Page 91

After she’d locked up, I held out my free hand, and she grabbed it without a second’s thought.

We descended the stairs at a decent clip, but then her steps slowed as we reached the foyer.

She stared at the apartment next to the rear exit, looking away quickly.

Images flashed through my mind—of her on the ground instead of Dustin, while he stood over her and watched her bleed out. My hand tightened around hers.

Ava squeezed back, her fingers loosening before they slipped away.

Tim and Varesh were already waiting in the two armchairs with several bags at their feet.

“Morning,” Varesh said, rising.

“Hey.” Ava gave him a quick smile and dumped her bag and axe, moving past him to the mailboxes. She pulled the note from her pocket and fed it into Sadie’s mailbox, tapping it once so it dropped to the other side.

Weak sunlight glowed through the gap in Dustin’s broken door, just as it had when we’d arrived yesterday. This time, we didn’t need to think about what might be lurking on the other side.

Tim followed my line of sight. “Have you been thinking about a solution to that problem?”

“I’m just focused on getting out of here.” I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder, wondering if we could get away with leaving and never mentioning what happened.

Tim slung a bag over his arm, then grabbed his hammer and an overfilled backpack. “Maybe he climbed out the window for the last time and fucked all the way off. Leaving the front doors open might have been his parting shot.”

Varesh stooped to pick up one of their duffle bags, distracted as Ava brushed past him again. “I’d rather confirm before we leave,” he said, adjusting his glasses. He collected a couple of reusable grocery bags and headed for the door. “The last thing we need is him following us to the farm because he doesn’t want to be alone.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Tim said. “That’s exactly what he’d do.”

Ava’s eyes darted to Dustin’s apartment.

Tim caught on and lifted his brows. “What did I miss?”

She opened her mouth, looked at me, then finally said, “We can talk about it in the car.”

“I need the story right this second.” He tilted his head toward the rear door and followed Varesh. “Your sister would never torture me like this.”

Ava and I headed outside with our bags and weapons, the air still damp from the night’s rain. A car alarm wailed nearby, and birds chattered in a tree as if nothing had changed.

She stopped beside the stain where Dustin’s body had dropped, but the rain had almost completely washed away the blood. “He was outside when I came downstairs yesterday afternoon,” she said, shifting her grip on the axe.

“Did he say anything to you?” Tim asked, an edge to his voice.

“Not at first.” She forced herself to keep moving to the rear of the SUV. “I was the one who approached him.”

“What did he do?” Tim sent a glance at the door we’d just come through. “Tell me, and we’ll sort this out right now.”

Varesh stopped, his attention landing on the pile of bodies stacked near the rear fence. “Wait. That’s—they’re...” His mouth pursed, and I followed his gaze to the polished black dress shoe protruding from the end. “Oh.”

Tim stared at the same spot. “That’s him?” He looked from me to Ava. “What happened?”

Ava took a minute to answer, as if searching for the right words. “We were arguing, and he grabbed me. I had a knife, and it just… all went wrong so fast.”

Tim closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, there was no judgment there. Just a strange, detached kind of sadness. “I always wondered if he’d eventually push someone too far. I’m a bit surprised it took this long.”

Varesh tore his gaze from the pile of bodies. “Theo and I talked about driving him a long way from here and dropping him off. If we’d done that—”

“He could have hurt someone else, somewhere else,” I said.

“You’re probably right.” Tim rubbed a hand over his buzz cut and looked at Ava. “Are you okay?”