What Lies in the Woods(103)

“I’ve got it,” Cody said brusquely, and Cass glanced toward him. He’d laid out the tarp. The handle of a hacksaw stuck out of the duffel. I looked away quickly, my stomach roiling at the thought of what that was meant for.

“All right. Enough talk. Stand up,” Cass said, gesturing with the gun. It was like something she’d seen in a movie. I pushed to my feet. She directed me over to the tarp. “Kneel down,” she ordered. Her voice shook now.

She wasn’t as tough as she wanted to think she was, I thought. This version of Cass was like all the others. Something that she’d decided on, constructed piece by piece. Friend, protector, mother, cold-blooded killer. A false front, and absolutely nothing behind it. I wondered if she even understood why she did the things she did, or if she was acting on pure instinct and filling in logic after the fact.

And she’d always been like that. The day we met, she hadn’t chosen us because she thought we were special. She’d chosen us because one glance was enough to tell her that we were so damaged we wouldn’t see the rot already festering inside her.

“I spent my whole life trying to heal from something that never happened,” I said. “You were my friend. You stayed my friend. You told me you cared about me. You made yourself part of my life after you’d done that to me. What were you thinking when you saw my scars and knew they were your fault? When I told you about my nightmares? When you promised me that Stahl wasn’t going to get me? Was it funny to you?”

“A little,” she said viciously. Her teeth flashed once. Her eyes were empty and cold, and something primal surged within me, an ancestral instinct birthed before we had words for the thing she was.

Ethan had seen it, I realized. Maybe not right away, but during the eulogy and when he spoke to her afterward, he’d seen that she was the same sort of creature he’d lived with his whole childhood. Maybe he’d only had an inkling. Enough to try to warn me, but I hadn’t listened.

“You destroyed her,” I said softly. “She was wonderful, and you destroyed her.”

“I said kneel down,” she repeated, and this time I obeyed, letting gravity overtake me.

She started to lift the gun but hesitated halfway. There was genuine fear in her eyes for what she was about to do—but I knew that fear wouldn’t save me. The tarp crunched under my knees. The rain had picked up, a steady hiss all around us. It plastered Cody’s hair to his scalp and ran into his eyes.

“Fuck,” she muttered. She wrapped another hand around the grip, taking a steadying breath. “Don’t look at me,” she said, but I stared straight at her.

“Wait,” Cody said. “Let’s think this through.”

“We have to kill her,” she said.

He shook his head impatiently. “I know, but you shouldn’t be the one to do it. I’ve already killed someone. If we do get caught, I’m already looking at a murder conviction. Better if it’s just one of us.”

“Fine,” she said. She seemed eager to hand off the gun. Relieved. “Just get it over with quickly, okay? I can’t stand this.”

Cody nodded, giving her a tight smile, and stepped between the two of us. “Hold on, there’s one more thing we should check,” he said, turning toward her.

“What now?” she snapped, in the half second before he raised the gun and fired a bullet through her throat.





Cass’s body collapsed instantly, dead weight. The mist of blood hung in the air longer, drifting down with the rain as the gunshot faded. A scream lodged in my closed-off throat.

Cody lowered the gun.

He turned toward me.

“She was a monster,” he said, but the words didn’t penetrate at first. I was still in the moment of the gunshot.

I took a startled breath. I wrenched my gaze away from Cass’s body, tried to think through the fog of horror. My mind was filled with the image of the instant the bullet struck. The look on her face—she hadn’t even had time to be surprised.

“Yes. She was,” I croaked out. She was a monster. She was my best friend. She was dead on the ground and the dirt was stained dark beneath her.

“She hurt you. It was her all along. She did that to you. All that blood—how could she do that to you?” he asked, face contorted in disgust.

I worked my throat, trying to speak. “You saved me,” I whispered.

I saw it: The way I lived. The way I walked out of these woods. He didn’t want to hurt me. He wanted absolution. He wanted me to kiss his brow and tell him that I understood, that I would keep my silence, that I would save him the way he had saved me.

“You saved my life. Just like you saved me from Oscar. You’ve always been my protector,” I told him, getting slowly to my feet.

I slipped my feet out of my high heels. The tarp was cold and slick under the soles of my feet. Cass’s body lay only a few feet from where I stood. Blood still bubbled from the ragged hole beneath her chin. “Cass did this. She did all of it, but you stopped her. Do you understand?”

It took him a moment. There were freckles of blood on the knuckles of the hand that held the gun. He stared at them. “We could pin it on her.”

“She could have killed Liv. And when I found out, she was going to kill me. But you stopped her. It all fits. Simple. She’s the one who put all of this in motion. You were as much her victim as anyone,” I said. Cass’s hand shivered with the last electrical pulses of a dying body, but she was gone—her eyes empty, her blood stilled. It was just the two of us, and the gun.