“Matty? Sure,” one of the guys said as the elevator doors slid open and I lifted Brad a little higher and hobbled in. I’d noticed he’d started panting a little, like he’d been doing on the train, so I was thinking that maybe different forms of transportation in general just made him nervous. Which was nothing to be ashamed of, really, I reasoned as I rubbed my hand over his head, pushing his ears down again the way he seemed to like. He was a very small dog, and there were fully grown humans who didn’t like elevators or trains. “He’s on the fifth floor. Five… C?”

“Five D,” the other guy corrected as he pressed the button for the ninth floor.

“Cool,” I said, pressing the button for five. “Thank you.”

“You’d better keep the dog out of sight,” the first guy said to me as the doors slid closed again and we started to move upward. “The Raptor’s on the warpath.”

“Ugh, really?” the other guy asked with a deep sigh. “Do you think he’ll make me get rid of my pizza box collection again?”

“He should,” the first guy said, shaking his head. “Because it’s disgusting, and there’s no way it can be hygienic.”

“The Raptor?” I repeated, but that was when the elevator doors slid open on the fifth floor, and I stepped out.

“Five D,” the pizza box guy said, pointing. “Just down to the left.”

“Thank you,” I called as the doors slid closed again. I headed down the hall, unzipping my coat as I walked and tucking Brad inside, not sure what someone who was called the Raptor looked like, and also not particularly sure I wanted to know.

I made it to the front of the door… but couldn’t quite bring myself to knock.

I did not want to do this.

You don’t really have a choice, a small voice in my head reminded me.

I closed my eyes for a second, wrestling with myself. It had been easier when I was concentrating on getting here—the trains I needed to take, counting the stops, making sure Brad didn’t go chasing after any rollerbladers (we hadn’t seen any, though, so he’d been fine so far). But now that I was here—and there was nothing left to do but knock—I didn’t want to do it.

The truth—the one I had never admitted to Kat, or Beckett, and barely liked to admit to myself—was that my stepsiblings were nice to me. They always had been.

But I wasn’t nice to them.