The man in overalls stopped in the doorway when I shouted, but not for long.
“Hey,” I called out, crossing the room in three strides. “Where are you taking those?”
He shrugged. “Old books. Your dad’s, right? They’re heavy as hell. Adam says you don’t need ’em.”
“They’re not for sale.” I grabbed at the nearest box, my fingers scraping against the cardboard. “They’re rare. Out of print. My father spent decades finding them.”
Mr. Landry stepped in front of me, his frame filling the hallway. “Don’t make a scene. I can get five bucks a box from the scrap guy. That’s a pack of smokes.”
“You can’t—”
The rest of my sentence turned into a grunt as his foot slammed into my hip, sending me to the floor. The boxes were gone before I could get up, carried down the hall toward the freight elevator.
I pushed to my knees, but Adam’s boot came down between my shoulder blades, pinning me to the hardwood. My cheek pressed into a strip of duct tape that had fallen from one of the half-dismantled walls, the smell of dust and paint sharp in my nose.
“Stay down,” Adam growled.
Mrs. Landry’s voice floated over me, falsely sweet. “You know, you’ve been nothing but trouble since we got here. Always complaining, acting like we’re strangers. Family doesn’t treat each other this way.”
“Family?” I spat the word into the floor. “You broke into my home.”
“Which is why we need to keep you somewhere safe.” Her tone turned brisk. “Adam, take her to the bathroom. Tie her up. We’ll finish up in peace.”
Rough hands grabbed my arms, hauling me toward the hallway. My heels scraped against the floor, catching on a nail jutting from the baseboard.
The bathroom door slammed shut behind me. A towel was stuffed into my mouth, the bitter tang of detergent making my stomach turn. Rope—no, some kind of heavy nylon cord—wound tight around my wrists and ankles. My phone was plucked from my pocket before I could twist away.
“You bring this on yourself,” Mr. Landry said, not unkindly. “Could’ve just let us stay.”
The light clicked off, and I was left in the dark with the sound of their voices and the crash of my life being dismantled outside.
Through the muffled cotton in my mouth, I tried to breathe slow, steady. But the darkness pressed in. My muscles started to twitch, not from fear, but from the creeping, electric itch of what I’d been fighting to keep under control.
A few hours earlier, one of the workers—someone I’d never seen before—had mentioned, almost casually, that the building had “a crazy lady” on my floor. Someone who screamed in the middle of the night. Someone who left dead animals in the hall. His tone had been curious, almost amused.
Mrs. Landry had laughed it off, insisting he must be thinking of someone else. I could hear the edge in her voice even now in my memory. She was scared—not for me, but of what might happen if that story stuck.
The walls of the bathroom seemed to pulse with each beat of my heart. I imagined my father’s books being tossed into a pickup bed, spines splitting, pages crumpling. I imagined the gold on my mother’s necklace glinting on Mrs. Landry’s throat.
And then my mind went somewhere darker.
If I were free, I thought, I could make all of this stop.
The thought didn’t scare me like it should have.
