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coward.” Because I want to hurt. Because a thousand reasons I can’t articulate.
    Because I can’t say no.
    Perhaps that was the truth at last. Though I doubted anyone would believe it. I spent my whole life pushing everyone away so I wouldn’t have to face up to the fact that no wasn’t in my vocabulary. It had been taken from me somehow.
    Except… I would say no to Thomas.
    I frowned.
    And I would say no because… I didn’t feel like a coward when I was with him. I didn’t feel so afraid. As if he’d given the word back to me. Given me permission to use it.
    And yet right now he was looking at me as though he agreed I was a coward, and I just couldn’t stand to see it.
    I turned and ran.
    “Sasha!”
    My name echoed after me, but I didn’t stop.
     
     
    M Y HEART was pounding by the time I made it back to the estate. Broken glass glittered beneath the streetlight outside the tower block, the shards sharp and clear, but I stepped over them. I didn’t want them. I didn’t want anything, just to be curled in the dip in my bed, safe and still. It was only when I reached the thirty-second floor and saw no light glowing under the bottom of the door that I realized Corinne was out. It was someone’s leaving party from her shift at work. I’d forgotten. Hitting the light switch, I slumped down in the corridor outside the flat and waited for the timer to run out. Paint flaked off the walls beneath my fingertips, and the concrete floor was so cold, it felt wet. I heard an echo of a door opening or closing somewhere deep in the bowels of the building and held my breath, imagining footsteps on the stairs, a nameless force making its way up here to claim me, all smoke and darkness, John Greene’s hunger in its eyes.
    I did this to myself all the time—created nightmarish beings probably only fearsome enough to scare a child. But stupidly they terrified me.
    I couldn’t sit out here any longer.
    Digging my keys out of my pocket, I steeled myself to the smell and the damp darkness of our flat and opened the door.
    I didn’t switch on the flickering hall light. Instead I pretended my eyes were closed and walked straight to my bedroom, kicked off my shoes, and fell into bed.
    Shivering, I sank into my dip and pulled the duvet up over my head. I breathed in the scent of my sweat on the sheets and welcomed the numbness that shrouded my heart.
    I let my lungs fill, slow slow slow. I thought of nothing. Not Thomas. Not how much I wanted to take it all back. Nothing.
    I was very nearly asleep when there was a quick knock at the door.
    I blinked in the grainy darkness, and my heart rate picked up speed.
    No one, no one at all, ever knocked on our door.
    The silence stretched out, and into it I imagined every stupid horror movie plot I’d ever seen, the world narrowing down to the blood-filled thump of my heart.
    Another knock. Jesus, I was going to have a heart attack.
    “Sasha?” The voice was breathless.
    Thomas? Crap. Holy Christ, it was just Thomas!
    Swallowing hard, I jumped out of bed and darted down the corridor to open the door.
    Thomas blinked at me. He looked pretty awful, his skin pasty instead of pleasantly flushed, and there was an inhaler in his hand.
    “Think… I might need… to sit down,” he wheezed.
    “You have asthma,” I stated.
    He nodded.
    I led him inside, hit the light, and shivered as it flickered sickly around us. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic at Thomas seeing the inside of our dump of a flat, but I also didn’t much fancy him passing out in the hallway outside it either.
    “Sit down,” I instructed, pulling his sleeve and directing him toward the sad excuse for a sofa in the living room.
    All wide-eyed and spacey, he looked like he needed a little instruction.
    Shakily he brought the hand holding his inhaler up to his mouth and took another hit. When he tried to breathe in, it sounded like air hissing from a tire through a very small hole.
    “Should I call someone?”
    He