Chapter 1 Two A.M.

Ivy's POV

The scrape comes again, metal on metal, and I am already sitting up before I decide to.

My hand finds the bat before my eyes even find the window. I keep it leaned against the nightstand, close enough to grab without looking, because looking takes time I might not have. The room is dark except for the orange smear of the streetlight through the blinds. I stand, bare feet on cold wood, and I count. One. Two. Three. My therapist told me counting slows the body down. It never really works. It just gives my hands something to do besides shake.

The sound is coming from the fire escape right outside my bedroom window. Not the wind. Wind doesn't scrape twice, pause, then scrape again like it's checking something. Like it's testing.

I stand flat against the wall beside the window, bat raised, and I wait. My phone sits on the nightstand, screen dark, and for a second I actually reach for it. My thumb hovers over the number before I stop myself. Calling means admitting I heard something real, and every time I've done that in the last three years, somebody in a uniform has looked at me like I'm the problem, not whatever made the noise. I put the phone back down screen first, so I stop thinking about it.

The latch rattles. Once. My stomach folds in on itself, but my grip on the bat stays steady, because that part of me learned a long time ago how to keep still when everything else wants to run.

Then nothing.

I count to sixty in my head. Nothing scrapes. Nothing rattles. The building settles the way it always does, pipes ticking somewhere below the floor. I tell myself it was raccoons, or wind pushing a loose gutter, or the cat from 4B that keeps getting out. None of that explains the pause that felt like a person deciding something, but I tell myself anyway because the alternative means getting back into that bed is not an option tonight.

I almost go back to bed. That's the truth. I get as far as sitting on the edge of the mattress, bat across my knees, telling myself I imagined the second half of it, that fear does that, it adds detail that isn't really there. I've read that somewhere, in one of the pamphlets they hand out after something happens to you. I want it to be true badly enough that I nearly believe it. My shoulders drop. My grip on the bat loosens just enough to slide an inch on my knee.

Then I think about waking up tomorrow and finding out I was right to be scared and did nothing about it.

That thought gets me back on my feet faster than the scrape did.

I cross to the window on the balls of my feet, like sound itself is the enemy now. My hand closes around the edge of the blind. I don't pull it back right away. I stand there with my knuckles white against the plastic slats, and for a second I let myself picture every version of what's on the other side. An empty fire escape. A stranger crouched low, waiting for me to look so he can smile at me through the glass. Nothing at all, which somehow scares me more than something would, because nothing means I'm the one losing my mind again, and I already fought that battle once.

I pull the blind back two inches.

The fire escape is empty. No shape, no shadow that isn't supposed to be there, no shoes, no face pressed too close to the glass. Just rusted metal steps leading down into the dark, same as they've looked every night for three years. Relief moves through my chest fast enough to make me feel stupid for the sixty seconds I just spent rehearsing my own murder in my head.

I let my forehead rest against the cool glass, eyes closed, telling myself this is what happens when you don't sleep enough. I'm still telling myself that when I open my eyes and look down at the sill.

There's a scratch in the paint that wasn't there yesterday. A thin line, fresh, cutting straight through the white paint down to bare metal, right where the frame meets the latch. Not rust. Not wear. Something dragged across it hard enough to leave a mark, recent enough that a curl of paint still sits loose at the edge.

My stomach drops in a different way now. Not fear of nothing. Fear of something that already happened and left proof behind. Someone was right here, close enough that if I'd been standing at this window instead, we would have been looking at each other through an inch of glass.

I almost let the blind fall back into place right there. My hand is already loosening around it, my whole body turning back toward the bed and the idea of pretending I never saw the scratch at all. That's when I catch something else, right at the edge of where the streetlight hits the glass.

Something small sits on the outside ledge, dead center where the glass meets the frame. It wasn't there this afternoon when I watered the one plant I haven't managed to kill yet. I know that stretch of ledge. I check it every night before bed, out of habit, out of the kind of caution that used to be a personality trait and is now just survival.

I lean closer, breath fogging the glass, and the shape sharpens into something with edges.

A button. Old, small, the metal gone dull and greenish like something dug out of a drawer nobody's opened in decades. The kind that used to sit on a coat, thick and round, sewn on with thread nothing sold today would match.

I did not put that there. Nobody has been inside my apartment. Nobody has had a reason to touch that window since I moved in, and I have checked that lock enough times to know exactly how it sits when nothing's been disturbed. And yet there it is, deliberate, placed dead center like whoever left it wanted to be sure I'd see it and not mistake it for something the wind blew in.

My hand is already on the latch before the rest of me catches up and asks what exactly I think I'm doing. I unlock it anyway. I tell myself I just need to look closer, that up close it'll turn into something ordinary, a lost coat button some tenant dropped years ago, worn smooth by rain and time and nothing else at all.

The window slides up an inch, cold air slipping through the gap, curling around my wrist like it's testing me the same way that first scrape tested the glass an hour ago.

I reach through the gap and close my fingers around the button.

It's colder than the air around it. Heavier than something that small should be. And the second my skin touches the metal, the room behind me goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with sound.