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“I just got my door back,” Felicity mutters as they pull it shut behind them. My brain focuses on the click too much and I’m too tired to resist. I open and close it to check it the requisite three times: the first to make sure it didn’t lock, the second to make sure it won’t, and the third to double-check. “Sorry it’s a mess. And for, you know, the rules and shit. She’s deranged.”

“Does she make everyone wear makeup at the dinner table?” I mumble.

“I wasn’t allowed downstairs without foundation for a week after coming back from camp.”

I wander across the room and brush empty snack wrappers from their vanity. There’s a notebook lying open, full of their looping scrawl. Descriptions of the photographs I stole. Timestamps from our conversations. Highlighter streaks. Wallet never left penthouse. Bellamy Slaughter has key card, the most recent entry notes. Then, Morgan visiting East Early, he seems scared, scared of what—

Felicity comes up beside me and eases the notebook closed.

Scared? I’m not scared.

“You look like you’re going to pass out,” Felicity says. “Are you going to pass out?”

“Are you recording?”

They take out their phone, show me the voice-memo app—which is off—and set it on their desk, out of reach. “No.”

The angry animal of my brain screams at me not to trust them. I’m here, in this room, because I believed Daniel when he said he wasn’t recording.

But for some awful reason, I trust them anyway.

I say, “Then maybe.”

So Felicity nods for me to take off my shoes and puts me in their bed. They go to the TV, boot up Pure Flix because nothing else is allowed in this house, and flip through the entire bullshit menu until they offer a half-hearted smile—”Oh, this one sucks,” they promise. Then they’re getting in bed, too, climbing underneath the blankets beside me.

It’s warm here. I breathe in, breathe out.

“Has she hit you before?” Felicity asks as they settle in.

“No.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I think the first time is the worst. It changes the … what’s it called.” They gesture vaguely, reminiscent of packing a snowball. “Expectations. Social contract. It wasn’t on the table before, and now it is. It’s a lot.”

I nod. That’s exactly how it feels.

“The second time’s also bad,” they say, “because that’s when it turns into a pattern. But the first one, that’s really a lot. Sorry. I’ll be quiet.”

They stop talking and curl up into the mound of pillows against their headboard. The movie plays on the notch above mute. The light is dim and soft.

It’s nice, I guess. Quiet enough to slow my heartbeat, release some of the skull-breaking pressure in my head. Everything is still sluggish, and my hands still burn from the phantom rope, but I’m not hyperventilating anymore. I’m not trying to pull out my hair, or pick any scabs into open sores.

It’s bullshit, really. That Felicity Keating’s room is the only safe place I have anymore.

It’s just—they already know how bad it gets. They know what I did. They sat there while I explained why Jane Doe couldn’t leave that penthouse, and they know there’s blood smeared all over my hands, and they’re still here.

Even if they’ve orchestrated this against my will, stuck around for their own selfish reasons …

It’s hard to bring myself to care.

We can both be selfish right now.

“I knew your last name was Keating,” I say, face halfway into a pillow. “I didn’t know it was them.”

“Yeah,” Felicity says. “It’s them.”

“How did that happen?”

They give a bitter laugh. “Are you recording right now?”