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“No. I won’t. I swear.” She shakes her head back and forth with vigor. “No cops.”
I give it a moment to sink in, Eamon’s face focusing in my mind’s eye, telling me to leave her be. My father’s rage and how I never want to be like him. My mam so sick before she passed, Eamon only a toddler, me thirteen, sitting by her side, her weak, cold hand in mine, saying, a light heart lives longest.
I tear my gaze away from her pretty face.
Killing out of necessity doesn’t bother me.
Killing this beautiful girl?
That would be a burden.
I feel her gaze, steady on me. Waiting.
Finally, I nod. “Aye. I’ll take you back.”
She collapses against the back of her seat, a heaving breath leaving her in relief. “Thank God. Thank you.” Her hand flutters to her hammering heart.
Sounds like her friends will be keeping an eye on her as well. Good, island girls who know their place. I need her phone. I don’t need her sneaking away to call DI Collins. Or anyone tracing her. Who knows what kind of tracking devices she has loaded on that American cell phone.
“One condition,” I say. “Leave me your phone.”
“What?”
“You don’t need it on the island. There’s a phone at the lodge and the center. You’re good with numbers. You can memorize your friends’ in case you need them, but you all are never separated anyway.”
“What about my mom?”
“You can email her.”
She hesitates as if to argue further, then thinks better of it. She takes her phone from her coat pocket, setting it down on the table between us.
I put it in my pocket for safekeeping. “Let’s go.” When we’re close to the lodge, I pull the truck over into the high grass off the side of the road. She can walk from here.
But not without one more warning.
I cup her chin in my hand, like I did that first night she lay hiding in the ditch.
I stroke her soft skin with the rough pad of my thumb. “If I have to come back for you, if you lie this time”—I stare straight into those big brown eyes, pulling her face closer—“ye won’t be coming back. Ever.”
Chapter Seven
Kitt
My arms hug my middle, tight around my downy coat, my UGGs sinking into the soft earth as I press forward. It’s only once I can no longer hear the loud rumble of the truck engine that I feel safe enough to move to the paved road.
I can see the lodge, its soft, welcoming yellow light. A tear slips down my cheek, cold in the wind, and I brush it away. It should be a tear of shame and humiliation. It’s not.
It’s one of anger.
Anger at him for doing what he did to me. Anger at my body for responding the way it did. Anger at myself for falling for the one-word text from an unknown number. As I reach the door of the lodge, another tear falls, this one from a wave of relief.
He let me go.
I turn the knob, the door left unlocked like every other door on this island. Here, the monsters are known. No need to bar the door against unforeseen predators.
Locks don’t matter when the Bayne boys are coming for you.
I close the door as softly as possible, tiptoeing to the room. As quiet as I try to be, Fiona blinks awake from her top bunk, the light from the hall coming into the dorm bedroom with me.
