someone like Henry Caruso happy in the long run. It was people like Colton who took pleasure in hurting people and people like Henry who took pleasure in healing the people who'd been hurt.

"Don't do it," she exhaled, all of the adrenaline from the confrontation escaping her in one small breath. "Let him disappear."

Let him incriminate himself.

She had always known that he wasn't going to surrender himself to the authorities willingly, not when he had his own badge that he didn't want to let go of. But Amelia was okay with not being the hero, not catching the bad guy—she didn't have to. He was going to make himself look guiltier than she ever could simply by not staying behind to answer anyone's questions.

Lily darted across the floor to peer out the window, to watch her captor's silhouette grow smaller and smaller before it disappeared into the woods. And then, as soon as she knew that she was free, she could finally do what she wanted to do.

Take Henry by the hand and yank him into a hug.

And Henry—oh, her sweet Henry. He could finally hold Lily tight, finally feel that she was real and not just another dream that was about to be torn away from him. Tears slipped down his cheeks as he rested his chin atop her head, and Amelia heard her whisper something to him that sounded suspiciously like, hey, loser.

Now that she didn't need to defend anyone anymore, Amelia's legs seemed to buckle under her weight. She sank onto the lumpy mattress, dizzy, closed her eyes for just a second...

And listened to the sweet, sweet song of the sirens.

____________________

A/N:

WHEW that was a lot. I think my brain spontaneously combusted when I was trying to write that and then again when I was trying to proofread.

we're in the final stretch of the book with just 7 chapters left!