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When I went back to her, she was still in the same spot I’d left her.

Her face was pale, and when she pushed her hair off her face, her fingers trembled. “I’m okay.”

“Sure you are.”

Heat sparked in her eyes, but when she tried to speak, nothing came out.

The first spatters of rain fell, turning the blood on the ground pink at the edges. Ava looked down, and her lower lip trembled.

When she made a tortured sound in her throat, I cupped her face, wishing I could take every bit of it away. “We’ll deal with it upstairs, okay? Not out here.”

I stooped and grabbed the knife. With a grunt, I tossed it to the other side of the car park and took her hand.

She didn’t say a word as we went inside and trudged up the stairs, her fingers barely curled around mine.

No one appeared in the hall when we passed by Tim and Varesh’s floor, so whatever noise she’d made—an argument, a scream—mustn’t have been loud enough to catch their attention.

I ushered her into Sadie’s apartment, securing the door before I led her over to the couch. “Sit.”

She didn’t fight me or refuse. Just lowered herself onto the velvet cushion and rested her hands in her lap.

My feet were red from the cold, so I took a minute to throw on socks. Once I’d scrounged a washcloth and a bowl of water, I went over to her and switched on the solar lantern.

I took a seat on the coffee table and dampened the cloth, drawing her hand toward me.

The blood had dried now, dark against her pale skin, settling into her knuckles and the crevices between her fingers. She watched me clean it off her fingertips and the crease near her thumb. The underside of her nail took a couple of swipes.

“Talk to me,” I said, setting the washcloth beside me.

“How? I don’t even know what to say.”

A long silence passed between us, then I asked carefully, “Did you mean to do it?”

“No.” Her answer came quickly.

“Then let’s start with that. Why did you go downstairs on your own?”

“I don’t—” Her hand flinched in mine before she made herself keep going. “I was sorting through Sadie’s things, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about what Tim and Varesh said.”

“About the cameras or how Dustin treated Sadie?”

“Both. All of it. It was too much after the farmhouse.”

I swept my thumb over the back of her hand as tiny flickers of emotion played across her face. In the past few days, we’d faced choices none of us had ever encountered before. “Do you think we should have killed Jeremy?”

Ava closed her eyes for a beat and let out a long breath. “Probably not. Leaving him alive made more sense at the time. Like you said, we couldn’t just shoot him while he was lying unconscious on the ground.”

“But Dustin?”

She looked past me, then at me. “I had this stupid idea that threatening him might be enough, but it only made it worse.”

“How?” My body wound tight, but I fought to keep my hands relaxed around hers.

“He couldn’t believe that someone like me—a woman—would talk to him the way I did.” She stopped and moistened her lower lip. “He said things to get under my skin, and I just… snapped. Pushed him against the car and shoved the knife in his face.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said Sadie wasn’t respectable, that her behaviour needed to be monitored. When I threatened him, he told me I was too emotional and needed to be taught some lessons.”