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Harry and Peter had gone through the deserted dining room, and she raced after them. There were two ways out—the kitchen and the deck, and she knew which one Harry would choose, with his sense of the melodramatic. She slammed out the door onto the deck at just the wrong moment, drawing Peter’s attention away from Harry, who chose that moment to fire the pistol he held, emptying it into Peter’s body as he fell to the deck and lay twitching in a pool of blood.
“No!” she screamed, rushing over to him and falling to her knees on the deck beside him.
“So touching,” Harry said, perching on the top of the railing, still holding the bourbon in his other hand. “And convenient. We were at a standstill when you distracted him.”
He was still breathing, but the blood was everywhere, and she buried her face against his chest, sobbing. Barely hearing the faint whisper that came from his white, unmoving lips.
“Gun,” he said. “Get it.”
She could feel it as she wept over his body—a hard, metallic presence just beneath his belt. She didn’t dare hesitate—she moved back and reached into his pants.
“Copping a feel on a dying man, Counselor? You surprise me,” Harry chuckled. His smile didn’t fade when she pulled out the gun.
“I’m afraid I used all my bullets on your dead boyfriend there. None left for you. But I’m not concerned—you won’t shoot me. You’re too decent a human being to kill an unarmed man, no matter how much he deserves it.”
“Maybe not,” she said in barely a rasp. “But Peter didn’t come alone.”
“Does your throat hurt?” he asked with feigned concern. “Oh, I am so sorry. And I’m afraid I didn’t quite hear what you had to say. Are you trying to convince me that someone else is here who can sneak up on me and end my wicked ways? I don’t believe you. I’m astonished that you managed to get free, but I must have been distracted, and you’ve proven to be annoyingly resourceful. But the only thing behind me is the hillside—I’ll be able to see anyone the moment they try to approach.”
There was no sound from the lodge behind her, and she wondered whether she’d made the incredibly stupid mistake of killing her rescuer. She wasn’t sure she cared—Peter was lying utterly still now, and she couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.
“You killed Peter,” she said. “I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Go ahead, try and pull the trigger. You haven’t got it in you.”
She knew how to aim the gun, how to cock it. She pointed it straight at him, but it was all over the place in her shaking hands.
“You won’t hit the broadside of a barn like that, Ms. Spenser,” Harry said.
She started to pull the trigger, trying to keep it aimed at Harry’s face. She could see Hans, Renaud, the man in the garage, the neat little holes of death in their heads. She could do this, she could blow his fucking head off, she could kill him…
She released the trigger, letting the gun drop in her lap. There was blood on her hands, blood on her jeans, draining out of Peter’s body by the second.
“You see, you can’t do it,” Harry said smugly, standing up on the seat, preparing to get down off the railing.
She picked up the gun and threw it at him, and it smacked him in the face, full force. A second later he was gone, tumbling over the side of the railing into the darkness below, and his scream echoed eerily in the fog, accompanied by the sound of crashing trees and then a merciful silence.
She couldn’t move—she just knelt in the blood at Peter’s side, disbelieving. He couldn’t have just disappeared like that—it was too easy.
And then Peter’s friend was pushing her out of the way, hovering over Peter’s body. “Hang in there, old friend. Ambulance on the way…just hang in there.” He looked up at Genevieve, who had risen to her feet, standing in shock.
“Remind me not to tangle with you again,” he said. “You’re as bad as Peter said you were,” he muttered.
“Harry…” Her voice barely made a sound, but he could hear her a moment before the sound of an ambulance cut through the night.
“Over the side. If he survived we’ll catch him. At least you did that right,” he said uncharitably.
She moved to the railing. With infuriating timing the fog was just beginning to lift, and she could see partway down the steep hillside the black skeletons of burned trees spiking into the sky.
And then she saw Harry, lying against a stand of crushed tree trunks. But he hadn’t crushed them all— one thick pine tree had gone straight through the center of his chest, and it was poking up into the sky, black and red with blood.
She took a step back. She could see the flashing lights of the ambulance, and she wondered if she should go and lead the way, but she didn’t know where she was going, so she simply sat down on the deck and stared at Peter’s unmoving body and the blood that soaked into her jeans.
She heard one word…“dead” in the man’s voice, and she let out a sob. “He can’t be,” she said.
“Peter’s hanging in there. I’m talking about Harry. Is he dead?”
She thought back to the body impaled on the burned tree. “Oh, yes,” she whispered in her ruined voice. “Most definitely.”
