45 Suzy
Suzy
Pacing the length of the great room over and over again had started to make Suzy feel human once more, though her heart still pounded an erratic beat between her collarbones. As if it had thought about jumping out her throat but decided to pause somewhere between there and its natural home.
Wintour was gone. Those infuriating twins had taken her.
Taken her in a car with a psychotic murderer.
What was she going to do if something happened to her dog?
After everything else, she honestly wasn’t sure she could survive it.
She kept shaking her hands in front of her, unsure of what to do with them.
Petting Wintour was what she was supposed to be doing.
They hadn’t just dognapped her best friend, but they’d taken her stress-coping mechanism.
Marley was still out cold. And Sean had fired a gun! Even with Marshall still sweating and panting on the floor, she couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact.
Sirens wailed in the distance, as they had been for the last thirty minutes. Had they stopped Grant and Gemma? Were they on their way here? Was Sean okay? Was Lily? Was Wintour?
She touched the scratches on her arm, hyperaware of the fact that she was the last person Juliet would ever touch. Were the police going to arrest her?
“How is she?” Suzy asked Daisy, who was kneeling on the floor next to the couch where they’d laid Marley.
At first there had been an argument about whether it was wise to move her, but it was decided that she shouldn’t be left on the floor of the dark room where she’d been attacked.
Suzy wasn’t sure whether they’d made the right call, but there was no going back now.
“Still breathing. Still not awake,” Daisy said. “But her color looks good.”
As a professional surfer, Daisy had been around some head trauma, so Suzy trusted her judgment on this one.
“You guys, check it out,” Cole said, nodding his head toward the sliders.
Those of them who were left—Suzy, Hazel, Magdelena, Daisy, and Candice, who had joined them in her pajamas not long ago—all turned to look and saw sunlight streaming through a crack in the clouds.
“Storm’s over,” Magdelena said.
“Where the heck are Sean and Lily?” Suzy asked, glancing down at her phone.
Nothing. Not a single text since they’d left to chase after Gemma and Grant.
She wondered if Gemma and the girls were okay.
If she were ever able to set aside the fact that Gemma had delivered the notes and lied to them for the first twenty-four hours she’d known them, Suzy would have to admit she kind of liked her.
She hoped she hadn’t been in on it with Grant.
Whatever it was. Everything was still so unclear.
And those freaking girls better be protecting her Wintour.
“Hey . . .”
“Marley?” Suzy rushed around the couch at the sound of her friend’s voice.
Marley was blinking her eyes. Daisy crouched down next to her as she turned her head and winced.
“Don’t move,” Daisy instructed. “You were whacked on the back of the head pretty bad.”
Marley tried to sit up anyway, then fell right back to the pillow. “Where’s Marshall? Is he okay?”
“Right here, Marls!” Marshall shouted through labored breaths. “Still bleeding out on the floor. You good?”
“I think so.” Marley looked at Suzy quizzically, as if she could answer that question.
“You’re not bleeding out.” Hazel rolled her eyes at Marshall good-naturedly and got up. Somehow having a trauma ward to oversee had improved her mood. “I’m gonna check on Marley. Don’t move.”
“Not going anywhere any time soon,” Marshall said, his nostrils flaring as he fought against the pain.
Hazel checked Marley’s eyes with the flashlight, then fired off questions like How many fingers am I holding up?
What’s your maiden name? And What’s seven plus seven?
She answered everything correctly, and Suzy’s heart started to descend back into its proper place.
Then the door slid open, and Sean and Lily walked in, trailed by two cops and a bunch of EMTs, walkie-talkies crackling.
Wintour was tucked against Sean’s chest.
“Sean!” Suzy cried, throwing her arms around his neck. She was so relieved at the sight of him, she started to cry. “You’re okay!”
“Hey, yeah, sorry. That was intense,” he said, pulling back. He handed her Wintour and smiled. “Apparently this little girl is a hero.”
“What? How?” Suzy asked before showering Wintour’s head with kisses.
“It’s a very long story,” Lily replied, reaching over to scratch behind the dog’s ears.
Sean raised his eyebrows hopefully. “Is Marley okay?”
“Present!” Marley said from the couch. “Please tell me you caught that asshole.”
“We did, but he took your ambulance,” Lily said, walking over to the couch.
She sat, pulled Marley’s feet onto her lap, and immediately started to massage them.
Hazel, meanwhile, explained the status of her two patients to the EMTs.
One of them had already strapped a blood-pressure cuff to Marshall’s arm.
“Great,” Marshall said. “More time on the floor for me.” He paused as two of the medical workers knelt next to him, flanking him. “So did he kill my brother? Was it him?”
“It was him,” Lily said grimly. “I mean . . . according to Gemma, he didn’t outright confess, but from everything he said . . . it was him.”
“Why? I don’t understand. He seemed so sweet,” Marley said, wincing again as a young woman inspected her wounds. “And I thought you all were all friends.”
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “We may never know. Let’s just hope he goes to jail.”
“We need to get you to the hospital,” one of the EMTs told Marshall. “Unfortunately it’s going to have to be in the back of a police vehicle.”
“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Marshall said.
The EMT got up to talk to the cops, who were sort of hovering near the doors, watching the proceedings. One of them nodded and then went out the back. The person working on Marley produced an ice pack and had her sit up slowly, holding it to the back of her head.
“What’s the prognosis?” Marley asked.
“You don’t need stitches,” the woman told her. “I’m just going to clean it up, and then you’re going to have a headache for a day or two. Ibuprofen should help.”
“I’m gonna go check on the kids and Tini,” Hazel announced.
The moment she was gone, Suzy heard someone coming down the stairs.
She looked at Sean. Until that second, she’d forgotten that Josh was even here.
He strode into the room, fully dressed and showered, and took a look around at the triage scene before him.
His gaze finally came to rest on the lake of blood around Marshall.
“Holy shit. What happened here?”