I need to keep working on Viv. She’s hard to read, but I get the sense that she’d rather not kill me. She thinks she has to; that’s probably why she’s prolonging this and eagerly accepted my help “rescuing” Piper.
A gust of wind slams into the boat, and I hunch forward in the plastic seat, wrapping my arms around my knees. My sweater is getting waterlogged and my teeth are starting to chatter. “Can I askyou a question, Viv?”
She glances at me again, notes my un-threatening behavior, and nods.
“Why do you have to kill me if you destroyed the evidence? The video is gone.”
“Because you’ll talk,” Viv says, exasperated. “Even without the video, you’d stir up enough trouble that people might look at us harder, and I can’t have that.”
It’s time. I have to reveal the truth about the text I sent earlier.
The memory waiting in the wings of my mind’s stage churns with anticipation, and my stomach convulses.
I open my mouth. “So, the video, if that got out, that would be pretty damning, yeah?”
“Duh.” Viv rolls her eyes, then remembers herself and returns her focus to guiding the motorboat through the bumpy waves.
“And if someone found that video after my death, you’d be in a pretty bad situation, right?”
Viv looks at me sharply. “What the hell are you talking about? I deleted the video. I destroyed your phone. In fact,” she says, throttling the engine down to neutral and pulling my smashed-up phone from her cargo pocket. She gets up from her seat, edges toward the side of the boat, lifts a hand, and lobs the phone out into the storm. The water is so choppy and dark I don’t even see it disappear. “There. Now it’s destroyed. No video to find.”
My grin isn’t joyful. It’s dark and filled with teeth I tend to keephidden. “See, the thing is… You were right. I did text that video. Problem is, I didn’t text it to myself.”
Viv’s skin turns a greenish color under the winking lights of the motorboat. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. Look at my eyes. You said I was a bad liar. Am I lying now?”
She hurls herself back over to the captain’s seat, one knee perched on her chair, one hand gripping the back of it. She levels the gun at my face. “Who the fuck did you send it to?”
I swallow a hard lump in my throat, a burr of poison. This will destroy me as much as it will destroy her.
Clenching my jaw, I say, “I sent it to Sage.”
Chapter 33
“Sage is dead,” Viv stammers. “You told us so. Didn’t you say her phone was lost in the lake?”
“I did say that,” I admit through numb lips. My rictus grin has fallen away now that I’m about to tell the truth. All I feel is nothingness. “I knew you’d probably take my phone, so I sent the video to Sage’s phone instead. I have her number memorized. That was Sage’s idea, actually. She insisted we know each other’s numbers by heart because no one does that anymore. She thought it bonded us closer.”
Confusion flickers over Viv’s face. “But…what…”
A wave slams into the boat, which is freely floating on the water now, and we both yelp and grab the sides of the seats so we don’t go flying. Viv glances at the control panel, knowing she needs to take the helm again, but she can’t, she’s too curious.
My stomach is lurching and roiling, and it’s not from the waves.
“When I don’t come back from Florida, when you tell them I’ve drowned or whatever, my sister Emily is going to have to pack up my apartment,” I announce. “And when she does, she’s going to find a phone in a small wooden box in my closet. She’s going to be curious, because she’ll know I had my phone with me and couldn’t afford a second one. Emily will turn the phone on, and recognize the person in the lock screen photo, smiling and holding up a copy ofA Song of Scales and Salt. Sage had an ego, you see. Her lock screen image was always of herself.” My voice wobbles, but I heave out an exhale and continue through the clapping of my heartbeat. “Emily’s going to realize she’s holding Sage Tartnet’s phone, which is going to freak her out, because she knows that Sage’s phone was never recovered. Everyone assumes it’s at the bottom of Lake Michigan. And because I knew and disabled Sage’s passcode, Emily is going to unlock the phone and see that snuff film Piper made. And she will take it right to the cops.”
The memory that has been crawling out from the back of my brain on bloodied claws and rotting scales rears its head, hearing its name. The truth is finally here.
An expression of shock flattens Viv’s face. She whispers, “You had Sage’s phone this whole time? Why? What…did you do?”
I open my mouth, but bile comes out instead of words. I turn to the side, falling to my knees, expelling what little contents wereinside my stomach. When I finish heaving, tears stinging the corners of my eyes, I turn back to Viv’s disgusted face.
I’m glad for the chill now because my skin is burning hot and my whole body is sweating.
“I took the phone,” I choke out. “It was a…reaction. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to do any of it.” I haven’t let myself think about it. I worked so hard to bury it, pretend it never happened. I erased it. Or so I thought. It turns out it was living in the back of my skull, waiting to burst forth from its cave this entire time.
Haunting me.
