You Should've Stayed Out
Chapter 01 - You Should've Stayed Out
The key was old, brass, heavier than it looked, and Sophie had found it three days ago inside her grandmother's jewelry box, tucked beneath a tangle of costume necklaces nobody had touched in years.
She hadn't known what it opened until she'd driven forty minutes outside the city to the Ashworth family's original property, a house her grandmother hadn't lived in for over a decade, boarded up since Eleanor moved to assisted living, forgotten by everyone in the family except, apparently, whoever had been paying the electric bill.
The storage room door was at the end of a dim hallway on the ground floor, the only door in the house with a lock that matched the brass key in Sophie's hand.
She turned the key slowly. The mechanism gave with a heavy, grinding click.
She pushed the door open.
The first thing she heard was the sound of rope pulling taut against metal, followed by the dull scrape of plastic boxes shifting against a concrete floor.
The second thing she heard was breathing, ragged and thin, coming from the far wall.
Eleanor sat slumped against the wall, wrists bound above her head to an old metal pipe, her silver hair matted and dirty, her face swollen slightly along one cheekbone, a thin line of dried blood at the corner of her mouth.
She'd been missing for nineteen days.
Sophie's legs nearly gave out beneath her. She dropped to her knees beside her grandmother, hands shaking, voice cracking wide open.
"What happened to you?"
Eleanor's eyes found her granddaughter's face, recognition arriving slowly through whatever fog of exhaustion and fear had been holding her for nearly three weeks.
She didn't answer the question.
Instead, her gaze shifted past Sophie's shoulder, toward the open doorway behind her, and every trace of relief drained instantly from her bruised, exhausted face.
"He's behind you," she rasped.
Sophie's blood went cold. She turned her head, slowly, and saw the silhouette filling the doorway, tall, broad, face hidden in the hallway's dim light, black gloves gripping the edge of the door.
She lunged for the exit.
The door slammed shut before she reached it, the impact cracking through the small room like a gunshot, and the bolt slid home on the other side with a heavy, final click.
Sophie threw herself against the wood, pounding, pulling at the handle that no longer moved.
From the other side of the door, a voice spoke, low and flat, entirely without hurry.
May you like
"You should've stayed out."
Sophie pressed her back against the locked door, chest heaving, staring at her grandmother across the dark room, understanding, all at once, that she had just become the second prisoner in a house nobody knew she'd come to.
