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“Whitney, what are you doing?”
“How could you not know?” she countered.
Oh, God. Did she just pretend this whole time? Had she insisted that she didn’t think I’d done any of this after she’d gotten the call from the police about me being brought in for questioning just so I’d let my guard down? Did she think I was the one responsible for killing Xavier?”
Shaking my head, doing my best to breathe through the pain, I insisted, “I didn’t kill him. Maybe he and I didn’t have the closest relationship, but I would never have done that.”
The corners of her mouth tipped up in a smile as she advanced faster. “But everyone thinks that you did.”
I attempted to flee faster, but between the rain falling, the fact that I was moving backward, and the stab wound, I wound up stumbling and falling to the ground. As soon as I was down, Whitney plunged the knife into my thigh before pulling it back.
I cried out in pain, my hands flying to my leg. I didn’t know where to put my hands to stop the blood from seeping out of my body.
“Now, you’re going to do exactly as I say,” she seethed.
Moving to the side, Whitney lifted the harness used for rock-climbing and brought it to me. She shoved my feet through it before sliding it up my legs.
“Stop this!” I shouted as I fought against her. “What are you doing?”
Whitney lifted her knife again and asked, “Would you like to go for number three?”
I froze and shook my head. “No.”
“Put the harness on,” she ordered.
I did as she asked, but I moved slowly. From her perspective, I was probably moving at a snail’s pace because of the stab wounds. While that was part of it, the truth was that I was using the time to try to devise a plan. I was panicked and didn’t have the slightest clue what to do.
With no way to get up and run given my injuries and the serious disadvantage I had when it came to weapons, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that within minutes I was in the harness, hogtied, and hooked to the rock wall’s rope system.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Whitney had hoisted me up just high enough before she fastened the rope to one of the metal bars on the back of the structure. Once she had me exactly where she wanted me, she slipped a noose around my neck. Until she’d hoisted me in the air, I hadn’t seen the noose.
Had she been planning this?
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her, my voice strained.
“You should know, Hanna. You ruined everything.”
“What? I promise you, I had nothing to do with what happened to Xavier,” I insisted.
She let out a sinister laugh. “Oh, I’m well aware of that.”
I had a noose around my neck and had just been stabbed twice, but for some reason, it never dawned on me what she was about to say next.
“I killed Xavier, and I’m going to kill you, too,” she shared.
Oh, God.
She’d killed her own flesh and blood. How could she do that? And if she’d done that, did it mean she killed Jimmy and Archie, too? There was no hope for me, if that was the case.
“Why? Whitney, I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
She moved in front of me, pinned her eyes on mine, and smiled as raindrops mixed with the tears streaming down my face.
“Because I’m going to get what’s mine,” she revealed. “Everything was fine until you came along. You had to show up with your sob story about your horrible life, and my dad took you in, then he gave you what should have been mine after he died.”
I stared at her in disbelief. Had she just admitted to killing Xavier because she was angry that Saul had written me into his will?
“Why Xavier?” I asked her. “And what about Jimmy and Archie? Did you kill them, too?”
