Page 31 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

Liv looked back down at his hat. The rational part of her said what she was feeling was not fear, but confusion. This whole situation was drowning in it. She had fallen into a product prelaunch rafting trip for a reason she didn’t understand, with people from a company she’d never heard of, whose CEO had gone AWOL. And now said CEO was sending menacing messages to her brother and business partner via customized hat embroidery.

It sounded ridiculous. But it was the lack of rational explanation that made her shiver in the warm air. Charlie’s hat—the planning, the delicate stitching, the sense that he had personally been delivered a threat—was creepy. Fear didn’t have to make sense for it to crawl across her skin.

Liv looked at Charlie. “What are you afraid of exactly?”

“I—Devon and I—on this trip, we were going to . . .”

“You were going to what?”

“Can you protect me?” he asked.

“Tell me exactly what this is about.”

He stared at her. She stared back. It was the kind of stalemate Liv was well acquainted with: Unwilling informant meets unmoved advocate.

“I think Babette hired someone to come down here,” he whispered. “To stop me and Devon from crossing her.”

“What kind of person? A lawyer?”

“A hit man.”

She stared at him, flabbergasted. “A hit man? You think Babette is going to kill you? Why?”

But Charlie said nothing.

“Does she have a history of extreme criminal actions?” Liv asked.

“Not directly. But there have been incidents.”

“Fatalities?”

He stayed silent. Liv kept pushing. “Are you talking about that assistant’s broken arm? Or the accident you just mentioned?”

Charlie grimaced. “Officially, they were all accidents.”

Liv stared at him, willing him to say more, but his lips were clamped shut. “You’re making a pretty strong assertion based on a few words embroidered into a hat.”

“It’s based on a lifetime with my sister,” he said. “I know her. You don’t.”

Chapter Fourteen

By the time Mandy stumbled up to bed after the poker game, the sky was lit up with stars, the Milky Way draped like a sheer scarf across their shoulders. Part of her hoped Liv would still be awake so she could regale her with stories of how she’d won them beers from Thor’s secret stash for happy hour the next day, plus a promise from Stefan to introduce them to a bona fide duke the next time they found themselves in Amsterdam. But Liv was already curled up on her sleeping pad, her back to Mandy like a silent rebuke.

Mandy unzipped her backpack, rooting around for a headlamp and warmer clothes. From a nearby bush, she heard the scuffle and chitter of small mammals—ringtails, maybe?—and high above, a great horned owl, calling the nocturnal predators of the canyon to the hunt. She pulled a sweatshirt over her head and gazed out at the pinpricked night. This week, the limits were finite: North Rim and South, guides and guests, river and sky. But what wasn’t possible within that container? She looked down at her sleeping sister, half covered by her unzipped sleeping bag, a parenthesis of blankets and staccato breath. Maybe this would be the trip where they fully saw each other, where they escaped the well-worn grooves of their skipping record and broke into a new song. Mandy had been gnawing at that hope for a while now, and something about this being the tenth year, their tenth sister trip, felt ripe with opportunity. She’d been only twenty-one when they’d started, Liv twenty-four. She was a different person now. They both were. Maybe here in the canyon, in its mesquite-scented air, they could be different together.

Mandy felt a flutter of contrition. While she’d been playing cards, had Liv gone to bed alone, before it was fully dark? She crouched down to straighten Liv’s sleeping bag, but when she did so, her sister’s hand bolted up and grabbed her wrist.

“You came back,” Liv whispered.

“Of course,” Mandy said.

“I was worried.”

Worried? About what? From far off, Mandy heard the bright, whistling howls of coyotes, their yips refracting against the canyon walls.

“Something is wrong,” Liv mumbled.

“With the campsite? I should have helped you set up.” Mandy reached out again to smooth out her sister’s sleeping bag, but this time, Liv sat up and shook herself fully awake.