Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WINSLOW
The blood trail coating half of my face made opening both eyes almost impossible. With my hands bound behind my back, there was no way to wipe my eyelid clean. Every blink was sticky. Every breath strained. Every step excruciating.
“Rain—”
“Shh.” She poked her knife at the gash in my head. The metal tip barely made contact with my flesh, but even the graze was enough to send me to the dirt.
The crack of my knees against the rocks rang through my bones like the vibration of a bell, but instead of a beautiful chime, it was agony. Sheer agony.
My head spun in a dizzy circle, like a spinning top the moment before it collapsed. Blackness tickled at the edges of my consciousness but I shoved it away, forcing a breath into my lungs. Breathe.
I’d had the wind knocked out of me countless times in physical training or karate. I’d strained muscles and earned thousands of bruises. But this was my first concussion. Each move was sluggish, and all I wanted was to sleep. Just for a minute.
I leaned forward, the ground beckoning, and twisted enough so that when I dropped, I hit my shoulder and not my face. Wrong move. The second I crashed, pain ripped through my arm. Either my shoulder was dislocated or I had a fractured bone.
When I’d been unconscious, Rain had done something to my arm.
Maybe, when she and Frank had been loading me in the Jeep, she’d dropped me.
Maybe she’d stomped on me or used the meat mallet again.
Something was definitely wrong because my muscles didn’t want to work right and any strength in my left hand was gone, stolen by the ache.
But before I could close my eyes and succumb to the dark, Rain’s knife was back, the tip digging into the smooth skin at my neck.
Pain had a way of cutting through the haze.
“Up.” She gripped my elbow and forced me to my feet.
I swallowed the urge to puke as I stood. “Please.”
“Shh.” She shoved me up the trail. “Walk.”
One foot in front of the other, I rushed nothing. For every step, I took two breaths.
Think, Winn. My brain didn’t want to think. My brain wanted sleep. Wake up. Fight. “Why are you doing this?”
“Stop talking.”
“Rain, please.”
She lifted the knife to my head, to the place where the blood felt thickest. “Quiet.”
I clamped my mouth shut and nodded, taking another step.
Up and up Indigo Ridge.
To the end.
Was this how Lily Green had died? Forced to make this miserable climb? Was this the path that Harmony Hardt had walked too? What about the others?
It hadn’t been suicide. I was right. All this time, my instincts had been pushing me to this conclusion. But those same instincts had failed me too. They’d failed me for not suspecting Frank. For not seeing the monsters who’d lived next door.
Now it was too late.
The sky was the purest of navy blues above my head. The stars appeared to be dancing in a dizzy circle, but it was my fuzzy head playing tricks on me. The one spinning was me.
Rain had slammed that meat tenderizer into my skull and, in a blink, there’d only been black.
I hadn’t even raised an arm to block the strike. I’d be disappointed in myself later. If I survived this.
That had to have been hours ago. I’d woken in the back of her Jeep at the base of the ridge.
When she’d waved a vial of smelling salts under my nostrils, only the faintest of golden glows had been left on the horizon.
The light was nearly gone now. And there was just enough moonlight to see the narrow trail that loomed ahead.
Rain didn’t relent for a moment. She pushed me up that trail, step by step. My lungs were on fire and my legs burned. She breathed like she was lounging on a couch, not hiking to the apex of a cliff.
Rain. How had it come to this? Who was she? The pain in my heart made this all so much harder to believe.
“I thought you loved me,” I whispered.
“Loved you?” she scoffed. “Liked you. Yes. You go too far with using that word. You’re like my cheating husband. Always spouting words of love.”
“He loved them?”
“He was obsessed with them. Leaving them notes. Arranging their secret rendezvous. Even when he promised me he’d stop, he didn’t. So this is his punishment.”
“You could divorce him.”
“That’s too kind. Did you know this used to be one of his favorite hiking spots? He proposed to me here. Now he can hike this ridge and think about what he’s done. About what he’s made me do.”
“I never touched Frank.”
“No, you asked questions.” She shoved my elbow, nearly knocking me off-balance.
“You should have let it go. They got what they deserved. So did he. And it could have ended there if you had done what everyone else in this goddamn town has done for years and believed what you were supposed to believe.”
That these girls, at least some of them, had killed themselves. And yes, everyone had simply believed.
“I told him to stop this.” Rain’s seething words seemed more for herself than for me. “I told him the last time had to be the last time or I’d bring him up here next.”
“If you want to take me to town and collect him instead, I won’t argue.”
She laughed, the musical, sweet laugh that I’d known since childhood. It sent a chill up my spine. “Keep going, Winnie.”
“Rain, please.”
“Don’t beg. It doesn’t suit you.”
I gritted my teeth and took another step. Then another before I stopped.
Why was I making this easy on her? Screw this bitch. With a smirk at my lips, I dropped to my knees, the pain unbearable but I grunted through it. Then I shifted and sat on my ass.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking a breather.” I lifted one shoulder, stretching my neck in an attempt to wipe some of the blood off my face. It hurt like a mother, but when I straightened, there was a red smear on the strap of my white tank.
“Get up,” she barked.
“No, thanks. I’m good here.” My head throbbed, but my focus was sharpening. I let it wake me up. I let it push me to fight.
At the dojo where I’d trained in Bozeman, my senseis, Cole included, had always said the best way to learn was to face an opponent better than you. Rain was better positioned. She had the knife. I had a concussion.
But I couldn’t lose this fight. I couldn’t die on this ridge.
“Get. Up.” Rain kicked my ankle, the sole of her hiking boot scraping the skin raw.
I winced, took that pain and added it to the rest, embracing it as fuel. “No.”
“I will kill you here.”
“And drag me the rest of the way?” I huffed. “Even a rookie cop would be able to tell that my body was dragged. So unless you want everyone in the county to start asking the questions I’ve been asking for months about these alleged suicides, no, you won’t kill me here.”
The air was lodged in my lungs as I waited for her to respond. A bold move, asserting myself, but at this point, what did I have to lose?
Griffin.
I would lose Griffin.
Find me, Griff. When I didn’t show up for dinner, he would go looking, right? He’d find my car. He’d ask Pops. Hopefully they’d go to Frank’s place and see through that bastard’s bullshit.
Griffin had been right about Frank, and I’d been too clouded by family history to see the lies.
“Did you put Harmony’s purse and Lily’s wallet on the trail for Briggs to find?”
Rain kicked my hip and it took every ounce of my willpower not to cry out. “Get up.”
“Or maybe you put them out there for me to find, hoping that I’d think Briggs had killed them.” I shifted as I spoke so my body would shield my hands.
The dirt was like sandpaper against my fingertips as I clawed at the ground, searching for a sharp rock or edge that I might be able to use to break the zip tie at my wrists.
Cops preferred cuffs because even behind the back, a person could break the ties.
All you had to do was make some space and slam down hard.
But I couldn’t lift my shoulder, not with enough strength to break the tie.
“It almost worked. I did suspect him.”
“But you did nothing.”
“You didn’t leave me enough evidence,” I sneered, at her and the trail. This spot where I’d plopped down was smooth.
“Up. Now.” Another kick. Another wince. But otherwise, I didn’t move.
“Did you hit them over the head like you hit me? Was that how you got them out here?”
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t find any blood around Lily’s car. No signs of a struggle. What did you do? Trick her into thinking she was meeting Frank?”
Rain’s glare narrowed. “Stop. Asking. Questions.”
“That’s a yes,” I muttered. “Let me guess. You wrote a note—you said that’s how Frank contacted them.” Which was why I hadn’t found anything in Lily’s text and call history. “Lily came out to the country expecting Frank. Maybe you promised a little late-night stargazing. A romantic picnic and—”
“Shut up!” The knife’s blade glinted silver as it whipped out and slashed through my bicep.
My cry was swallowed up in the night. There was no one but her to see the tears, so I let them fall. Angry, desperate tears. But I would not be silenced. Not tonight.
“You hit them, like you hit me. That was why there weren’t any traces of drugs in their system.
” Any injuries caused by her knife or a wound to the head like mine had been covered up by the sheer brutality of their deaths.
When all that remained of a person’s skull were fragments, piecing them together to see a prior injury was nearly impossible.
“Did you make her walk up the trail too? When did she take off her boots?”
“Why do you care?”
“Tell me. Before we end this, the least you can do is give me the truth.”
Her lip curled. “She kept slipping in those boots.”
“You should have left them on her feet.”
She nudged my tennis shoe. “I’ll fix that mistake with you.”
“Good luck,” I deadpanned. “No one will believe I committed suicide.”