Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
“Luna, don’t listen to her!” Huge tears rolled down Grace’s face as she jerked forward against the seat belt, coming close enough to me that the blur of darkness vanished and I could see her. “She’s getting into your mind. That’s what she does! She’s the one who made us all come to this horrid place!”
Darcie took several breaths to reply, as if gathering her strength. And in that time, I decided to continue driving. I didn’t know how long it’d take in this weather, or how much longer either woman would survive. Because while Grace had seemed feisty when she’d lunged against her seat belt, I’d noticed that the whites of her eyes were scarily pale.
She was losing blood. A lot of it.
“It’s funny,” Darcie said at last. “I almost forgot. It was Aaron who suggested we meet up. Said he wanted to introduce Grace to his oldest friends.”
I could imagine Aaron doing just that—after Bea, he’d been the one most likely to organize group events. “Who chose the estate as the location?”
“Me,” Darcie admitted. “We’d otherwise have had to pay for a place and it was big enough.”
“See?” Grace said. “She’s the one who brought us to this hellhole.”
Grace was right—but if Grace had nudged Aaron into bringing up the idea of a reunion, then the Shepherd estate would’ve been by far the most obvious option. I didn’t keep a permanent residence in the country, Vansi and Phoenix had an apartment in a building close to the hospital, Kaea’s was a small bachelor pad, while the two other couples owned homes in the suburbs. Nice enough homes but not set up to accommodate eight for what was meant to be a vacation.
We could’ve hired a place, but it had never come up because Darcie had offered the estate right off. Even if she hadn’t, someone would’ve asked if it was available and still in a habitable state. While we’d never visited it, we’d heard all about it the years we’d been friends with her and Bea. We’d always talked about doing a big weekend there, never quite got around to it.
The pathway would’ve always led to the estate.
“Luna.” Darcie’s quiet, pained voice. “You know me. I’ve never been violent.”
No, Darcie wasn’t violent. Darcie was manipulative, far preferred to get her way through more underhanded methods. If anything, Bea had been the violent one. I’d once seen her lash out at Darcie over some slight, literally haul her into a hair-pulling fight. But they’d been teenage girls then, their hormones running amok.
“I’m not violent, either.” Grace’s tone was brittle. “But she’s your friend and you don’t know me. You don’t know that I draw hot baths for Aaron after he’s had a hard day. You don’t know I drive a cute red car that’s my pride and joy. And you don’t know that I spoil our puppy so much that I cried when we left him with the dog sitter.”
Something flashed in front of the lights.
Braking hard, I searched the dark. “Did you see that?”
“What?” both women said, one a sharp question, the other a mumble.
I looked hard, but whatever it had been was gone. Probably an animal. A possum? Did they have deer in this region? I didn’t know, took extreme care when I started to move again. “Grace, do you remember the exact location of the slip?”
“No.” A single sullen word. “Maybe forty-five minutes away at regular speed?”
I frowned, tried to think back to our discussion. “That doesn’t sound right. We’d be well past the settlement by then.”
“Maybe it was thirty minutes then? My brain’s all fuzzy.” The strength in Grace’s tone was dwindling rapidly, and I could imagine her face coated with fine threads of silver. Imagination was all I had right now, because she’d pushed back into her seat and been enveloped by the pillowy shadows; I could see large motions but no detail of her face or expression.
Her dullness of spirit and hazy memory worried me for what it implied about her level of blood loss.
As I drove, I chewed on my lower lip, attempting to see through Grace’s and Darcie’s words and coming up against the same hard wall of fact: they’d admitted to stabbing each other. I just had no way to tell which one had been the instigator.
“I’d never hurt Ash.” Darcie’s whisper was a sepia photograph as faded as Clara and Blake’s wedding image. “That woman pretending to be Bea . . . she has blood on her dress. Did she do something to him? Did Grace?”
I’d been trying not to think about that, to focus just on the situation with Grace and Darcie—neither one of whom had blamed Bea for their own stabbing. So where had the blood come from?
Grace snorted. “Your husband didn’t come back because he can’t stand to be around you.”