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“I wonder what room it happened in.
“Were they shot? Saoirse didn’t show me that part. Why wouldn’t she show me? Did she think I’d be upset?
“Oh my God, Darby’s journals.”
Clo began pulling notebook after notebook off the top shelf of the wardrobe, tossing them on the floor until she found one that struck her as important. Flipping to the back, she thumbed through a section of blank pages until she found the last entry.
“God, her handwriting even looks like mine.” She smiled.
Then, her face fell as her eyes swept back and forth across the page.
“She was worried about you. You’d been acting paranoid but wouldn’t tell her why.” Her eyes found mine. “I know the feeling.”
She was speaking about me like I was him again. It was definitely time to go.
Closing the notebook, Clo leveled me with a suspicious stare.
“What did you see? In the lake.”
I shook my head, feeling my blood heat and my heart pound at the very mention of that experience.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
I shoved a hand through my hair and pushed away from the door, needing to move, needing to bolt.
“Damien, whatever you saw, Saoirse showed it to you for a reason,” Clo said. “We are here for a reason. And I think that reason is for us to right a wrong. To finally get justice for what happened to them. To us.”
“The only us that matters is us,” I said, jabbing a finger back and forth from my heart to hers. “And if we don’t get the fuck off this island, we’re going to end up just like them.”
Clo winced and jerked away from me.
Regret roiled in my empty stomach as I took a deep breath and tried to calm the fuck down.
“Maybe not,” she said quietly. “Maybe we can stay here, in Glenshire. Use fake names, lie low. It’s a small village. The Russians will probably leave it alone. We can get jobs in town—”
“Stay here? Are you fuckin’ serious, Clo? This place is pure evil. I can feel it on my skin. I can feel it slithering into my brain. Everything that has happened since we got here has been fucked, and the sooner we leave, the—”
My stupid diatribe died on my tongue as Clo’s face suddenly fell. Not because of my shitty tone or my refusal to support her little murder mystery mission, but because something in the wardrobe had caught her eye.
And mine.
Sliding a shiny black flight jacket off a hanger, Clover held it up in front of her with both hands, then hugged it to her chest and burst into tears.
And I almost did the same.
I’d seen that jacket in my nightmare. I knew the weight of it, the way it always felt cool to the touch. I knew that it had orange lining and a tear on the right sleeve. But mostly, I knew the pang of bitterness I felt in my chest every time I was wearing it instead of her.
Sitting on the floor, surrounded by Darby’s journals, Clover pressed the jacket to her face—my jacket—and wept.
Setting the backpack down, I knelt before her and watched her mourn, unable to speak, unable to bridge the gap between the revelation taking place in my soul and the rationalization that had taken root in my mind.
“I feel so far away from him.”
Clover’s words were a dagger through my chest, pinning my heart to my rib cage like a fucking ransom note. For the second time in as many hours, I felt that organ bleed out, only this time, death wasn’t coming to take away my pain. This time, I had to fucking live with it.
I wanted to grab her face and force her to look at me. I wanted to tell her that he … I was sitting right in front of her. That she wasn’t crazy. That I was beginning to remember too.
But accepting that reality meant admitting that I was the reason she’d died. It meant admitting that I was putting her in the exact same position again. And I couldn’t. Not while her blood was still warm on my hands.
