“I’m not going anywhere! I’m going to call the cops—”

“You call the cops and I guarantee someone is going to die.”

“This…you’re being ridiculous.”

“I wish I were. Stay inside. Stay safe. Someone is coming to get you.”

He disconnected and I stared down at the phone. In shock. Truly. If I called the cops someone would die? How did that happen?

The fight continued over in Ben’s trailer, but the intensity seemed to have dropped. Ben was yelling too, and now it was just a loud conversation.

In no time a black sedan purred to a stop in front of my window, in the shadows between my trailer and Joan’s. And I thought about that day in the laundry room when I’d scurried away while Tiffany and Phil fought. I’d been so scared—for myself.

Ben was my friend. He was. And I couldn’t leave him here to be bullied or scared or hurt.

I had to have changed that much. I had to have. I couldn’t have run this far to still be so damned scared.

I ran around my trailer to tell the driver he wasn’t needed. He was standing beside the car, a handsome guy older than me.

“You Layla?” he asked and popped open the back door of the sedan.

“Yeah.”

“Get in.”

“No. No, I’m not leaving.”

“Dylan told me to throw you in the backseat if I had to.” He stepped toward me and I stepped back, not about to be manhandled.

“Touch her and I’ll put a bullet in your hand,” Joan said from the shadows of her little deck. Her green robe caught the light and glimmered.

“Joan!” I yelled. “I’m not going to leave Ben—”

Suddenly from the front pocket of her robe she pulled out a badge. Some kind of government thing.

“What…what is that?” I asked. This whole thing was spinning so fast out of any kind of control.

“I’m undercover DEA,” she whispered. “Get in the car and get gone.”

“But—”

“Go!” she yelled. Truly yelled, as in no longer whisper-yelling, and I jerked into motion, stumbling toward the sedan. The driver yanked open the door, but before I got in I looked over at Joan.

“Come with me,” I said. “If it’s really dangerous—”

“If it’s really dangerous I do my job. Go.”

And then I was in the backseat of the car and it peeled out of the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground.

ANNIE

The car rolled through an endless night, parting the sea of shadowy kudzu and dotted by islands of neon rest stops. We got off the highway, onto increasingly smaller roads that switchbacked up hills and down again into gullies, until we were up in the mountains.

Panic and a thousand questions sat in that car with me. How could I have been so content not pushing Dylan about Ben? Who does that? What kind of idiot allows herself not to worry about a possible murderer next door because she’s too busy having some kind of late-blooming sexual awakening complete with phone sex and strippers?

That guy, the motorcycle guy—I thought for sure I’d seen him at The Velvet Touch.

Was that why Joan—an undercover DEA agent—was there?

What was Ben involved in?

With shaking hands, I fumbled for the button to unroll my window.

“You okay?” the driver asked.

“The window—” The word wasn’t even out of my mouth before the window had opened a crack.

The air through the window smelled evergreen.

It was exotic compared to the dust and clay of Oklahoma.

“Where are we going?” I asked the driver. Considering one of the last things Dylan said to me was that he didn’t want to see me again, I figured there might be a 50/50 chance this guy’s orders were to leave me at a hotel. Or a gas station.

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. “Someplace safe.”

Why did I doubt that? Why did I think that wherever we were headed was infinitely more dangerous than where I’d been?

“Who are you?” I asked.

“An employee of Dylan’s.”

Dylan has employees that drive to trailer parks in the middle of the night to pick up women and whisk them away to safety.

Of course he does.

The headlights illuminated impenetrable curtains of trees and kudzu, and then the car slowed down and stopped in front of the thick black beams of an iron gate stretched across the road in front of it.

Through the window he opened, the driver punched in a code on a metal box, and the gate slid open and the car eased up the drive.

My heart was pounding behind my eyes. In the tips of my fingers.

I couldn’t see the house in the thick shadows of a granite-topped, forested hill. But as the car pulled up, a light flickered on in the murk and I could see a wooden door, the house behind it dark and hulking against all that stone.

Not safe, my gut said. Not safe at all.

“This is it?” I asked.

“Yep.”

Reluctantly, I got out of the car, freezing in the pre-dawn mountain air. I wrapped my arms around myself as best I could. There was running water somewhere, a brook or a river.

It didn’t look like much, this house. There was a back door and a garage attached. A big garage, like a warehouse. It was dark. And had lots of little roofs. Eaves and awnings.

It was a strange little house on a lonely mountain.

Weird and vaguely ominous.

It looked like the evil house in a movie. The one where bad shit happened.

“Dylan’s housekeeper, Margaret, will take care of you. Don’t be fooled by the Mrs. Santa Claus act—she’ll cut you if she thinks you’re going to hurt Dylan.”

“Wait…what?” I turned to ask the driver more about this housekeeper, because frankly, I’d kind of hit my limit on drama tonight, but the driver only waved at me through the driver-side window before taking off, leaving me alone in the parking area. Moths the size of airplanes buzzed over my head toward the light over the door.

Right.

A deep breath.

I stepped across the gravel driveway, wincing as the rocks bit into the bare skin of my feet. I lifted my hand to knock on that dark little door, now totally inundated with moths, but it opened before my fist connected and I nearly knocked on a woman’s forehead.

“Sorry—”

“Are you Layla?” She was short and round, with a Hilton Head sweatshirt zipped up to her neck. She had gray-blond hair pulled back into a bun, stray hairs frizzed out around her head making her look like she had a halo.

No. I was not Layla. I was never Layla.

But I said yes, because this was the bed I had made.

“Well, come on, girl, before these bugs make off with you.” She did not look nice. She was trying to look nice, but it wasn’t working. She wore a big smile that should have put me at ease, but didn’t come close. She was worried about me being here, or tense. Or something. Whatever her reasons, she didn’t want me here. And it was coming off of her like a radio signal.

Jesus, did I need to worry about her having a knife?

Without much choice, I stepped into the house. The door clicked shut behind me.

“Look at you, poor thing,” she said. “You don’t even have any shoes.”

“Or a purse,” I said. Or money. Or a bra. Such is the nature of trailer park kidnappings.

“Are you hungry?”

“No, please don’t go to any trouble for me.”

“It’s no trouble,” she said, waving me off like waking up at three in the morning to care for a surprise guest with no shoes was totally par for the course in her life.