Chapter Twenty-Five
“You weren’t supposed to hurt her.”
Aslen mentally struggled through the haze that’d taken over.
The ground bit into her shoulder, tingling pinpricks dancing in her fingers.
She rolled her head to one side. Pain threatened to splinter her brain in half.
It took more effort than it should have to open her eyes.
Her attention went straight to the swaying pine tree overhead.
The sky had turned a bruising purple, bluer to the right and lighter to the left.
“She’ll lead the police right to us.” Familiarity bled into Aslen’s awareness. That voice had haunted her straight down to the bottom of the reservoir. The arsonist. He’d found her. He’d ambushed her. “We talked about this. She’s a threat. She will lead them straight to you. We have to do this.”
Tension hardened the muscles down her spine as she rolled onto her side. That was all she could do with her hands bound at her lower back. Only this time, zip ties secured her ankles too.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Movement filtered through that unconscious haze.
Blond hair swept down the woman’s back, straighter than Aslen’s, frizzed from over playing with the strands and nervous pulling.
But it was her voice that seized Aslen from head to toe. Danny. “You burned down the house.”
The arsonist—she didn’t know his name—stepped into her best friend’s personal space. Raising his hands to Danny’s arms, he brought her in for a hug. “I’m doing this for you. Remember? They deserved every second of pain they suffered from what they did to you. To us.”
Aslen pulled at the zip ties, trying to ease onto her stomach without drawing the duo’s attention. She didn’t understand.
“I know. I just… She’s my friend. She doesn’t deserve any of this.
” Danny craned her chin over her shoulder, locking Aslen in her blue gaze.
Her roommate swiped at her face then closed the distance between them.
Crouching, Danny reached out, her boots level with Aslen’s face. “Aslen, please. I can explain—”
She jerked out of reach, driving dirt and rock deeper into her pinned arms and hip.
A picnic bench sat positioned near a chain-link fence roping off the peak of Lava Point Overlook.
She’d come here to find Danny, to make sure her friend hadn’t been hurt, only to find the arsonist himself.
With Danny’s phone. They’d lured her here. Were working together. “You know him?”
Danny threw her attention over her shoulder. To the man standing between Aslen and the only shot of escape down the overlook. “Jaylan’s my brother.”
His voice. That was why she’d recognized it on the dock.
She’d heard it before, from the few times Danny and her brother had video called each other.
Her roommate hadn’t given much information about her family, but Aslen knew she hadn’t been close to her family in a long time.
Her brother had been her only point of contact over the years, and now he was here.
He’d killed two people. He’d tried to kill her.
She could see the resemblance now. The same blond hair, the blue of their eyes, but that was where the similarities ended.
Jaylan Kennex was a mountain of muscle that might come close to Murray, where his sister was soft.
Danny had the strength of a firefighter but not the bulk.
“I never wanted this, Aslen.” Danny shook her head. “I tried to keep you out of it, but then Murray drafted you into the investigation, and you were making all these connections… Jaylan didn’t have a choice—”
“You knew.” Betrayal scorched up her throat and triggered a wave of nausea.
How many times had she trusted Danny to have her back?
How many nights had she cried in Danny’s arms when Murray had failed to live up to her expectations?
Two years. They’d been roommates. They’d been friends.
And it’d all been a lie. “You knew what he was doing, that he was killing people—that he tried to kill me—and you never said anything. How is that trying to keep me out of it?”
A line of silver glistened in Danny’s eyes as she maneuvered herself back onto the park bench. “I didn’t know. Not at first. Please, you have to believe me. I didn’t know he’d set the first two fires. I didn’t even know he was in Zion until I was assigned to respond to the campground explosion.”
Stinging pain bit into her palms as she tried to break the leverage of the zip ties, but even if she managed to free herself, it was two against one, and Aslen wasn’t sure she could hurt her friend.
Or that she’d survive the encounter with the arsonist. The weight of his attention pressed on her chest as Aslen cut her gaze to Jaylan Kennex. “Who were they? The people you killed.”
“Our parents.” Two words had never held so much weight to them.
The arsonist—the murderer—slid both hands into his front jeans pockets, legs spread as though he expected her to tackle him at a moment’s notice.
Which she hadn’t decided against. She owed him for throwing her overboard into the reservoir.
A red gas can at his feet claimed her focus.
“You killed your parents.” Bile slithered up her esophagus, and Aslen tried to pull one boot from the zip tie at her ankles. “Why?”
Danny leaned forward on the bench, her elbows against her knees.
She picked at the calluses she and Aslen had both developed over the years of wrangling hoses, hauling equipment and having to get their hands dirty in every fire they’d been dispatched.
Sisters. She’d thought they were sisters, but now?
Aslen didn’t know the woman sitting in front of her.
“I told you my mom and dad were angry when I left their church, which was an understatement, but that’s not the whole reason. ”
It took a few breaths and a glance toward her brother for Danny to corral an explanation.
“Growing up, our family would come here to Zion, specifically to Lava Point. There weren’t as many rangers patrolling this area as the more popular areas of the park.
My parents knew that, and they took advantage of that to… educate me and my brother”
“I don’t understand.” And why on earth did she want to?
Why was she looking for ways to be less angry at Danny than she was?
Her best friend had let this happen. She and her brother had abducted her.
Again. They’d bound her wrists and ankles and intended to ensure she couldn’t tell Murray and his rangers the identity of the arsonist.
“Our parents believed the entire world was about to collapse to make way for their God’s second coming.
” Jaylan Kennex moved in, his boots scuffing on the packed dirt of the overlook where thousands of visitors had come before him.
The events of the past few days—a wildfire, the explosion, news of an arsonist on the loose—had kept hikers clear of the area. No one was coming to save her.
Least of all the man who’d outright rejected the love she had to offer since she’d been thirteen years old.
“My entire life, Jaylan’s too, we prepared for that day.
As a family. We were told it would be us against the whole world, and we needed to know how to survive the evil coming for us.
We moved to a compound in the middle of nowhere with people who thought just like my parents.
Cut off from everything we knew, everyone we loved.
” Danny wiped her palms down her uniform slacks.
“We grew our own food, stocking up on guns and ammunition. We had Bible study morning, noon and night then survival training.”
Danny looked to her brother then, her face losing color.
“They left us in the middle of these woods for days to see if we would survive. Same with the other children from our compound.” Jaylan’s attention locked on his sister, and Aslen could see the hurt there.
The difference in their ages was obvious as they stood together, Danny a few years younger.
“No tents, no food, no water. No supplies. We were instructed to meet at a location within three days, and if we didn’t make it, we weren’t coming home.
Our parents couldn’t afford weak children in times of chaos.
I had a few more years of experience. I spent a good amount of time learning the skills I needed, but Danny…
Our parents dropped us off, blindfolded, at two separate starting points. She was only four the first time.”
Aslen’s heart hurt. For the treatment they’d suffered, for the pain of being hardened so early in life, for the understanding the siblings shared in this moment.
The same look she and Murray had shared so many times.
But none of it justified the murder of two innocent people and the attempted murder of a ranger.
“It took me two days to find her. I didn’t even care about meeting our parents’ timeline.
I couldn’t leave her out there to die.” Jaylan slid his hand over Danny’s shoulder, and his sister covered his hand with hers.
“She was soaking wet, suffering from hypothermia after falling in one of the streams. She was so blue, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get her warm.
I swore then I would never let anything happen to her again, that I would protect her.
It wasn’t our family against the world. It was me and Danny against our parents.
So I taught her what she needed to know every time we were dumped in these damn woods, just enough to keep her alive until I could get to her.
And I took the lashings our parents doled out when they found out I was helping her survive. ”
Aslen’s heart shot into her throat. That same promise Murray had made to her all those years ago.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. That promise was responsible for transforming Murray from the popular, fun, outgoing boy who’d brought her into his home into an arrogant guardian, and she’d hated it.
Murray’s commitment to her protection had made her feel as nothing more than an obligation he couldn’t rid himself of, but seeing how far Jaylan Kennex had gone to ensure his sister’s survival ripped the world right out from under Aslen.
Murray had told her he couldn’t love her.
But the truth was, he already did. In the way he’d followed her to Zion, in riding her to study harder than anyone else through high school and college, to have her reassigned to the visitor’s center after the explosion, confronting her foster mother every night, vetting those boyfriends before allowing her on a date, keeping her from drinking at restaurants, training her to defend herself from some invisible threat she never understood.
She’d hated it all, but now she understood.
It’d been his way of not just keeping that promise but showing her how much he cared. That he loved her.
And, damn it, she would go to war for him. For them.
“So you killed them.” Aslen swallowed against the rush of relief as the zip tie at her back broke.
Using the lessons Murray had taught her to escape, she’d angled her wrists against a rock, and the pressure had snapped the plastic, but she kept her hands hidden.
She couldn’t go anywhere with the ties still secure around her ankles.
“They were a threat to my sister.” A hardness Aslen had glimpsed in the second leading up to her going over that boat railing filtered into Jaylan Kennex’s expression. “And so are you. You’ve seen our faces. You know our names. I can’t let you turn us in. Danny deserves better.”
“So do I.” Aslen snapped her knees apart. The tension severed the zip tie around her ankles, and she pushed to stand.
Jaylan didn’t have the chance to defend himself as she rammed her shoulder into his soft organs and shoved him off balance. He tripped over the gas can at his feet and hit the ground.
And she ran.