If You Dare Read Online Free PDF

arrived, the only area she’d been in was the twenty square feet in the center of the living room. That was good. That was a relatively small area. It’d take her five seconds, ten tops.
    Although…
    Her temporary boudoir was strewn with shopping bags, blankets, and snack food. The spark of hope that had ignited fizzled. The keys could’ve been inadvertently kicked under the air mattress, tossed away with her dinner container by mistake, or balled up in the packaging when she’d unwrapped the fresh bedsheets. She’d have to do a careful search to find them. That would take several minutes. Minutes that might have her hearing or— gulp — seeing something that would forever haunt her psyche.
    Dread pooled in her gut when she cast another glance at the doorway. “You can do this,” she whispered, ignoring her quaking insides.
    “Or I could sleep outside.” She swept her gaze to the shadowy woods surrounding her, the hunkering willow overhead. Anxiety rose like bile in her throat. As uninviting as the mansion’s unseen inhabitant had been, the shrouded forest surrounding her locked car was worse.
    A flash of movement—something too tall to be an animal, unless it was a bear—moved at the tree-lined edge of the forest.
    Hallucination caused by stress. Lily blinked, closed her eyes for the count of three, and reopened them. The shadow moved, the shadow of a man, and lifted a long handle with a curved piece on top. Then it progressed, that figure wearing the night, crunching over sticks and brush on the ground and coming right for her.
    The scream that should be pealing from her lips refused to come. This was like being trapped in a dream. The one where she couldn’t run because her feet were mired in sludge. Wake up, Lily. But she wasn’t sleeping.
    The figure stepped from the trees into the pale moonlight, revealing a white face with black eyes…no, that wasn’t his face.
    It was a hockey mask .
    Adrenaline pushed aside the panic freezing her limbs and shut out her brain’s insistence that what she was seeing couldn’t possibly be real. She pushed off her car and ran for the door on rubbery legs. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man take off after her, calling something in a garbled, muffled slur.
    Lily found her voice.

And screamed.

Chapter 5
    Dammit!
    Marcus tripped over a rock and lumbered to the edge of the woods in time to hear Lily make a decidedly frightened sound as she trekked from her car to the house. Clive was wrong. Marcus’s brilliant idea to spook her in this mask had scared her. Far worse than he’d ever imagined.
    “Lily!” He called out, but the mask muffled his words. He reached for the Friday the 13 th face covering his own and yanked. “Ow!” How it’d wound itself in his short hair, he had no idea. Stumbling, thanks to the welt on his shin from a misplaced tree branch earlier, he lifted both arms, plastic ax still in hand, and attempted to untangle his hair from the strap.
    Through the eyeholes—with zero peripheral vision, he might add—he saw Lily risk a look over her shoulder, her expression one of sheer fear.
    Shit. He was an asshole.
    She missed the first step on the porch and fell, banging her knee so hard, the bump on his shin pulsed in sympathy. At least she hadn’t lost her footing altogether.
    “Lil!” Marcus said, giving up on literally unmasking himself. She dragged herself to the doorway, and he held out his arms to show her the chintzy toy ax he’d found at the store this morning.
    She either didn’t hear him or didn’t believe the ax was a fake because she swiveled her head to the open door of the mansion, then to the lock that rested on the patio before bending over and grabbing something on the porch.
    “It’s me!” he called, climbing the stairs.
    He dropped the “weapon” and showed her his empty hands, but she didn’t care. She swung the object in her grip—a rusted watering can with a long, pointed spout, he could see now—and slammed