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  If she could move. Her entire body trembled with the effort. Agony screamed through her from the thousand points of his torture. Her body, weak with hunger and cold and loss of blood, responded sluggishly to her brain’s commands. She tumbled from her table into the blood-soaked duff of the floor. She rolled to her knees, straightening enough to both cause white-hot pain through her slashed abdomen and to catch the edge of Cecily’s table with one hand. That hand balanced her enough to bring her other hand up, and she inched her way upright, leaning heavily with her hip against the table for balance as she shook Cecily.

  Cecily’s eyes opened to mere slits, her head lolling toward Molly. Her limbs were unbound like Molly’s; he must have thought he’d killed them both.

  “We have to get out of here before he comes back. Can you move?”

  Cecily’s hand came up, trembling violently, her bloody fingers curling around the infinity knot and peeling it from where it had stuck to Molly’s skin just below the hollow of her throat, anchored by thick, sticky blood. Her fingers lost their grip on the pendant and fell back onto the chipboard table with a sickening squelch.

  Her mind suddenly supplied the mystery of the dark blotch on his shoulder: a tattoo. Both Magnus and Cary had tattoos on the backs of their right shoulders. Both were broad-shouldered, well-built men.

  She didn’t know which of them had tortured her.

  “Cecily.” The other woman didn’t answer. Molly whispered louder, “Cecily! Who is he? Cary or Magnus? Cecily!”

  Cecily never answered. Molly pressed her trembling finger to her throat, found no pulse.

  “I’ll be back for you. I swear.”

  He hadn’t latched the door securely. Using a stick she worked under the door from outside, she lifted the branch from its brackets and pushed open the door, shuddering as the limb crashed against the door. Could he have heard that? How far away was he? She didn’t wait to find out.

  She staggered out the door and into the forest, stabbing pain in her feet as branches and rocks and pinecones punctured her tender soles. Clenching pain like hot pokers in her gut as she stumbled through shrubs and around trees, holding one arm over her leaking abdomen. Splatters and clots of blood marked her passage. The forest was endless, nothing but trees and brambles in every direction. Filtered light through the canopy let her find her way, but the sun sank in the sky faster than Molly traveled. Each step became an impossible burden until finally, she couldn’t take another. She leaned against a shoulder-height boulder, wrapping her arms around it for support, pressing her cheek to the soft moss growing across it. Just a little rest, two minutes tops, then back at it. Almost there. Bringing help. Hang on, Cecily, just a while longer. She closed her eyes.

  Men’s voices shouting to one another, very close, brought her awake unknown minutes later. She had fallen asleep and nearly missed her chance at rescue. If they left before she could reach them, she would die. Naked, tortured, and starved, she would not be able to survive the night without medical care.

  She staggered away from the boulder, leaving behind a slick of blood. Shock hazed her brain. She shivered with cold. Blackness crept in at the edges of her vision. She stumbled, fell into the forest duff, couldn’t rise. Her fingers clawed into the detritus; her feet shoved through the moldy leaf layer until they found traction in solid ground. She dragged herself over jagged stones and stabbing branches and barbed pinecones, through years of decaying leaves and prickly pine needles and glacial mud. Too far. Too wounded. Couldn’t make it.

  She didn’t see the embankment, slid down it, pulled herself by her fingers into the frigid road and rolled onto her back where she stayed, dragging in air, thirsty and cold and dying.

  A truck engine rumbled to life, and another. Men were still talking, hollering to one another. Molly couldn’t understand their words. She drifted off. Cecily shook her awake, bending over her, her blonde hair silky and shiny.

  “Wake up. Look for me, Molly. Wake up!”

  “Cecily,” Molly moaned. Her voice slurred. Her body shook. Voices murmured around her. Warmth descended on her. She was dying. That was all right. In death, there was an end to this pain, an end to the never-ending cold.

  “Lady! Hey, lady! Wake up! Oh, Christ, we’re losing her! Where’s the fucking ambulance?”

  The darkness claimed her.

  She raised her gaze from the knife in her belly, looking from Cary’s blood-slicked hand as it slipped off the handle and up into his cold, kaleidoscope eyes.

  “Breathe, Molly, I’d say, and you would, no matter how much I had hurt you. You didn’t breathe when I told you to that last time. I thought you both were dead. I’d never have left the shack that day if I’d known you weren’t.”

  The gunshot came from far away, flat and unexceptional. His eyes stared just past her, focused on nothing, holding nothing of the man who had lived behind them.

  They fell together to the hallway floor, inches apart. Molly gazed into his magnificent, lifeless eyes, unable to look away, because up to the last few seconds, she’d have laid her money on Magnus.

  Magnus screamed her name, scrambling up the steps in a half-running, half-crawling gait. Harvey Cohen vaulted over him onto the upper landing, dropping to his knees beside her, shouting into his phone words Molly couldn’t grasp. Magnus tore off his shirt, frantically wrapping it around the handle of the knife and applying pressure to stop the flow of blood.

  Her hand floated up, her fingers tangled into the chain of her necklace. Cecily’s necklace. She pulled until the chain broke and pressed it into Magnus’s blood-soaked hand. He looked at it, then looked into her eyes. Panic crawled in his. She felt it as her own, felt his horror and his fear as if they shared the same consciousness. Finally, in the very last seconds of her life, she felt their twin bond. How utterly, gloriously ironic.

  “Magnus.”

  Fear pounded her heart faster. Was that thin, tremulous whisper all she could manage? She drew in a breath to try again. Her heart fluttered, missing a beat, fluttered again as it missed two more.

  “Molly, don’t speak. Save your strength. The ambulance is on the way. Just hang on.” He bent close to her until they were nose to nose. His fingers curled around her hand and pressed it to his cheek, necklace and all. His skin was feverishly hot against hers.

  “I’m glad . . .” Her voice rasped. She coughed, tasting blood. A river of it flowed from her lips. “So glad . . . it wasn’t you.”

  He recoiled as though she’d struck him.

  Molly let go.

  Epilogue

  Molly paused when the doorbell rang, her finger hovering over the corner of the magazine page she’d been about to turn.

  “Expecting company?”

  Magnus frowned slightly. “None that I know of. Lynda’s not due for a while yet.”

  “Lynda.” Her mouth twisted.

  “Don’t start,” he warned. Lynda had been his almost constant companion since that awful night six months ago. She was coming to dinner tonight—a dinner he should be getting a head start on instead of reading.

  He laid aside his book and went to the sitting-room doors, peering into the hallway at the front door, then popped back into the sitting room. “It’s Detective Cohen.”

  Molly brightened. “Oh, how nice.” She set her magazine on the coffee table, marking her place with a subscription card that had fallen out of it earlier.

  When Magnus came back into the room, Harvey Cohen was with him, dressed casually in a polo shirt, jeans, and a light windbreaker; the early September weather was mild this year. He glanced at the magazine, at Molly’s chair, into which she curled lazily, and offered a twisted smile as he accepted Magnus’s gesture to sit and claimed one end of the sofa. Magnus sat on the love seat opposite him, bracing his elbows on his knees.

  “I brought you something.” Cohen dangled a plastic evidence bag over the coffee table. Magnus swallowed hard.

  “Are you sure?”

  “As near as we can tell, the necklace Molly
wore was the necklace you gave Lee. The assumption is that Cary took it from Lee after he abducted her. The investigation is closed; the perpetrator is dead. Since Lee is dead as well, I thought you might like to have the necklace you gave her. I think . . .” Cohen choked a little on his words and cleared his throat, flushing deeply. “I think you would have been good for each other, all things considered.”

  Magnus took the bag and said, a little sharply, “What things considered?”

  “The mental issues you both suffered.”

  “Ah. Those things.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Are you still searching the forest for her body?”

  Cohen hunched his shoulders uneasily. “We think Cary buried her somewhere after he burned the lean-to. The only evidence we collected after Molly escaped were charred boards and traces of Cecily’s blood. We were lucky to find that—lucky the dogs were able to track Molly’s path through the forest to the logging road. Odds are, he chose a site far away from where he killed her. It haunts me, wondering if—when—we find that site, how many more bodies we’ll find.”

  “So you still think the trophies Cecily gave you were his?”

  “Yeah. A number of them have been matched to bodies found. Others . . . So many missing women in King County. We found Genevieve Stratton’s necklace in his house. That was enough to start investigating, as best we can, his whereabouts in several other disappearances.”

  “I’m sorry. I know having her body to lay to rest would bring you closure, make this real so you can accept her death.”

  Cohen glanced in Molly’s direction again, at her chair, at the magazine on the coffee table. This close, he would be able to see it was House Beautiful, Molly’s favorite publication, and that it was the current edition.

  “Do you talk to Molly like you talked to Lee after she vanished?”

  Magnus leaned forward again, scrubbing his hands over his face, then clasping them between his knees. “She was my twin. How could I not?”

  Cohen nodded sympathetically. “I regret that I was not able to save her.”

  “You did better than we had any right to expect of you. What about the Augury Group? I seems like they’re getting off scot-free.”

  “The investigation will continue, of course, probably for years. Suspicion weighs heavily against them, but suspicion isn’t evidence. All things considered, you have to admit they gave you a pretty good year with your sister. Not that it excuses their actions.” With a sad twist of his lips, he handed a business card to Magnus. “I’m not officially involved in Molly’s case—conflict of interest. But let that guy know if you remember anything else. Even something seemingly small can be significant.”

  They shook hands, and Magnus saw the detective to the door. When he came back, Molly was in her chair again. He leaned against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets, glowering at her.

  “You can’t keep doing that, just popping in and out of sight like the bloody Cheshire Cat.”

  “Now that he knows you still talk to me, you don’t have to be so afraid you’ll slip and do it in front of him again.”

  “What makes you think he’ll come by again?”

  “You’ll keep in touch. You’ll always need to make sure you know what he’s up to.” She lowered her magazine, frowning thoughtfully. “Do you think he knows?”

  “Knows what?”

  “I could tell him, if you like.”

  “Tell him what? And you aren’t a ghost; you can’t tell anyone anything. You’re just in my head, like Cecily was. I talk to you because I miss you.”

  “Meddling Molly. Mollycoddling Molly. Suffocating sister. Do you miss that?”

  “I miss all of it.”

  He picked up his book and opened it to where he’d left off. She picked up her magazine and idly paged through it. After a moment, he became aware that the rustle of her pages had stopped. He glanced up, finding her staring at him over the top of the magazine.

  “What?”

  “Do you really think I don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That it was both of you.”

  “Both of us what? And who?”

  Her voice was coldly clinical. “It was both Cary and you, in that shack in the woods, cutting into me for three days.”

  He laid down his book. “Are you crazy?” But a memory bobbed just below the surface of his conscious mind, where so many things still hid because he wasn’t emotionally capable of facing them. I’ve seen you watching Lee, and I know what you’re doing. You can’t fool a killer. She’s your first, so you’re taking your time. I can help you with a lot of things, but mostly, I can help you not get caught. The first lesson is we watch them, but we don’t romance them. Romancing them the best way to get caught.

  “It was your GPS I followed into the woods. Your car by the side of the road. Cary didn’t set you up—it was you. And now you’re using my best friend to make yourself look respectable just like he used Cecily—the camouflage of a family to hide a killer. How long until she vanishes, just like Cecily?”

  “How could you think I’d ever do something like that, Molly, let alone to you? Or to Lynda?” Another memory surfaced, this time his own voice, rough with impatience. She already suspected, and it was only a matter of time until she told the police. So I lured her to the shack. What else was I supposed to do?

  “Oh, you mean because of the twin bond—the twin bond we didn’t share until the last seconds I was alive? Because I’m your sister? Genetics don’t trump crazy.”

  A key rattled in the lock. The knob squeaked as it turned, and the front door creaked open. Lynda called out, “A little help here?”

  Magnus threw his book aside and got up, bracing his hands on the arms of her chair. He leaned in close with an icy smile and whispered, “You scream like a girl.”

  With no fanfare or dramatics, she simply vanished. He straightened and stared for a long moment at the magazine, lying open on the coffee table, the most recent edition of a subscription he couldn’t bear to cancel because reading it kept her alive in his mind. He’d have to find a way to curb her phantom voice, though, or she’d be the ruin of him.

  With one last cold, calculating look at Molly’s empty chair, Magnus went to help Lynda with the groceries.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sharon Gerlach was in training to be a ninja, but a dismaying lack of physical grace and balance—not to mention the inability to keep her big mouth shut—ended her ninja career before it had really begun.

  Now she writes. She doesn’t write about ninjas because that’s obviously a sore subject. But she writes about other really cool things and figures someone else will cover the ninjas. Life’s really not all about ninjas, anyway.

  Sharon lives on the dry side of the Pacific Northwest with her husband (who must really be fond of her, as he hasn’t left her yet despite her ninja failings), her kids and grandkids (none of whom possess ninja qualities, either), and three cats. Yes, you guessed it—ninja cats!

  Website: sharongerlach.com

  Twitter: twitter.com/SharonGerlach

  Facebook Fan Page: facebook.com/AuthorSharonGerlach

  ALSO BY SHARON GERLACH

  Harper & Lyttle Series

  Office Politics

  The Secret Dreams of Sarah-Jane Quinn

  Blackberry House Series

  Where I Belong

  The Devil’s Mansion Series

  Malakh (novella)

  The Wyckham House

  Condemned

  The Revenant Chronicles

  Blink of an Eye

 

 

 
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