Chapter 20: Not Afraid

Something was different about Everly.

Jack could smell it the moment she walked into the school building. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was, but he figured it out pretty quickly when he saw her hanging her backpack in her locker.

She had bandages on both of her hands.

Over the last few weeks, he’d done his best to stay away from her as completely as possible—except for when he went out to her house in the evenings, the mornings, and sometimes in the middle of the night, just to make sure she was safe. But she didn’t know about any of that. He wasn’t stalking her. He’d just come to the realization that getting her to leave was going to be a lot harder than he’d hoped, so he would need to keep an eye on her to make sure she was safe until he figured out a way to get her to move away.

Now, seeing that she was injured, smelling the fresh blood on the surface of her skin in the form of scabs, he needed to know what