Page 135 of To All the Men I’ve Killed Before

Agnes thinks about this for a moment before giving me a watery smile. ‘She was pretending to be my best friend,’ she says. ‘I guess she was a better actor than any of us gave her credit for.’

We sit in silence for a few moments longer, each of us caught up in our own thoughts.

I can’t help but feel bad for Lauren and how she died. My thoughts battle each other. Could I have helped her? Or was she too damaged by everything she’d been through? She was so earnest when she was explaining to me why she killed those women. She really believed she was saving them. Her logic, although completely fucking twisted, kind of makes sense.

Like me, she just wanted to protect women.

‘We should think about getting to bed,’ Charlie says after a while. ‘It’s been a long day.’

I kiss him on the cheek. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There’s just one thing I need to do first. I’ll meet you upstairs.’

He gives me a puzzled look as I grab my phone and take it through to the living room, closing the door behind me.

72

Kitty and Antoinette’s Airbnb, West Hollywood, Los Angeles

‘Hey, Kits.’ Tor sounds and looks tired when she answers my FaceTime call. ‘How’s it going?’

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. The moment this whole LA adventure has been for. The moment I can tell my best friend that she doesn’t need to be scared anymore. That the monster under her bed is gone for good.

When I was very little, I was scared of monsters. I thought they hid under my bed at night, waiting for a chance to slip out and eat me up. I remember hiding under my duvet, breathing as quietly as I could, hoping that they wouldn’t hear me. Then, when I heard my parents come upstairs to bed, I’d race across the hallway into their room and snuggle into bed with them. I believed that they would keep me safe. They tolerated this when I was a toddler but by the time I was four my father evidently decided enough was enough. He gave me a spray bottle of water that he told me was a monster spray.

You spray it all over your room and your bed, Kitty, and it will keep you safe from the monsters.

He thought he was a genius but all it taught me was that I had to fight my own monsters now. That I was on my own.

And, of course, as I got older I began to learn that the monsters aren’t under the bed at all. Sometimes they’re in it with you.

I made a promise that I’d never let a woman fight her monsters alone if I could help it. Killing Aidan Ward wasn’t just for Tor, it was for every woman who has had to fight alone.

I swallow hard. What I say next is going to change everything.

‘It’s done,’ I say.

There’s a long beat of silence before I hear Tor breathe out. It’s a breath she’s been holding since she came out of her coma. She closes her eyes as she exhales and I can see the beginnings of a smile dance at the corners of her mouth. She looks like the sun has just come out and shone on her.

‘Are you sure?’ she says eventually.

I nod. ‘Oh yes. I’m very sure,’ I say. ‘Couldn’t be surer.’

And then she beams and it’s like the sun has come out and shone on me.

‘You,’ she says, ‘are a fucking angel.’

‘Thank you.’

‘No, better than an angel. What’s better than an angel?’

I think for a moment. ‘An archangel?’

‘A guardian archangel,’ Tor says. ‘My guardian archangel.’ There’s another little beat of silence. ‘Kitty. I can’t thank you enough for this. I will forever be in your debt.’

‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘It was my pleasure.’ It absolutely was. Wiping that man off the planet was a complete pleasure. ‘Besides, I owed you—’

‘No.’ Tor snaps her fingers. ‘No, you did not. If I’d just listened to you, to your warnings about him in the first place, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t have needed to …’ She trails off. She doesn’t know what I needed to do. Or how I did it. And I don’t think she’ll ever ask. She shakes her head and smiles again. ‘Anyway. You can come home now?’

I smile back and I can feel it’s huge and goofy on my face.