Chapter One #3
Something cinches suddenly around her bare ankle, wrenching her off her feet.
She goes down hard, ankle twisting. Pain flares up her leg.
She scrambles, trying to find the source of the attack, and her hands close around the metal wire of a snare, hidden by the tall grass.
She gasps as her fingers graze the place where the wire has cinched, her ankle already swelling.
She feels her way down the snare line to where it’s been staked into the ground.
She gets her fingers under the post and starts to pry it out as Cate trudges up, winded and disheveled, the crossbow hanging from her hands.
“There you are,” she says, over the storm. “Ouch,” she adds, seeing Ava’s ballooning ankle, “that looks nasty.”
Cate crouches beside her as if to catch her breath, and slowly, methodically, begins to reload. “This thing is so fiddly,” she says, prying the mechanism back. “This is my last bolt, so hold still.”
Ava’s hand goes up to her collar. Her fingers close over the decorative gold cap of her red pen, the petals biting into her palm.
As Cate fits the bolt, Ava drags the pen free, shifting her weight onto her good foot.
“There we go,” says Cate, lifting the crossbow, but before she can fire, Ava drives the pen into the back of her hand.
It sinks deep, breaking flesh, scraping bone, and Cate yelps and pulls the trigger, launching the last bolt uselessly into the dark.
Ava yanks the stake from the ground as she surges to her feet and takes off, every step sending a wave of fresh pain up her injured ankle, but she doesn’t stop.
She calls to mind Arthur’s words, the ones that spoke to her so many years ago.
Pain is a gift because it makes you angry.
Angry at the ones who hurt you.
Angry at the world.
And angry people fight.
Ava hobbles down the slope toward the jetty, and this time she doesn’t look back. She can’t. She needs every ounce of strength to carry her forward. At last, a rowboat comes into sight, tethered by a single rope, as if holding on for dear life.
All she has to do is get there.
Halfway down, a rotting wooden step gives way beneath her good foot, and she gasps, clinging to what’s left of the rail, knowing that if it goes down, so will she. She’s so close. So close.
She doesn’t know how she makes it, but she does, down the crumbling steps and over the rotting planks and into a boat that hardly looks fit for fishing on a good day, but it’s better than nothing.
This is suicide, warns a voice in her head as she fits the oars into the slots.
Better than being murdered, she snaps back, prying the wet rope from the post.
Instantly, the churning water begins to peel the boat from the jetty. She tries to row, but it’s like fighting sand. If she can just get to the mainland. Hell, if she can just get off the island. Away from Cate—
Cate, who is somehow running down the dock, lurching under the weight of the bag and the heavy book inside.
But she keeps coming. This slip of an English girl, who spent the whole weekend shrinking, making herself small, who seemed like a strong wind would bowl her over.
This strange, angry, murderous girl, who isn’t slowing down.
Not even when she reaches the end of the jetty.
Instead, she takes a running leap and lands.
In the boat.
The dinghy rocks violently beneath the sudden weight, and Ava half expects it to tip and send them both into the churning sea. But somehow, it steadies.
Ava scrambles backward, but there’s nowhere to go. Half blinded by the rain and the pain and the dark, she feels along the boat’s floor as Cate looms over her, glowering, dark hair clinging in wet ropes to her face, blood dripping from her wounded hand.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Cate snarls as Ava’s hand finally closes over something. “I thought editors were supposed to be support—”
Ava swings the oar like a bat. She was aiming for Cate’s head but the wooden pole is heavier than she expected. It dips, and she ends up catching Cate squarely in the chest. Not enough to do real damage, but enough to knock her off the side of the boat, and into the harsh tide.
Cate goes in with a heavy splash, and for a moment, Ava hopes the girl can’t swim. But then she bobs up a second later, gasping for air.
She clutches at the side of the boat, trying to find purchase, but there’s no way in hell Ava is letting her on. She grips the oar, pushing Cate back, away.
She’s trying to tread water, but the bag—the book—is too heavy, it’s dragging her down. Each time she goes beneath the waves, it takes more time for her to come back up.
“Take off the satchel,” shouts Ava as Cate gasps, fighting and failing to stay above the water. But she shakes her head, clinging to it, as if it’s the thing that will keep her afloat, instead of the one that’s dragging her down.
“Get rid of the book, and you can swim back to shore!”
“No,” Cate gasps, sputtering as she swallows more water. Struggles. Sinks.
“Goddammit, Cate, it’s just a book.”
But the girl shakes her head. Tries to say something, but can’t find the air. The waves churn and crash, rocking the boat, as she takes one last gasp and goes under.
Ava stares at the whitecapped water, clutching her oar.
But Cate never comes back up.
00:00:00
THE SAFE MAKES A SOUND LIKE A body turning over in its sleep.
A grunt. A sag. Something giving way. The time is up, the clock wound down from seventy-two to zero. The screen blinks once, then goes dark, the numbers replaced by nothing. The lock clicks, and a voice that once belonged to the most famous author in the world sighs, as if in relief.
“Now,” says Fletch’s disembodied voice, “was that so hard?”
But no one’s there to hear it.
The safe door opens, just a crack, but no one rushes forward to reclaim the contents left inside. On the shelf, where they were placed three days before, are the seven writers’ prized possessions.
The devices sit there on the darkened shelf, unclaimed, their power winding slowly down, as the hours pass, and the light crosses the panels of the office window.
The sun slides from Ashbolt to Creststone, to Bellamy, hanging on Fletch’s final and most famous hero, Petrarch, before dipping out of sight.
They are still there, two days later, when Eleanor Vandenberg walks through the grand front door of Arthur Fletch’s house.
She looks around and lets out a weary sigh, as if to say, What a mess.
Her heels click as she crosses the polished foyer floor. They leave small dents on the runner in the hall, then on the threadbare rug that pools before Arthur’s desk and muffles the last few steps before the safe.
She sets a weekender bag on the floor and kneels to collect the contents from the darkened shelf inside—she knows by now that no one else is coming for these things.
One by one, she takes them out.
A tablet with a pair of eyes stuck onto the back, like something from a horror novel.
A laptop covered in stickers with sayings like MY BOOK BOYFRIEND IS BETTER THAN YOUR REAL ONE.
A smartwatch softly warning that the movement target hasn’t been met.
A pair of computers with matching screensavers of a signature, the P and S cut through with cursive.
An iPhone with an AI-generated background: a dragon, devouring books whole.
One by one, they go from the safe into her bag.
And, like their owners, disappear.