Of course, I did.

Why would she think I didn’t want to leave?

• • •

Kai and Banks.

Winter and Damon.

Michael…

I knew what I needed to do when I came here, but Alex’s words kept drifting through my head—especially now. Especially when faced with the decision I was going to have to make sooner than I thought.

Maybe I was scared.

Maybe…just maybe a small part of me didn’t want to ever leave here. There were no drugs here. No women. I’d stayed away from the alcohol fairly easily. I didn’t have to prove my worth with a career, plans, or relationships.

I just had to survive. There were no opportunities to face, so nothing to screw up.

We were all in the same boat.

And maybe I liked that. With sobriety came clarity, and I’d had time to think about my past, and I was embarrassed. I wanted everyone to trust me. To depend on me.

But that meant risking failure, and for a few minutes here and there I was content to just stay here forever.

Believe it or not, it was easier.

I headed back up the stairs to my room, carrying a bowl of stew for Alex. Micah had saved it for me, but not enough for Alex, and I wasn’t about to beg Aydin for extra food. She told me she had some stuff in the tunnels, but I’d let her eat her first solid meal in days and just grab one of her granola bars for myself.

I stepped up into my room, hearing water splash on the other side of the privacy screen. I halted and watched her shadow through the cream-colored fabric.

She stood in the tub, bending over and washing. Slowly, I set the bowl down on the table, my stomach sinking as I watched her.

Alex was always easy to disappear into. I didn’t have to talk or put up a front. I didn’t have to seduce her or pretend.

She was my port in the storm and I was hers.

I watched her form move as she washed her legs and arms. Her hand drifted up the back of her neck, the water from the cloth dripping back into the tub.

She was the only person I’d ever felt completely safe with. The only person I never feared disappointing because the only thing she expected of me was to be there.

Why couldn’t I love her? She got along with my friends. She made me laugh, and her presence was always a comfort. Always.

She fit in my life.

Watching her, I balled my fists, almost convinced I should do it. I should go and lift her into my arms and take her to bed and sink inside of her and…

I shook my head, sighing.

I couldn’t.

Because every time I closed my eyes, I saw the girl who made me want to be better. More.

I saw Emmy Scott.

Alex was like Damon. They loved me. They indulged my dark side.

They were too forgiving and too enabling.

They kept me from being lonely, but Emory taught me that not everything I wanted was going to come easy. That there were things I was going to have to fight for and there was pain in the world that my shallow lifestyle in high school kept me ignorant of.

She made me feel like a man.

Even though her words were sharp and the battle she constantly fought in her heart felt like a knife in my own, her eyes on me made me feel strong.

Her arms around me made me want to take on anything.

When I closed my eyes, I saw a girl with glasses too big for her face, and I heard the sweetest, most timid voice asking me if I still wanted to hold her.

I could still feel her cradled in my arms.

Leaving the stew, I pressed on the wooden panel on the wall Alex had shown me earlier and dove into the hidden passageway, sliding the panel closed again behind me.

The guys were still up, spread out and doing their various things, but I hadn’t seen Emory when I went to collect food.

Alex said she left her duffle bag in the tunnel outside of Emory’s room, and even though I told myself I was just getting a granola bar and some water, I wanted to make sure she was in her own damn bed.

With the door secured.

She’d be brought back to Thunder Bay safe and sound to face the music.

I found my way through the tunnels, heading to the east wing where I knew Emory’s room sat, eventually spotting the black bag on the floor in the tiny bit of light shining through the peep holes.

All this time, these tunnels were here. It was inconceivable that Aydin didn’t know.

But Alex had been skulking around the house for days undetected, so...

I left the bag on the floor, hearing Emmy’s moans before I even found the peep hole to her room.

My pulse skipped, and I forgot about the bag, pushing the door open and stepping over the threshold into a pitch-black bedroom. I immediately noticed her lying in bed underneath the covers.

Her breathing shook, raspy and shallow, and she twisted under the sheets, letting out a whimper. I flashed my gaze to the door, seeing the chair propped under the handle, and then I looked back to the bed, inching forward.

She clenched the sheet in her fist, and I squatted next to the bed, gazing at her back like I did that night after I brought her home from the Cove and put her to bed. She wore a tank top and some purple lace panties I assumed she got from Alex. The sheet hung below her waist as her chest rose and fell too fast.

She let out a small cry, and I leaned over the bed, planting my hand on the pillow above her.

Her eye had bruised, and I let my gaze fall down her body, seeing more nicks and scrapes on her arms that hadn’t been there before.

The tumble in the woods, the small fire, the fight with Taylor, and the fight with Alex… I couldn’t help it. I ran my hand over her hair, smoothing it away from her face as her nightmare played out and her body shook.

I’d loved Emory since the moment I laid eyes on her when I was fourteen.

I could still see her—sitting on her bike outside the chain-link fence surrounding the school parking lot as she watched my friends and me on our skateboards that summer.

From that moment on, it seemed I was always aware of her, and everything I did, I did it with it in mind that she was watching.

Every joke in class. Every strut into the lunchroom. Every new haircut and every new pair of jeans.

Even the Raptor. My first thought when my parents bought it was how she’d look in it.

This stupid fantasy of her running to my truck after school, smiling and skipping at my side, unable to keep her hands off me because I was her boyfriend and I always took my girl home from school.

I hated that she was alone. She was always alone, and she shouldn’t have been, because she should’ve been with me.

But the older she got, the angrier she got, and the more desperate I got in trying to forget her, and I just needed this to be over.

Nothing got better with her. It just decayed.

She was never going to lie in my arms in a bed that belonged to both of us.

“I love you, Will,” she said in a quiet voice.

I froze, my hand paused on her temple as I stared down at her.

What?

My legs nearly gave out from under me, and I gaped at her, pinching my eyebrows together and trying to see if her eyes were open or if she was still sleeping, but…

I knew she was awake. Her breathing had calmed, and her body had relaxed.

“Do you remember the night you snuck into my room?” she asked, still facing away from me. “When you’d had it with me and tried to walk out on me?”

EverNight. The night I met her grandmother for the first time.