He nods and comes closer, but I side-step the body and then back up to keep the distance between us. I dart my gaze over him—no holster, no gun. The next step he takes, I run for the front door.

I have to open it.

I have to open the door because no one else has run out of it or they’d have left it open like I do. No one else was in the house. Daniel never came in from the garage. He never comes through the garage.

Every other word is likely true. The attack. Mom landing on the fireplace poker and becoming the body.

But it was him.

Daniel shouts after me as I run down the street. I run until my lungs heave and my legs ache. But it’s more. All of me gives out once I reach the town square. I bend over and empty the contents of my stomach. I continue to heave, even when nothing else comes up, like my body thinks it can purge what just happened.

My mom’s dead. And Daniel killed her.

* * *

They put me in a room at the police station. An interrogation room with the two-way mirror and a camera in the corner. There’s even a metal arch on top of a table where handcuffs attach. I have no idea how long it’s been since the female officer, Julie, with the apologetic eyes, draped me in a blanket and left me alone.

She found me mid-panic attack on the freezing ground in the square. I was hyperventilating and violently shivering, and she helped me breathe, then helped me to her car. My mind felt as numb as my fingers when I stupidly let her put me in the passenger seat. Then she brought me here. To the one place I should have been going after finding my mom murdered. After seeing the body.

Except she hand-delivered me to the king’s personal court. The gilded walls equally as rotten beneath as the ones I’ve wanted to escape. I can’t escape.

And the longer I sit here—the more my body warms and my mind emerges from the fog—the sicker I feel again.

The door finally opens, and I’m not even surprised when toxins invade the air.

Elvin.

Julie reappears behind him, but she stays by the wall, letting him approach me.

He repeats what I stuttered to her through my useless breaths in the square. Only he phrases my convictions as questions, doubt veiling the words.

When Elvin stoops down in front of me, I recoil in the chair. But he takes my hands anyway. I close my eyes, tears spilling down my cheeks as he apologizes for what I witnessed.

“…it can’t be easy to process … our minds like to play tricks on us.”

I struggle to breathe while he continues to try to convince me of what I know is a lie.