Chapter 16. Ophelia
OPHELIA
Walking away from Belladonna feels like an awful idea, but I can’t drag her into this any further than I already have. This is my mess.
The short walk to the trees feels like a marathon. So much time to overthink, so much time for my heart to accelerate into a rapid rhythm. Each whisper of the wind in my ear or bare branch reaching out for my legs has me spinning around to face a person who isn’t there.
By the time I reach the abandoned Golf, I can barely make out Belladonna’s vehicle behind me.
I glance around, the world silent enough that my breaths are deafening and my footsteps sound like they could be heard for miles around.
I dare to turn on my phone flashlight, peering through the yellowing windows.
The car is filthy, inside and out. The driver’s seat is empty, passenger seat covered in empty water bottles and food wrappers.
The small back seat has a stained pillow and a blanket.
Whoever is here, they’re living in this car.
The coordinates I was sent lead into the mass of pines in front of me, but when I scan the tree line, there’s no trace of anyone or anything.
I pace around the vehicle, knife clutched between my clammy fingers. I can’t find any clue in the car, but my eyes land on the license plate, so thick with dirt that it’s almost unreadable.
I take out my phone and cringe at the brightness of the screen, scrambling to turn it down before I’m seen. I half expect Mack’s tech guy not to pick up, but he does. God knows what time it is wherever he is.
“Brendan?” I whisper, so quiet I can barely hear myself. I glance over both shoulders, crouching down to hide behind the car. “It’s Ophelia. If I give you some plates, can you tell me who’s driving a car?”
He must notice the fear in my voice, because he doesn’t ask me why I need it. “What country is the car from?”
“The UK.”
I hear a drawer open and shut on the other end of the phone, then the sound of him typing. “Why are you in the middle of nowhere?”
I look beneath the car and at the cluster of trees beyond, finding no one. “It’s a long story.”
He sighs. “Tell me the plates.”
“MG01 ARJ.”
“Hold on.”
Somewhere in the trees, a twig snaps. Panic cuts through me. I can hear Brendan muttering under his breath, like he’s having trouble on his end. “Um, how long until you get a match?”
“Are you in danger?”
I suppose now’s not the time to sugarcoat the truth. “I think so.”
“Who does the car belong to? The person sending the texts?”
I look down beneath the car again, watching the tree line like a hawk. “Yeah.”
“Ophelia, get out of there and leave it to us.”
“I’ve been leaving it to you guys for months. I can’t just sit around and wait for someone to kill Alex.”
“Okay, well, let me know who the stalker is, if you survive. The car has an expired MOT. It isn’t taxed, either. It’s likely stolen.”
I curse in frustration, keeping him on the line as I pace over to a small, round shrub, watching, waiting for anyone to appear. No one does.
It leaves me no choice but to head over to the trees, wincing at every twig and leaf that crunches beneath my Doc Martens.
My teeth chatter together on an exhale as I’m plunged into complete and total darkness.
Brendan’s steady breathing and typing on the line are the only things keeping me company.
Just like in the Solemn Woods that surround Sorrowsong’s crumbling walls, the forest snatches all five of my senses from me. I lose my sense of direction, fumbling blindly through the cracked tree trunks until I hear a second set of footsteps in front of me.
Or are they behind me?
Every sound reverberates through the forest, coming at me from every direction.
I head toward the footsteps, knife in hand, and just when they sound like they could be walking alongside mine, the forest falls silent and still.
A cold sweat sticks to my skin.
I feel it again now, just like I did in those woods with Bancroft: a nauseating, crushing sort of dread.
But somehow, I feel stronger than I did then.
“Gotcha,” mutters Brendan, making me jump. “Last year, the car was registered in Inverness to one Ms. L—”
Something—someone—slams into my back, sending my phone flying. The earth comes to greet me with a hard thud, the taste of blood and damp earth invading my mouth. I hold on to my knife, slashing it behind me as a pair of knees come crashing down on my lower back.
But I know as soon as those knees land on my back that this isn’t a fair fight.
No weight accompanies them. When my hand encircles the forearm that snakes its way across my neck, it’s nothing more than skin and bone.
The voice that comes is hoarse with sickness and frailty, but the Scottish accent is familiar. “I hate you, Ophelia.”
I shut my eyes against the thorns and the dirt and curse my own stupidity.
I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.
There is only one person I know who wanted Green to crumble with the same intensity that I did.
“Laura,” I choke out.
“I gave you my father’s tape,” she hisses, the thin line of her forearm pressing harder into my neck. “You tricked me into giving you my final piece of him.”
I remember her home, her desperation as she handed me the confession tape that would give us the vengeance we’d both dreamed of for so long. It was crucial information in my case against Cain Green. It was her prized possession, and I promised her that giving it up would be worth it.
But I chased a happily ever after instead.
And barely thought about her again.
“It wasn’t like that,” I wheeze, through my compressed airway. I clutch my knife, but I might as well throw it into the bushes.
I won’t kill Laura. I can’t kill her.
“How did your boyfriend bribe you to steal the final piece of evidence against his family? You begged me for it, pretended that you hate the Corbeau-Greens.” She laughs maniacally, bony knees digging into my spine.
“I sent you that tape, and you went silent. And I thought maybe you’d forgotten about me, like everyone does.
But I found Alex online. Laughing with you, spending Christmas with you. ”
“No, no, no,” I plead, trying to get her to see, trying to starve the flames of guilt that are burning me alive.
“I came to you. I watched you. I came to Sorrowsong because surely, surely, that girl who came to my house wasn’t truly bad. Surely it was all a misunderstanding. And what do I find? You and him, burying that man. Was he like me, too? Did you trick him?”
“Laura, please,” I choke out “I wasn’t trying to trick you, I fell for him after, I swear. I always intended on bringing Green down.”
“All you ever do is lie.”
I buck her off me just enough to roll onto my back. It’s too dark to make out her features, but the silhouette of her greasy hair is lank and limp against the moonlit treetops. “I posted it back. The tape.” I pant. “You can have it back.”
“I sold the house to pay a hacker to finish what you promised me you’d start!” she shouts, hands grappling for my neck. Thin fingers dig into my flesh, but there’s no threat, no strength behind her movements.
I hear a mechanical click somewhere beside us and freeze, eyes widening in dismay. “Belladonna, don’t shoot!”
A mottled ray of moonlight catches on the distinctive metal lines of a gun, aimed right toward us.
But this only panics Laura, hands flying in a frenzy.
“She has a knife, Ophelia.”
“Don’t. Shoot,” I beg her, trying to catch one of Laura’s arms. The knife settles at my neck, my hand on her wrist preventing it sinking into my skin. “Laura, listen to me.”
“Listen to you? Listening to you was my final hope.”
“I am so, so sorry.”
And I am. Sorry doesn’t cover it. The guilt makes my breaths labored, turns my blood to ice.
Laura is me, and I am Laura. Two women let down by the same man. Two women united by the same trauma. Two women forgotten by the law.
And then I forgot her, too.
I wrap my other hand around the blade, and it bites my palm as I carefully push it away from my neck. Blood trickles onto my clothes. “I’ll get you some help. I’ll help you.”
“You made me believe. But you’re just like the rest of them.”
“I’m so sorry. I never intended to fall in love,” I plead, desperate for both of us to make it out of here alive. It doesn’t take much effort to push her upright and away from me, for me to see from her outline just how skeletal she really is.
I did this.
I am no better than the people I swear to destroy.
Her breathing calms just a fraction. My thumb strokes small circles on her knuckles where I hold both of her hands in mine. “That’s it,” I whisper, like I’m taming a wild animal. “Breathe. I’ll help you. I’m so sorry.”
She backs off me, and for a second, I think it’s working.
But then she makes the fatal mistake.
She lunges toward Belladonna.
“Don’t!” I shout, but I’ve always admired Belladonna for her ability to put herself first. One single gunshot slices through the dense air, ruthless and efficient.
It casts the forest in an orange glow for the briefest of seconds, and then Laura crumples to the ground in a heap of stained clothes and gangly limbs.
“No,” I croak, crawling over to her. Even in the dark, with a moving target, the shot couldn’t have been more accurate.
I press my hands over the blood that pumps out of the wound just above her heart, like that’ll fix anything, like I didn’t kill Laura five months ago when I chose love over revenge.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. Oh God, I’m so, so sorry.
The whites of her eyes seem to glow in the dark, wide with shock. Her blood is a crimson river that trickles into the earth, and if she’d been offered the scholarship, if she’d met someone she loved, if our roles were reversed, it’d be mine.
“I don’t want to go to prison,” she whispers, like she believes she might survive this.
I clutch her body to mine, my hand a steady support beneath her head. “You won’t. I won’t let that happen.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” I say, holding her emaciated hand in mine. Something splinters inside my chest. “Belladonna is really good at hiding evidence.”
“Yeah?”
I brush the hair from her face, a tear trickling down my upper lip and bursting on my tongue. “Yeah.”
She dies quickly. Quicker than Bancroft. She dies with her hand in mine and my hoodie draped over her shivering frame.
I think part of me dies with her.
“I’m sorry she died,” says Belladonna, after five silent minutes of me kneeling beside her with my head in her hands.
My voice sounds alien, distant and muffled. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to put yourself at risk.”
“She’s probably better off this way,” she says, and it fractures this illusion I’ve had that I want to be exactly like Belladonna one day, because it’s such a cold and callous thing to say. If being strong means dulling your emotions to things like this, I don’t think I want to be strong at all.
It’s only another few minutes before a few of Rocco Morello’s men arrive, shining flashlights on the ugly scene in front of us, shining a flashlight on what I did to a woman who deserved so much more, and as they start to clean up the remnants of her existence, only one thought rattles through my brain.
It should be me.