Page 125 of Indigo Ridge (The Edens 1)

Think, Winn. My brain didn’t want to think. My brain wanted sleep. Wake up. Fight. “Why are you doing this?”

“Stop talking.”

“Rain, please.”

She lifted the knife to my head, to the place where the blood felt thickest. “Quiet.”

I clamped my mouth shut and nodded, taking another step.

Up and up Indigo Ridge.

To the end.

Was this how Lily Green had died? Forced to make this miserable climb? Was this the path that Harmony Hardt had walked too? What about the others?

It hadn’t been suicide. I was right. All this time, my instincts had been pushing me to this conclusion. But those same instincts had failed me too. They’d failed me for not suspecting Frank. For not seeing the monsters who’d lived next door.

Now it was too late.

The sky was the purest of navy blues above my head. The stars appeared to be dancing in a dizzy circle, but it was my fuzzy head playing tricks on me. The one spinning was me.

Rain had slammed that meat tenderizer into my skull and, in a blink, there’d only been black.

I hadn’t even raised an arm to block the strike. I’d be disappointed in myself later. If I survived this.

That had to have been hours ago. I’d woken in the back of her Jeep at the base of the ridge. When she’d waved a vial of smelling salts under my nostrils, only the faintest of golden glows had been left on the horizon. The light was nearly gone now. And there was just enough moonlight to see the narrow trail that loomed ahead.

Rain didn’t relent for a moment. She pushed me up that trail, step by step. My lungs were on fire and my legs burned. She breathed like she was lounging on a couch, not hiking to the apex of a cliff.

Rain. How had it come to this? Who was she? The pain in my heart made this all so much harder to believe.

“I thought you loved me,” I whispered.

“Loved you?” she scoffed. “Liked you. Yes. You go too far with using that word. You’re like my cheating husband. Always spouting words of love.”

“He loved them?”

“He was obsessed with them. Leaving them notes. Arranging their secret rendezvous. Even when he promised me he’d stop, he didn’t. So this is his punishment.”

“You could divorce him.”

“That’s too kind. Did you know this used to be one of his favorite hiking spots? He proposed to me here. Now he can hike this ridge and think about what he’s done. About what he’s made me do.”

“I never touched Frank.”

“No, you asked questions.” She shoved my elbow, nearly knocking me off-balance. “You should have let it go. They got what they deserved. So did he. And it could have ended there if you had done what everyone else in this goddamn town has done for years and believed what you were supposed to believe.”

That these girls, at least some of them, had killed themselves. And yes, everyone had simply believed.

“I told him to stop this.” Rain’s seething words seemed more for herself than for me. “I told him the last time had to be the last time or I’d bring him up here next.”

“If you want to take me to town and collect him instead, I won’t argue.”

She laughed, the musical, sweet laugh that I’d known since childhood. It sent a chill up my spine. “Keep going, Winnie.”

“Rain, please.”

“Don’t beg. It doesn’t suit you.”