It was surreal to think that twenty-four hours ago, I was stuck in a house on the edge of nowhere, my friends dying around me. Today, I sat in the searing whiteness of a hospital room, dozing fitfully in a leather armchair a nurse had draped with a soft sheet so that the cracked leather on the arm wouldn’t catch at my skin.
When I woke with a jolt a few minutes after midnight, I saw that Kaea’s breathing was even, his stats stable. The same nurse had taught me how to read those stats after I kept asking her about them, and I’d memorized the ranges she’d told me were good.
But Kaea wouldn’t come out of this undamaged.
Grace refused to tell the doctors the exact drugs with which she’d dosed him, but whatever it was had done internal damage that might equal the need for a transplant down the line.
Per Grace, it was punishment for turning Bea down when she’d been sixteen.
I’d known Bea’d had a crush on him for about five seconds, also knew it had passed as quickly. Bea, I understood, would’ve shared the story with Grace as a humorous anecdote of childhood drama, a funny snippet of life to make them both laugh in that dark place where they’d been imprisoned.
It was Grace who’d decided that Kaea’s gentle rejection—because Kaea wasn’t cruel, would have let Bea down with tenderness—was a crime that deserved the death penalty . . . after plenty of suffering. I had the feeling his mind and legal training had counted against him, too. That ability to unmask liars, expose twisted truths—and zero in on unstable points in an opponent’s psyche.
Grace, however, was far beyond simply unstable. Her name wasn’t even Grace and she wasn’t adopted, much less from Romania; she hadn’t tried to keep up the lies now that she’d achieved her aim of exposing Darcie.
Rubbing my face with one hand, I decided to check in on the others. The hospital staff had been very kind, allowing me to stay in the rooms long past visiting hours. News of what had gone on in the house had spread through those caring for my friends, and the hospital had even sent a psychologist to talk to me.
He’d strongly recommended I “undertake a regime of therapy” after my return to London, “with the aim of staving off long-term PTSD.”
I wanted to laugh.
I wondered what Dr. Mehta would say if I walked in and told her that I now had even worse problems than before my relaxing little vacation. Not that she’d be seeing me. I wasn’t going back to London.
How could I when Bea was here?
After making sure Kaea’s blanket was tucked in around him, I shoved up the sleeves of my oversize gray hoodie as I padded over to the next room. My sneakers were soundless on the hospital floor. The shoes and clothes were both courtesy of Detective Stu Ratene. He’d taken my own gear in as evidence even though I had little blood on me.
Procedure.
Though my eyes were tired this late into the night on such a limited amount of sleep, I could see fine; it was never fully dark in a hospital, not even at the darkest hour of night.
Too many machines with blinking lights, too much need for nurses and doctors to be able to rush into a room in an emergency without having to fumble to find their way. What existed in the hallways was a light bright enough to hurt, while within the rooms hovered a dark gray twilight somber and restful.
Despite the wires and the machines and the drugs, Ash was awake and staring out the window at the dark beyond. Tiny squares of light patterned his face, thrown from the windows of a neighboring high-rise. “Luna,” he said when I walked in.
His face was sallow and thin, his eyes hollow.
As of my last conversation with the staff, Ash remained listed as critical. His family was out of the country, would land in New Zealand in the early morning hours. Until then, they’d given the hospital permission to share information with me.
“You saved his life,” his mother had sobbed on the phone. “Please take care of him a little longer.”
I almost hadn’t been in time to save Ash at all; the kitchen knife his attacker had used when she’d lured him into the ruined part of the house with a cry for help had nicked a vital organ. He’d been bleeding out into his abdomen.
Ironically enough, it was the cold in the house that had saved him.
“How are you awake?” I came to stand beside his bed, my arms crossed. “You’re meant to be under heavy sedation postsurgery.”
“I have an irregular reaction to anesthetic—always wake up too fast.” His words were a monotone. “Can’t feel my stomach, though. No idea why. In fact, no idea why I’m in a hospital.”
Had this been Kaea, I’d have touched him multiple times by now, but with Ash . . . I didn’t blame him for falling for Darcie’s strategy to oust her sister, and yet I did. “How are you feeling overall?”
His chest rose and fell as he turned his head toward me. “I dreamed that I was being held by a crying angel. I could smell blood, but I wasn’t afraid. Funny, huh?”
A crying angel.
“About that . . .” I grabbed a lightweight plastic chair from the corner and moved it close to his bed. After taking a seat, I told him what I thought he could handle in his current state—and that didn’t include information about Bea’s return from the dead. Mostly, I focused on Grace’s desire to get vengeance for her friend.
Not even a drop of surprise on his face.
So, Grace had been telling the truth. “It was you that put Creepy Bea in Darcie’s daypack.”
“Yes.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Darcie freaked out after the doll appeared on our bed that first time. Total breakdown. All her filters gone. She said that no one should have had the doll, that the facility had disposed of all of Bea’s belongings after she died.”
His mouth twisted. “When I asked her what facility, she got this deer-in-the-headlights look that isn’t in any way usual for my wife, and then she told me that Bea checked herself into a mental health facility before her suicide. She said Bea hadn’t wanted any of us to know.”
His hand flexed flat against the blue hospital sheet. “I knew at that instant that she was lying. Bea was a people person. She hated being alone. You know that. You spent hours with her just hanging out—I used to be jealous until I realized how much she needed her people around her, and that if I tried to take that away, I’d make her sad. So I never tried. I loved her enough to never try. Our Bea would’ve wanted visitors, an endless stream of them.”
So Ash had decided to terrorize his wife. I couldn’t judge him for that.
“I guess Grace must’ve taken the doll,” he said. “Or Bea gave it to her. Place like that, they must’ve become incredibly close even after only a few months together.”
That was when I realized that, distraught or not, Darcie had managed to hide when she’d thought Bea had died. She’d stuck to the original story, with Bea dead only months after her disappearance.
“I should’ve tried harder to find her.” Ash’s calm tore apart in front of me, his features twisting into a rictus. “I looked so hard, but I had no idea where she might’ve gone. I asked Darcie for help.”
That flexed hand fisted to bloodless white. “She pretended to help me. Can you believe that? That bitch pretended to help me look for the woman I loved more than anyone in the world when she was the reason we lost her in the first place.
“I hate myself for ever letting her touch me, for betraying Bea by loving Darcie even as much as I did. I thought we were united by the same pain, but the whole time, she was crowing over what she’d done to my beautiful Beatrice. I’ll rip her online persona apart, destroy that precious reputation of hers, then take everything in the divorce. Just watch me.”
I touched him then, closing my hand over his fist.
He slipped into sleep with shocking suddenness, his injured body unable to maintain consciousness. I wondered if he’d even remember this conversation when he woke. I wasn’t sure. But I knew that the Ash who had left for the vacation wasn’t the Ash who’d come back.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
“Lu?”
I looked up to see Aaron in the doorway. A small white bandage marked the spot where I’d scraped his cheek against the door while hauling him to safety.
Angling my head, I invited him in. Ash wouldn’t wake now, his breathing so deep and even that I knew it was unnatural, a result of the drugs in his system.
Aaron dipped out for a second to quietly borrow a chair from another room, put it down beside mine. Then he sat hunched over with his hands between his knees, staring down at the ground. I stroked his back, my heart breaking for him. Of all of us, it was Aaron who had the best heart, was a person who was just quintessentially good.
That was what had drawn Grace to him.
“I fell in love with him through Bea’s descriptions of him,” she’d told me the last time we’d spoken. “She always said he was the caretaker of the group, the one ready with a warm hug and a cookie if anyone was feeling down. No one’s ever taken care of me that way before.”
The doctors had worried that he had hypothermia, but it turned out Grace had only given him a mild dose. He’d swum to consciousness an hour before the firemen who were the closest first responders finally got through to the estate; he’d figured out where he was and—after making sure Ash was as comfortable as was possible—had stumbled into the bloodbath of the living room.
It was Aaron who’d found my note.
His body quivered under my touch. “I’m sorry, Aaron.”
He tried to breathe. It caught, broke. “I still love her. I’ll always love her.” Red blood vessels snaked through the whites of his eyes when he looked at me. “She’s not . . . There’s something fundamentally wrong with her brain, Lu. But she’s loyal and she’s loving and she can be so fiercely protective.”
I had no argument with any of that. Grace had done what she had because she loved with obsessive, protective loyalty. “Did she tell you why she ended up in the institution in the first place?”
I’d shared everything I could with him the first instant I saw him. Uninjured as I’d been, I’d ridden back to the estate with the fire crew. There had been only one available fire truck. It had carried on to the estate, while Jim and a member of the fire crew trained in first aid took charge of the Land Cruiser and raced out to meet the ambulances that had been dispatched from the closest medical facility.
In a place that isolated, everyone pitched in, and decisions about limited resources had to be made on the fly.
The rescuers going to the estate hadn’t wanted me with them until I’d pointed out that the house was a maze; the chances of them managing to locate Ash and Aaron, even with instructions, were dangerously low.
I’d also warned them about the bridge, but following an examination using high strength flashlights, they’d made the call to go through.
Afterward, Aaron had ridden out with me in the fire truck—the fire crew had made the decision to load all remaining survivors into their appliance and power through the weather toward the one ambulance still heading in our direction. Vansi’s breathing had been even, her pulse fine, but Ash and Kaea . . .
“Ambulance won’t make it in time,” had been the fire chief’s grim determination. “Roads are still dangerous and the air ambulance remains grounded.”
Aaron had listened to my words in unmoving silence, a shell-shocked frontline veteran of a war he hadn’t even known was occurring. Now, I waited for him to tell me why Grace had ended up in the facility.
“Psychopathic personality traits,” he said at last. “I looked it up, but the stuff I read doesn’t fit her. It’s all about cruelty and a lack of empathy. You’ve seen Grace. She has so much empathy.
“I think the shrinks just wanted a label to put on her. Something for her father to justify locking her up in that place. She’d still be there if he hadn’t died, and her half brothers decided they didn’t want to be on the hook for the fees to keep her locked up. They signed her out on the agreement she wouldn’t contest the will—she’s taken care of herself since.”
Her father still being alive was another thing Grace had lied about. As for how she’d funded her life outside the facility without access to familial money, I had a feeling that a woman who could hack into a judge’s computer with such stealth wouldn’t have found it difficult to access money.
As for the rest . . . I wasn’t so sure I agreed with Aaron. Because the Grace who loved Bea enough to avenge her was the same Grace who had pushed Phoenix down the stairs. The odd thing was that while she’d accepted the blame for Kaea’s poisoning, and the stabbing of Darcie and Ash, she wouldn’t admit to that push.
“He fell” was all she’d say when I’d asked. “You saw that rug. So easy to get tangled up in it.”
Grace had stonewalled the police in the same way; oh, in between sleeps to heal from the wound Darcie had inflicted, she was talking plenty, giving the cops more than enough to get her committed to another facility for life. Except when it came to Nix.
And it wasn’t like she was attempting to blame Bea, either. No, Grace had been clear that the revenge plot had been all her. “No one pushed Nix,” I’d heard her say to the detective in charge of the case. “It was a terrible accident. He wasn’t on the list of people I planned to hurt.”
The question of why Phoenix had to die haunted me. Not just for myself but for Vansi, who was in a sedated sleep on a different ward. She’d snapped after learning what had taken place, begun screaming and screaming and screaming.
I wasn’t sure if my friend as I’d known her would ever come back.
Meanwhile, the storm broken, the police were currently processing the estate.
It was an unmarked gray hearse that had driven Phoenix’s body away from the cellar where he’d lain so cold and alone. But his peace wasn’t to last. Soon, they’d cut him up in a search for the truth.