Main Dishes

Part 1 The fire was already eating the roof when he smelled it. It wasn’t the faint, distant scent of burning leaves or a neglected cigarette. It was heat. That thick, bitter, metallic heat that crawls down the back of your throat and coats your lungs before your brain can even catch up and scream…

PART 1 The wind bit through Jack Callahan’s heavy leather jacket like thousands of tiny, frozen daggers. December in the isolated town of Pinewood, Montana, showed absolutely no mercy to anyone foolish enough to be out after sundown. The town looked almost entirely abandoned under the fresh, blinding blanket of snow that had been falling…

PART 1 Snow was already killing me when I saw the skid marks slicing across Interstate 90. My name is Ava. I was seventeen years old, and I was entirely, completely alone. The wind howling across the flat fields outside Billings, Montana, shoved at my back like it was trying to erase me from the…

Part 1 The balloons were still perfectly inflated. Honestly, that was the worst part. Every single gold and white balloon I had ordered—all sixty-three of them—still hovered right near the ceiling. I had ordered exactly sixty-three because my daughter, Ren, had once mentioned in passing that it was her favorite number. She had calculated it…

Part 1 “Don’t touch her.” The voice came sharp, controlled, but edged with something dangerous. Daniel Carter had just stepped out of his sleek, black town car. His attention had only been half on the scene ahead. It was just another freezing Chicago night. The Hawk was blowing hard off Lake Michigan, cutting through the…

PART 1 The heavy, suffocating humidity of Miami in August pressed against the thick glass of the terminal windows. Outside, the tarmac was a sea of flashing amber lights and the shadowy silhouettes of ground crews working under the unforgiving glare of floodlights. Inside Terminal D, the air conditioning hummed with a sterile, icy persistence,…

Part 1 I didn’t wake up that Saturday morning planning to gamble the last bit of my dignity on a piece of scrap metal. If you had asked me the day before, I would have told you exactly what my life was, and exactly what it would always be. I am Lucas Hargrove. I’m thirty-four…

Part 1 The breaking point didn’t come with a warning. It never does. It arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, under the harsh, unforgiving fluorescent lights of the Northbrook Court mall in the Chicago suburbs. Amelia Vance had not planned to be there. If you looked at her color-coded, meticulously managed digital calendar, Tuesdays at two…

Part 1 The girl’s face turned a terrifying shade of purple. A seventeen-year-old boy’s thick fingers dug brutally into her throat, pinning her against the wall. Thirty students formed a tight circle around them, their eyes glued to the glowing screens of their smartphones. They watched. They filmed. They laughed. Fourteen-year-old Lily Carter clawed desperately…

I heard Travis shout over the dying rumble of the engine, but the sound was muffled, like hearing a voice underwater. I was still holding the throttle steady, even though the load absorber had disengaged and the rollers were freewheeling. I couldn’t let go of the wheel. My knuckles were white. Not from the strain…