Page 172 of Mile High Ruin

I stop so abruptly that my heel slides against the gravel. “Camille?”

She’s running toward me too quickly, stumbling once on the edge of the path before catching herself, and there’s something so wrong in the way she moves that the relief disappears almost as soon as it arrives. Her hair, usually pinned into the same immaculate style she wears on every flight, has come loose around her face in damp, disordered strands, and her expression is so wild that for a second I barely recognize the composed woman who taught me how Vadim took his water and quietly rescued me from Warren Hale on my first day.

“Camille?”

She doesn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flick over my shoulder toward the house, then toward the dark line of hedges behind her, as though she expects someone to come through them at any moment, and when she finally looks back at me I notice the tremor in her mouth.

Then my gaze drops to her hand.

The knife is small so I almost don’t register it as a weapon at first, but the blade catches the garden light when her arm moves, and the dark shine along the metal is unmistakable. Blood has collected around her fingers and run across the heel of her palm, streaking the inside of her wrist before disappearing beneath the cuff of her sleeve, and there’s enough of it that my first irrational thought is that she must have cut herself.

Then I see there is no blood on the edge of her palm where she would have grabbed the blade. The blood is somebody else’s.

My stomach turns cold.

“Camille,” I say again, slower this time. “What happened?”

She reaches me and catches my forearm with her free hand hard enough to hurt.

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice is breathless and broken, nothing like the calm, measured tone I know, and when I look more closely I realize she’s not simply frightened. She looks frantic, almost feverish with it, as though she has been running for a long time and has finally reached the place where panic becomes something physical.

“I’m sorry, Sloane. I didn’t want it to be this way.”

I stare at her. “What way?”

She looks behind herself again. I follow her gaze automatically, but there’s nothing there except the path disappearing between the hedges and the soft pools of light cast by the lamps along the garden.

When I look back at her, the knife is still in her hand.

“Whose blood is that?”

Her fingers tighten around the handle. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“What did you do?”

She shakes her head, breathing harder now. “No, listen to me. You need to listen to me.”

A hard knot forms beneath my ribs. “Then tell me what happened.”

She steps closer, so close that I can smell something metallic beneath her perfume, and suddenly I’m aware of every wrong detail at once: the blood on her wrist, the way her eyes keep searching the dark, the fact that she’s holding a knife as though she has forgotten it’s there.

“Sloane, I never meant for you to⁠—”

The gunshot cracks across the garden so violently that for a fraction of a second I don’t understand what I’ve heard.

Camille’s body jerks against me. Her expression empties, and the sentence dies on her lips.

Then something hot strikes my face. I flinch backward, bringing one hand up instinctively, and for one disorienting second all I can see is Camille staring at me with the same shocked expression I know must be on my own face.

Then blood begins spreading across the front of her dress.

Too much of it.

It blooms rapidly through the fabric near her chest, darkening everything beneath it, and her knees give way before I can understand what’s happening. Her hand slips from my arm, the knife falls somewhere into the grass, and suddenly her full weight is collapsing into me.

My arms close around her shoulders, but she’s already sliding, dragging me down with her, and when I look at the hand pressed against her chest it comes away red.