How to Tame a Silver Fox – Episode 20
Chris was out of his chair before the security alert finished sounding. He drew Harper behind him and looked toward the dark staircase, every trace of flirtation replaced by lethal focus.
“Stay here,” he whispered.
Harper caught his sleeve. “That’s my room.” Fear tightened her voice, but she would not wait downstairs without knowing who had invaded her home.
Chris seemed ready to argue. Then he remembered the rules on the table and handed her his phone. “Behind me. If I say run, you run.”
They climbed together, avoiding the boards that creaked. Cold air moved along the upstairs hall, carrying rain through an open window.
Harper’s bedroom door stood ajar. She knew she had locked it before leaving for campus, and the sight felt more violating than Christina’s theft of her diary.
Chris entered first. The curtains moved in the wind, but the room appeared empty. Nothing waited behind the door or beneath the bed.
Harper stepped inside and immediately saw what had changed. Her diary lay open on the pillow even though she had hidden it in a locked desk drawer that morning.
The drawer had not been forced. Whoever opened it either possessed a key or knew where Harper kept the spare.
Chris checked the window. A narrow ledge ran toward the guest-room balcony, but rain had erased any useful marks. “They could have entered before we came home and waited,” he said.
The thought made Harper’s skin crawl. Someone might have been inside while she and Chris sat downstairs, close enough to hear their rules and their almost-confession.
She approached the bed. A new line had been written across an empty diary page in handwriting that did not belong to her: *Ask Chris what happened in Boston.*
Harper read the sentence aloud. Behind her, Chris went completely still.
“What happened in Boston?” she asked.
“A mistake.” His face revealed more than the answer. Whatever he remembered carried guilt, not merely danger.
“Was my father involved?” Chris looked toward the open window instead of replying, and silence supplied the truth.
A floorboard groaned in the hall. Chris turned, but the bedroom door slammed shut before he reached it. The lights died at the same instant.
In the darkness, someone locked the door from the outside. Harper’s phone illuminated Chris’s face as smoke began curling beneath the threshold, and a stranger’s voice called from the hall, “Tell her the truth—or neither of you leaves this house.”
