Author: CuongG Mr

PART 2 I didn’t watch from the window. I couldn’t. My legs gave out the second the door clicked shut, and I slid down against the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the cold linoleum floor with my head in my hands and my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my…

PART 2 “Chief?” he breathed. The syllable hung in the sterile, air-conditioned chill of the trauma bay. It wasn’t a question. It was a profound, earth-shattering recognition that stripped away every single layer of the incompetent civilian disguise I had painstakingly built over the last ninety days. I looked up at the massive man standing…

PART 2 I didn’t sleep that night. After Ava finally drifted off with her paper crown on the nightstand beside her bed—she’d refused to let me throw it away, said it was still hers even if the party got ruined—I sat at my kitchen table in the dark with my laptop open and every document…

PART 2 The emergency lights painted everything red. I grabbed the denim jacket from the bed and ran. My bare feet slapped cold marble as I sprinted down the hallway toward Alessia’s room, past guards who were suddenly everywhere, weapons drawn, voices barking orders into earpieces. The mansion had transformed in seconds from a home…

PART 2 The terrace door clicked shut behind me, but I only made it three steps before I heard his voice change. “What the…” I turned. Joshua was staring at his phone screen like it had just spoken a language he didn’t understand. The color had drained from his face so completely that for a…

PART 2 The gray sedan tore out of the underground garage and into a rain so heavy it turned the windshield into a waterfall. Leo drove with one hand on the wheel and the other still gripping the shotgun, barrel-down between the seats. His face was stone. I was curled in the back, shivering, one…

PART 2 I closed my eyes. Lily’s breath was feather-light against my collarbone, a rhythm so small and steady it felt like the only true thing left in the world. The hospital sheets were stiff beneath me. The monitor behind my head beeped twice and then seemed to hold its breath, as if the machine…

PART 2 The heavy ballroom doors closed behind us with a sound like a vault sealing shut. For three full seconds, the hallway on the other side was so quiet I could hear the soft scuff of Noah’s clearance-sale shoes on the hotel carpet and the distant hum of the ice machine near the restrooms….

PART 2 The three of us stood on that sidewalk in front of the house that had been a prison for Mrs. Evelyn, and I felt the weight of what I was about to do settling onto my shoulders like a physical thing. Mrs. Gable was still crying. Brenda had her arm around the older…

PART 2 The week after the dance, Grace Miller started watching differently. She had been Lily’s teacher since September, knew the girl was quiet, sat near the back of the room where she could see the door, turned in homework on time, and kept to herself at recess without appearing to mind it. These had…