Billy's gone.
Ruby Buckley's world ended with him.
But Hawkins isn't done with her yet.
When strange deaths begin again, Ruby is pulled into the heart of the storm. Between shadowy nightmares, the town's newest outcast, and someone she was never s...
( songs for the chapter ) way down we go // kaleo i want to break free // queen
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The cold hit him first.
Not the sharp, bracing shock of Lover's Lake, that part was already over, but the deeper kind, the kind that felt like it crawled under his skin and took up residence. The kind that told him, with a creeping, sickening certainty, that they weren't swimming anymore.
They were being dragged.
Pulled. Yanked downward through something that felt less like water and more like a current with teeth.
Steve's grip tightened instinctively around Ruby's wrist.
He couldn't see her face through the churning dark, but he felt her, the clutch of her nails on his forearm, the small, panicked kick as she tried to find direction in the chaos, the tremor running through her arm. She was scared. Of course she was.
He was too.
And yet, underneath the fear, something molten burned.
Anger.
Not at her. Never at her.
At everything that had funneled her to this moment. Everything that kept dragging her closer to the center of the mess Hawkins could never stop birthing. Everything that shoved a girl who shouldn't have had to deal with any of this into a war she never asked for.
She shouldn't be here.
She shouldn't know any of this.
She should've been at home, blasting the music she loves so much too loud, or lying on her bed reading a book in a weird language, or painting something that caught her eye and didn't let go, or literally doing anything else except drowning beside him in the middle of Lover's Lake because Hawkins couldn't keep its shit together for five minutes.
How the hell had this happened?
He knew pieces of the answer. He'd put them together faster than he expected, really.
After the Russian base, after all the concussions and bruises and stunned confusion of walking out of there, only to find Ruby suddenly... in it. Not just present, rooted. Woven into the madness like she'd been orbiting their chaos from the very beginning.
Max sticking to her side like a shadow. Lucas hovering close. Dustin whispering in frantic circles to Mike about how much she'd pieced together and how much she'd cornered out of them. How much she knew.
He hadn't been there for the beginning, but he could see it anyway. Has heard all about it:
Ruby noticing something wrong with Billy long before anyone else said a word.
Not the obvious stuff, the temper, the sharp edges.
She already knew those. Loved him through them. Worked around them with a softness Steve had never seen someone aim at Billy Hargrove before.
