Chapter 15 · Dead Girls Get Jealous

"You want to die for her?" Mara's voice came from everywhere at once—the walls, the ceiling, the space between my ribs where the cold had already started.

I was still on the floor where Daniel had left me, door locked from the outside, his footsteps long gone. The marks on my hand had stopped crawling but they hadn't disappeared. Seven wet lines, dark as old blood, reaching from my wrist toward my heart.

"I'm not dying for anyone," I said.

The air shifted. Mara stepped out of the wall like it was water, her hospital gown still torn where the fall had broken her neck. She looked almost solid tonight. Almost alive.

"Liar." She crouched in front of me, close enough that I could see the fracture lines in her skull. "You came back. You're still here. That's dying, just slower."

"I came back because my mother got out," I said. "And you're still stuck."

Her face twitched. Not a smile. Something worse.

"Your mother," she said, slow and sweet, "didn't get out. She escaped. There's a difference."

"Then I'll escape too."

"No." Mara stood, circled me like I was something she was deciding whether to eat.