They reach the bottom of the stairs. Ava slows as she passes Kenzo. She scans the floor at his feet, hoping for the ax, but there’s no sign of it.
She doesn’t want to know. But she has to ask. “Did you kill the others, too, Cate?”
The girl’s head bobs side to side. “Jaxon, yes. Malcolm, no. I did write theGet Outnote for Millie, but honestly I was just having a laugh. I found the typewriter in Fletch’s bedroom and thought,Why not?”
“How did you get in?”
“Please,” says Cate, rolling her eyes. “You can learn to do anything on the internet. I learned to pick locks using hairpins and a YouTube tutorial when I was thirteen. Mum used to lose track of time writing at the library and leave me locked out. Silly cow should have just given me a key, but...” She shrugs. “Now, as for Sienna—thatwas an accident. Sort of. I knew about the sleeping pills, so I spiked her tea—well, I spikedeveryone’stea, so I could have some peace and quiet to look around, but Sienna was the only one I saw gulping it down before I went upstairs. How wasIsupposed to know she was going to mainline the whole pot? Let alone lug a typewriter down the stairs in the middle of the night? What a silly thing to do. Still, I felt pretty bad.”
“So youdidn’tpush her?” asks Ava.
“I mean—technically I did, but she probably would have fallen anyway, she was really teetering. I barely even nudged her.”
For some reason, Ava doesn’t find that reassuring. But Cate’s already moved on.
“And with Malcolm, I was back up in Fletch’s room, looking for the book, and I saw him go over the edge, just fell right off—and everyone blamed Jaxon, which I thought was pretty harsh, but also, at that point... in for a penny, in for a pound, right?”
“Right,” echoes Ava, her gaze flicking along the foyer walls, searching for something, anything. But all she sees are framed tokens and notes from a dozen research trips. And there, at the edge of the hall, the map. Of Skelbrae.
“You should know”—Cate’s positively chatty now—“I’ve nothing againstyou. I liked you.” Ava does not care for the past tense. “At least, I liked the person you pretended to be. Kenzo was pretty fun, too. But at this point, I figure, it’s better to be thor—”
Ava doesn’t hear the rest, because in that moment lightning flashes against the stained-glass windows, followed a split second later by thunder loud enough to shake the house. Cate looks over her shoulder, and Ava takes off running for the front door, wrenches it open, and sprints out into the dark.
It’s like running into a wall.
The wind is raging, and the rain falls slantwise, instantly blurring her glasses. She pulls them off, trading one kind of blindness for another as she sprints across the gravel drive.
Hearing Cate tear out of the house behind her, she makes the mistake of looking back, only to see her silhouetted in the doorway, holding what looks like amotherfucking crossbow.
Ava runs harder than she has in years, heels sinking into the sodden grass until she finally kicks them off and sprints barefoot away from the light of the house.
It was a dark and stormy night, she thinks absurdly, the line rising like bile in her throat, along with a horrible hiccuping sound, part hysteria, part primal fear.
She points herself downward, heading not for the steep incline of the main dock stairs but the other side of the island, toward the copse of trees and the rocky slopes and the small jetty she noticed, little more than a pair of black lines on the hand-drawn map, ornamented with a tiny boat.
It’s the longest of long shots, but right now it’s all she has.
She’s soaking wet. Wet weeds tangle around her legs like icy rope, and rocks cut into the soles of her feet, and she can barely see where she is going, and just when she thinks it can’t get any worse, a crossbow bolt goes whizzing past her shoulder, and she stumbles in shock at the near miss as much as the fact that she is being shot at by a twenty-two-year-old English girl who conned her way onto the island using ChatGPT.
“Come on,Ava.” Cate’s voice is high and thin and tangled with the wind. “It’s time to wrap things up.”
Ava reaches the copse and darts into the trees just as another bolt sings through the air, only this time, it doesn’t fully miss. It goes straight through Ava’s sweater, sinking with a thud into the nearest tree. For one panicked second she thinks she’s been hit, but the bolt missed her skin by an inch, pinning her sleeve. Cursing Priscilla and the color pink for standing out like a beacon in the dark, she fights her way free of the sweater, stripping down to her tank top as Cate crests the hill behind her and starts to reload.
“This is a lot harder than it looks,” Cate calls as Ava scrambles through the trees, the wind shaking the branches so hard they groan, threatening to break.
She makes it through, out onto a downward slope, soaked to the skin from rain and bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts, but down there, in the distance, she can see it.
The rickety jetty, just like on the map.
And for the first time, Ava feels a flutter of hope.
The flutter turns into a surge when she hears a small cry and looks over her shoulder to find Cate slipping in a boggy patch, the weight of the satchel clearly knocking her off balance. She goes down, dropping the crossbow, and Ava knows this is her shot.
She takes off across the overgrown field, each step carrying her closer to safety, and as she sprints through the raging storm, away from the House That Petrarch Built, she thinks of all the things she’ll do if—when—she gets off this fucking island.
She’ll ask for—no,demand—that raise she’s been promised no less than three times.
She’ll use the newfound power to buy more of the books she loves, the strange and quiet ones, even though it means fighting twice as hard for half the budget.
