When she hears a chuckle through the crackling speaker of the decades-old phone, Grace’s blood goes cold. The heavy breathing, wet and thick, the sinister undertones of the voice—she knows it instantly. Her stomach twists, her eyes widen. “What—”
Bellamy cuts her off, his voice low and icy. “I warned you, Gracie.” He lets that hang between them for a moment, and Grace looks around, scanning her immediate surroundings. “You didn’t listen. Now, you’re going to understand that actions have consequences.”
Grace swallows, her nostrils flaring. “I couldn’t stop them—”
On the other end, he laughs again. “Here’s a lesson for you, Grace: Consequences don’t always hit you directly, but they’ll always hit you where it hurts. I can promise you that.”
Her heart begins to hammer in her chest as panic starts to overtake her senses. She’s still scanning the area, not sure what exactly she’s looking for, when he says, “Or Trey can, actually—he’s the one who tailed your precious Caldwells all the way to Highway 46 tonight.”
Time freezes then. The entire world cracks open, and Grace is free-falling into its depths, never to recover. The breath leaves her body in a shudder and she gasps, desperate to fill her lungs, to regain the ability to speak so she can askexactlywhat he means.
She doesn’t have to. He tells her happily.
“That Suburban of theirs…it rolled and rolled and rolled like a tumbleweed. Didn’t even look like a car by the time it was done.”
Grace’s knees give out, and she falls to the ground roughly, nearly toppling over. “Please,” she wheezes, but the plea isn’t to Bellamy. Her eyes squeeze shut and she says it again, and again, prayers falling from her lips before her brain even has the chance to process what’s happening. On the other end of the line, Bellamy sighs.
“What are you gonna tell them when they wake up in the ICU—if they wake up at all? What are they gonna think when you tell them you could’ve stopped this? You could’ve, Gracie. Could’ve called them off, after all I did for you, all I saved you from. And this is how you repay me.”
“I didn’t know it would—”
“Of course you did, and now you’ll have to live with that. And that boyfriend of yours? If you think he’s safe from all this, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Grace’s head swings in the direction of the bunkhouse. She can see the light of the movie flickering through the closed blinds, changing the windows from white to blue to gray and back again. Crew is in there, completely unaware, and all Grace wants is to rewind to twenty minutes ago when she was, too. When she was safe in his arms and happy and in love. “You leave him out of—”
“Youdon’t givemeorders, you ungrateful bitch,” Bellamy snarls. She hears his panting breaths, the rattle of phlegm in his chest. It disgusts her, makes the nausea in her gut that much sharper. “Meet me outside the north entrance at midnight, or I’ll put him in the hospital, too. Think I’m bluffing?”
The line goes dead, and the phone falls from Grace’s sweaty hand, crashing to the ground and flipping shut upon impact. Geysers of chaos and despair continue to burst in Grace’s head, each bigger and more devastating than the last. Worst-casescenarios of every variety pile on top of one another, and for a long, indeterminate amount of time, she cannot breathe, or speak, or think of anything besides the terror she’s wrought on this family simply by choosing them. By letting them get close to her.
She doesn’t hear the swing of the bunkhouse door, nor the running footfalls of Crew’s boots as he races over to where she sits, nearly catatonic from the shock. Only when he’s right in front of her face does she realize he’s outside, he’s with her, and the storm brewing in her gut implodes—tears pour down her face in hot, endless streaks. He’s wiping them away before he even asks what they’re for, and Grace is shaking her head, wishing she didn’t have to do what she’s about to—wishing she could go back and never darken the door of Halcyon at all. This man she loves, this man who didn’t try to save her but instead gave her something so much bigger. So much more than she ever thought possible. Her heart feels like it’s literally being ripped to shreds, piece by agonizing piece, as she stares into his fearful eyes.
Sound comes back to her ears in gradual waves, Crew’s voice growing louder until she can finally make out the hurried, “What’s wrong? Talk to me, baby. What’s going on?”
Grace’s head falls forward, and she gives herself over momentarily to the sob wracking her body. As it desists, she breathes deeply, then gathers up whatever courage she has left and looks him in the eye again.
She’s never hated herself more than she does in this exact moment. She should’ve known she was always going to end up right here. She should’ve known that outrunning the past was a luxury reserved only for those who deserved to escape.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Tell me,” Crew says quickly, nodding, so wholly unaware ofthe bomb that’s about to be dropped in his lap. The bomb that’s already detonated on some darkened highway outside of Victoria. “Tell me,” he repeats softly.
“I lied—when you asked me why I stayed at Braxton, I lied.”
The concern on Crew’s face shifts minutely into something else, but then he’s brushing it off, immediately reassuring her. “That’s all right. What’s—”
“It’s not all right, Crew. I lied, and there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason I never left after I turned eighteen. I—I did something. When I was young, I did something really awful.”
A wrinkle forms between Crew’s brows, his eyes narrowing slightly. “What?”
Grace swallows, glances away from him to center herself—she knows she needs to look him in the eye when she tells him, but every atom in her body is screaming at her to look down instead, to keep her eyes on the ground where they belong. She doesn’t listen; she picks up her chin and looks at him as tears continue to flow down her cheeks.
“I killed my father when I was sixteen.”
The bob of Crew’s Adam’s apple is visible, and it’s the only part of him that moves for a moment—for an eternity, it feels like. Then his face contorts into confusion, and he’s shaking his head like he can’t quite make sense of what she’s just said. “What do you—”
Grace doesn’t give him the chance to wonder or speculate. “It was during the summer before my junior year—I woke up one night to my parents screaming. They screamed a lot—I could usually sleep through it. This was different. My mom—she wasn’t screaming at him, she was just…” Grace’s eyes go sightless, and she’s back there, in that tiny bedroom, listening to thesound of her mother screaming for her life. “I went out to see what was going on and he—he was stabbing her. Over and over and over again—and she—” She gasps, and her entire body trembles with it. “She stopped screaming.”
Crew’s hands are at her forearms, and it occurs to her then that he’s holding her up, keeping her in place. She didn’t even notice that she was at risk of falling, but it makes sense. She can hardly feel her body at all.
