Page 70 of Promise Me Never

“End this madness now. Please. You won’t get away with this,” Bennett pleaded.

She laughed again. “If she’s dead I will. Your wife already gathered all the evidence. Her notes. The items belonging to those women. Their phones. And I’ll tell them where to find the bodies. I’ll tell them you stormed in and killed Savannah, then tried to kill me. It’s Savannah’s gun, after all. You took it from her. They won’t believe anything you say.”

Just then, Bennett lunged at her and tried to grab the gun. They both fell to the floor struggling while Savannah looked on, frozen, unable to move. And then the gun went off.

| Seventy |

Savannah

Savannah was jolted out of her shock and ran over to the two figures on the floor, blood pooling underneath them. She grabbed the gun. Isabel started screaming.

“No! Oh my God! Bennett, open your eyes. Please!”

Bennett’s chest was red with blood. Even from where she stood, Savannah could see that he was dead.

“You shot him!” It came out as a whisper. Savannah doubled over as a wave of grief overcame her. Bennett was innocent. He’d saved her, and now he was dead.

“We need to call 911!” Savannah yelled.

Isabel’s face was streaked with tears. “It’s your fault. If you’d only gone along, turned him in, none of this would have happened.”

Savannah waved the gun. “Sit down. Over there and don’t move. Tell me your code! And what’s the address? Maybe we can save him.” Savannah knew he was gone, but Isabel was too hysterical to see that.

“0615. His birthday,” Isabel said through her sobs. She choked out the address and Savannah repeated it to the 911 operator.

“My husband’s been shot. Please hurry.”

Isabel started to get up.

“Don’t move, or I’ll shoot you.”

Isabel put her head in her hands. “If he dies, oh my God if he dies. It was an accident. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“But you did kill those women on purpose. All of this is your fault. Your doing!”

Suddenly Isabel stopped crying and regained her composure. It was like watching one of those shows where someone had multiple personalities and a new one emerged. One minute she was distraught and the next completely composed. It was the eeriest transformation Savannah had ever witnessed. “He was supposed to be with me. I should have killed you right away. Then he’d still be alive. We’d be together.”

Savannah didn’t say another word. What was the point? Isabel was living in her own twisted reality. The sounds of sirens grew closer, and she kept her gun trained on the woman who had just destroyed her life. If it was the last thing she did, she would make sure Isabel paid for her crimes.

| Seventy-One |

Savannah

One Year Later

Marion handed Savannah a glass of champagne.

“No thanks, I’m on in ten, don’t need to be tipsy.”

Marion gave her a smile. “Just a sip. We have something to toast.”

Hope swelled in Savannah’s chest. “It hit?”

Marion pulled out her phone, put it on speaker, and dialed Savannah’s editor. “You there, Anne? I’ve got Savannah.”

“Congratulations, Savannah. Number one, baby!”

Elation rushed through her. Killer Twist had come out last week, and today was Wednesday, the day the New York Times list came out. She was a New York Times bestselling author! And number one! Never in her wildest dreams would she have believed it. She had put aside her other project and instead wrote about a woman obsessed with a horror writer who’d killed the women he intended to marry. It was the fictionalized version of the real-life events that had ended Bennett’s life and put Isabel in prison for the rest of her life.