Page 75 of She Haunts Me Still

Once they’re out of sight, Saskia walks faster, scanning door numbers. Mallory matches her pace as they fly past offices and conference rooms. The halls are dimly lit, elegant sconces glowing on finely painted walls, and shadows seem to trail their every step. They turn corner after corner, check sign after sign.

But there’s no records office to be found.

“Damn it,” Mallory mutters, defeat plummeting through her. She swallows another swell of inexplicable queasiness. “There’s nothing here.”

“There’sgotto be a storage room,” Saskia says. “For a company as old as this?”

“Maybe it’s unmarked,” Mallory whispers, looking back down the hall.

“Let’s backtrack. There was an unmarked door that way, we can—”

A clattering of footsteps snags their attention from the other direction.

“Someone’s coming,” Saskia urges.

Mallory whirls at the sound, fear and frustration gripping her at once. The answers she needs could be inches away, hidden behind one of these doors. She didn’t come all this way to leave them behind, didn’t step into a new role of bravery only to fail. “Here,” she says, rummaging in her bag for her dollar store pocketknife. “Take this.”

“What—why?” Saskia asks.

As Mallory hands the tool to Saskia, she can’t help but recall the night of auditions, remembering the sting of the blade in her fist. But the image mutates, and she unwillingly thinks of Saskia’s fingers folded around the knife instead, blood blooming in the creases of her skin.

And before she can snuff out the rest, Mallory imagines cradling Saskia’s delicate palm against her mouth and hungrily lapping at every drop. Like a kitten being fed by hand.

She roughly closes Saskia’s fingers along the handle and yanks away, startled. Both at the images themselves and the way they arrive with a thorned, unfamiliar hunger—one that puts an unwanted heat low in her stomach.

“See if you can get into that unmarked room,” Mallory blurts in an effort to quiet the sudden onslaught of emotions. Revulsion. Shame.Need. She swallows, dizzy from the incongruity of it all. “I’ll distract them.”

The footsteps clip faster. Louder.

Saskia shakes her head, unaware of Mallory’s crumbling composure. “Come with me—”

“They’ll catch us. I saw a stairwell at the end of the hall—meet downstairs in five.Go.”

Mallory practically shoves Saskia around the corner and sprints in the opposite direction. The deliberately clunky sound of her boots is like blood in water, and whoever had been inching closer snaps to attention. Ready to pounce.

“Hey! Hey, you!”

Mallory looks over her shoulder to see the blond man from the lobby tailing her, his red tie swinging.

“I know who you are!” he shouts. “We all do!”

We all do. What the hell does that mean?

She sprints faster, panic rising as she turns another corner—

And reaches a dead end.

“Fuck,” Mallory whispers under her breath. She whips her head back and forth. The blond man’s footsteps draw nearer. There’s no time to think, nowhere to go—

She yanks open the nearest door and practically throws herself inside.

A door labeledVictor Pierce,CEO.

19

It takes several moments for Mallory’s eyes to adjust.

Victor’s office is bathed in darkness. The floor-to-ceiling windows are blacked out with heavy curtains, every lamp switched off. Along the shadowed walls are a smattering of eerie gothic portraits framed in brass, beady eyes and solemn faces staring down at her. A tall bookshelf looms on one side of the room, nestled against a black file cabinet.