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“I was in the pool, making the best of my life now, remember?” Her smug tone causes my teeth to grind so hard that pain shoots through my jaw. If she expects me to feel sorry for setting her up in a life of luxury, she’d better think twice.

“This is urgent,” I snap. “They’re looking for you.” Suddenly, there’s an echoing silence on the other end of the phone, Laura catching on to the anger I’m barely managing to withhold. Anger at Everest for not telling me what the fuck he was up to, anger at myself for thinking I’d gotten away with this stupid stunt created from jealousy and bitterness. I’d even fooled myself into thinking Meg might not be the problem I’d originally seen her as, but a solution. A missing piece between Everest and me, but she can’t be anything if she winds up dead.

“Looking for me…where?” Laura asks quietly now, panic creeping in. She’s worried her secret life is about to be exposed, whilst I’m worried I’ll have to explain to Nicholas that his perfect son confronted a criminal for no valid reason.

“Where they think you are, I presume. With Harrison.” Just hearing the words leave my mouth has bile rising in my throat. I press my hand over my eyes, nausea causing the room to spin. The colors that burst behind my lids don’t help either. “Laura, I need you to come back.”

“Are you insane?” She scoffs at me. “You can’t keep uprooting my life whenever you feel like it. I did what you paid me for. I got invited to the party, I let you drug her, and I vanished with those fake documents. Just because your masterplan didn’t work out doesn’t mean I’m going to pop back up and play the broke student again. I…I just got a puppy.”

On cue, whining sounds faintly through the line, followed by Laura cooing at it as if I’m not about to lose my shit. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It wasn’t meant to go this far.

“She was meant to go back to rehab. Not go on a suicide mission.” I confess, my last pathetic attempt to take back what I ruined. To fix what I fucked.

“Boo fucking hoo. Not my problem anymore,” Laura snaps. “It’s about time you learned you can’t play people like puppets. And it’s good to know not everyone yields to your plans.” I know she’s right, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing red. How quickly Laura forgets that she’d have been nothing but a penniless college dropout if I hadn't intervened. There are many victims of my actions, and she’s not one of them.

“You were quick enough to take my money,” I yell down the phone. Unaffected, Laura cackles like a fucking witch.

“It’s a bit late for a conscience. You handed me a script, some fake documents, and a paycheck that meant I never have to work again. Don’t pin this on me because your neighbor turned out to be more unhinged than you realized.”

“Unhinged?” I seethe, venom practically dripping from my teeth. “I’ll show you unhinged.” The line goes dead, and for a second, I’m not sure who hung up. It doesn’t matter anyway. Laura isn’t interested in anything I have to say, but I’m sure when I cancel her next payment, she’ll be blowing up my phone instantly. Instead, I press Everest’s name on my screen, exhaling a shaky breath as I pray to a God I don’t believe in to make him pick up. He doesn’t.

My phone hits the opposite wall, accompanied by a sound that escapes me. Something between a scream and a roar, causing the veins in my neck to pull taut and my throat to burn. It doesn’t help, neither does the smashing of a glass jar that’s hurled next. Murky paint water decorates my wall, a Jackson Pollock of self-sabotage, but I hardly see it. My hands are fisting my hair, scratching my face, clawing at my clothes. I’m too hot, too damaged, too despicable to even go on.

Panting against the silence that envelopes me, I switch on my music, more cries becoming lost to the heavy bass pressing me further into the carpet. Yet, it has nothing on the truth that is crushing my organs to dust. Harrison didn’t take Laura. I did. Everest’s in danger, and I put him there. Essentially, I drove him into Meg’s arms, and then pushed the pair of them off a cliff.

Tears stream down my face now, panic clawing at my chest, the ache of Everest and Meg’s absence becoming too much to bear. Ironically, I’ve painted Meg in this exact position many times, but never myself. I saw her as the broken one who could be labelled and condensed into layers of charcoal and ink. And all along, it wasn’t her I was painting. It was a reflection of me.

I’m not the artist or the canvas. I’m the fucking subject.

Chapter Thirty One

She killed him. Meg killed Harrison.

That sentence doesn’t make sense, no matter how many times it batters against the inside of my skull. Meg isn’t a killer. Meg is rage, fire, and stubbornness in the moments she remembers she’s holding all the cards, but not this. Not the gunshot still ringing in my ears, or the body lying at the bottom of a hole he dug himself.

Everything happened too fast. One second, Harrison was standing before us with a shovel, digging a grave beside a rolled tarp, and the next, he was lying at the bottom of his own pit. He was alive, then he wasn’t. And somehow, that isn’t even the worst part.

Standing behind Meg, I watch her gloved hands tremble as she carefully unties the tarp bundle, her knees pressed into the dirt. Both of our hearts are in our throats, beating too hard and too loud, trying to grapple with the shredded remains of our morality.

Shifting my stance, I put my back to the pit, refusing to look down there again. I’ve already made that mistake, and the image of Harrison staring blankly upward is now burned into the edges of my mind. Shadows cling to him, concealing his features, and somehow that makes it worse because now my imagination is filling in the gaps, twisting him into something monstrous and unreal.

My stomach pitches again, a violent roll that has saliva flooding my mouth, but I force it down because I can’t vomit here. I can’t leave any evidence at the crime scene. Christ, crime scene. The words make my chest tighten and I’d give nothing more than to drag Meg back to the car and get her the fuck out of dodge.

However, we’ve come this far. We’ve snuck up on the man who has plagued Meg’s nightmares. We’ve ended his life whether we had the right to or not. Now the least we can do is see this through for Laura’s sake. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I repeat it over and over, clinging to the words as if they’re the new plan drawn up on the whiteboard in my mind. But none of it helps. My control is slipping through my fingers with every second we remain here.

Carefully peeling back the strings, Meg tugs the tarp aside while my mind runs wild. This could have been her. She could have been wrapped in that tarp, hidden in the dark. She could have met the same end if Thiago hadn’t found her when he did. The thought punches through me so brutally that for a second, my vision blurs. I try to steady myself by thinking of evidence, of footprints and fibers and timing, of the practical details that usually give me something to command, but all that does is make the word rise up with sickening clarity.

This isn’t Harrison’s hiding place anymore. It’s ours. My control slips another inch, and that’s before the body within the tarp is fully revealed.

“What the fuck?” Meg whispers, dropping back in shock. I slump to my haunches and collect her into my arms as we stare at the deer’s head before us. It’s a young doe, no more than a year old, its black eyes glistening beneath the moonlight, reddish-brown fur blending into the dirt surrounding us. A doe. Not Laura.

Relief should hit, but it doesn't. It only leaves more questions. Were we too late? Has she been buried elsewhere, has she been passed onto another thug to have his way with? Is she alive or is she somewhere, praying she wasn’t? Questions and confusion tears through my skull, my gun weighing heavy in my pocket. We’ve condemned ourselves, and we still don’t have the person we came for.

A choked cry escapes Meg as my stomach rolls again, dots peppering my vision. This can not be happening. Tightening my arms around her, I bury my face into her neck and attempt to inhale. To breathe her in. To find something steady in the scent of her skin other than cold air, dirt and terror, but it doesn’t work. My thoughts are splintering too quickly, colliding so hard I can’t separate one from the next.

Harrison is dead. Laura is still missing, and I brought Meg here. I brought the gun too. I thought I was returning her power, but all I’ve done is hand her another nightmare to carry. Suddenly, this morning’s shy smiles as I took her to get a Plan B seem like years ago. Hysteria starts low in my chest, a pressure expanding behind my ribs, and I clamp down on it with everything I have. I don’t have time to break, I need to get Meg out of here.

“Come on.” I tug Meg to her feet, although she’s unable to stand on her own at first. Sniffling, Meg turns against my chest, her huge wet eyes peering up, and the fragile trust in them nearly guts me. Whatever foolish notion I had of helping her to face her fears and finding her inner strength again feels so pathetic now. Making her into her best self wasn’t supposed to make her a killer, too.