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)
“Without any friends?” I wanted to hit her again, so much that I knew it was dangerous.
And right now, I wanted to know the truth more than I wanted to hurt her. But I wanted something else more. Turning to look at Bea, I said, “Grace, can you tell if Bea’s still out?”
“Yes, she is,” Grace said without hesitation. “I gave her a big dose. Nothing dangerous. Just meant to keep her under until I took care of her dear, loving sister.”
My eyes locked with Grace’s. I nodded slowly while ignoring Darcie’s babbling about how Grace was a monster, how she’d just admitted to drugging people.
Shifting back to face the windscreen, I made myself clench my fists hard enough that my nails dug into my palms. Drawing my own blood instead of Darcie’s as I spoke words flat and without anger. Without any emotion at all, so remote they could’ve come from another person altogether.
“She must’ve thought none of us cared.” My poor Bea, who’d thrived in the sun of people’s attention. “She must’ve believed that we’d abandoned her.”
“She did.” Grace’s voice came out damp, whispery. “She cried in her room night after night, and all her sparkle, all that gorgeous, defiant light, it began to bleed out of her. She thought you’d all forgotten her, even you, her beloved Nae-nae.”
The distance cracked, a serrated breach through which flowed agony. “Tell me she discovered the truth long before she escaped that place,” I begged the swollen and reddened eyes in the rearview mirror. “Tell me she knew I didn’t leave her, that none of us left her.”
“Yes. Her psychotic bitch of a sister let it slip the last time she ever visited. She came to rub in the fact that she was now sleeping in Ash’s bed, said that he’d leaned into her in his grief over Beatrice’s suicide.” Grace began to sob, a hard, wracking thing so violent that it took her three attempts to get out her next words.
Then she did, and the fractured glass fell in smithereens at my feet.
“Beatrice tried to kill herself that night.”
All the pain, all the rage, all the hate—it rushed back into me in a punch that sparked stars behind my eyes.
When I could stomach looking at Darcie, it was to see that her expression held no outrage or anger. It exhibited only the desperation of a liar who’d been discovered.
“She trusted you.” It was all I could get out, the enormity of what Darcie had done almost impossible for my mind to grasp.
“She was out of control,” Darcie insisted. “She needed help. You never saw her lose it! Never saw—”
Her words were nothing but a formless buzz, my eyes attempting to make sense of this snake in human skin. Because even if I believed every word she’d spoken about Bea’s mental health, none of it mattered. She’d lied about Bea’s suicide, made us believe our beautiful Bea was gone when she’d been trapped and wounded and slowly dying.
Darcie had locked her sister up in a place far from all her family and friends . . . and then she’d twisted the knife into Bea by crowing over her “win.” She’d broken my unbreakable Bee-bee.
“Please.” Darcie’s breath hitched, that more than her speech catching my attention. “My head feels faint. I’m losing too much blood.”
I looked at her abdomen, realized I could no longer see any of the white towel.
I didn’t care.
That was when Grace spoke. “No one will ever know.” A murmur rough with the remnants of her grief for Bea. “If you let her bleed out. If you let her die like she tried to let Bea die. I’ll never tell. Even if I lose my mind and spill my guts one day, I am certifiably mentally disturbed. No one will believe me.”
She was right. In all of it.
I wondered what she’d done to end up in that facility with Beatrice, and found my mind filling with fragments of Kaea’s report on the break-in.
Disturbing and ugly, unhinged.
Obsessed.
Stalker.
“Did you kill Dr. Cox?” I asked, my mind calm enough now to put together the pieces.
“Sure. Bastard deserved it.” Grace shrugged. “I suffocated him after meeting him on a cliff where he thought he was going to get a blow job. Wasn’t hard to dump him onto the rocks after that. Slight downhill slope. Release the parking brake. Easy.
“Getting those dark-web files onto Landis’s computer, on the other hand, was a pain in the ass—I had to fuck him three times before he got a little too ‘drunk’ and I had hours of access—but I’m sure he’ll be getting fucked in more ways than one in the prison to which he’s headed.”
“How did you know what to do? How to access the files and bury them in his computer?”
“No one ever said I wasn’t smart. Just crazy.” Grace’s smile in the rearview mirror was sinister in its amusement. “I decided on my plan two years ago, the day I got out of the facility. That’s a long time to learn how to do something. The trick is to commit.”