Page 132 of Necessary Cruelty

Forty

My heart isin my throat when Giselle pulls the gun.

“Point it at me,” I insist, looming closer to make myself as large of a target as possible. “I’m the one you’ve always wanted dead, right?”

I let out a harsh breath of relief as the gun swings toward me.

“No…” Zaya cries out, but I silence her with a harsh movement of my hand.

This is between me and my stepmother, Zaya is just collateral damage.

“I tracked your mother down,” I say conversationally, not taking my gaze off of Giselle’s face. Even though I’m ostensibly speaking to Zaya, my words aren’t really meant for her. “Or at least, I tracked down the woman who has been using your mother’s identity. She’s an illegal immigrant who bought Julia Milbourne’s social security number ten years ago and has been using it ever since. The white woman in expensive clothes who sold it to her insisted it was high quality, because the person that the identity belonged to was dead. It’s amazing what people will tell you when they think you’re an immigration agent.”

Zaya’s body is frozen behind me. “I don’t understand.”

“My father didn’t tell me about the restrictions on my inheritance until recently, which almost certainly means that Giselle didn’t know about it, either.” I stare down the woman that had taken the place of my mother when I was still an infant. She was supposed to care for me as if I was her own. And instead, she’d paid someone to poison me. “Emma wasn’t born yet, and Giselle didn’t have any way to ensure her hold on the Cortland fortune with me standing between her and the jackpot. She thought with me out of the way that all money would eventually go to her. I can only assume that my father would have been next if her plan had worked.”

“What does this have to do with my mother?”

“Giselle couldn’t poison me on her own, that would have looked suspicious. So she paid your mother do it, taking advantage of the destitute and desperate. I’m guessing Julia regretted what she had done when I collapsed and it looked like I might actually die. She probably threatened to go to the cops, so Giselle killed her and made it look like she just skipped town.”

My stepmother’s face has contorted into something monstrous. “Julia screwed up when she didn’t give you enough oil of oleander to kill you. She only made things worse when she threatened to tell your father everything. I didn’t have a choice.”

“What’s your plan here, Giselle?” I position myself so as much of my body as possible is between Zaya and the gun pointed at us. “The police won’t believe that you killed us both on accident.”

“This one was just released from the psychiatric unit after she tried to drown herself in the ocean.” Giselle gestures with the barrel of the gun at Zaya, who clenches her fists in the back of my shirt. “I’m thinking she showed up here raving like a crazy person, then shot you right before she killed herself. I found that pregnancy test you left in the bathroom at the Shore Club. Now that she’s pregnant, your inheritance stays with the Cortlands. Even if you die.”

My heart pounds painfully in my chest as she raises the gun and points it directly at my heart. There is a vanishingly small chance that I can rush her, but that would just leave Zaya defenseless, and Giselle won’t miss at this distance. As her finger squeezes down on the trigger, I have a moment of perfect clarity. I am going to die standing in between the woman I love and a monster.

There are worse ways to go.

Then a blur of pink and white rushes past me.

Giselle goes flying, the combination of surprise and the force of Emma crashing into her enough to knock the gun from her hand and make her stumble back toward the stairs. Her arms pinwheel wildly as she tries and fails to gain purchase. The sky-high heel of her designer shoes, the ones that it makes no sense to wear inside the house, catches on the top step, and she finally loses her fight with gravity.

She hits each step on the way down, her body contorting in a way that no person should until she hits the hardwood floor at the bottom, her neck bent at an impossible angle. Her eyes are wide and fixed as they stare up at the ceiling, a small trail of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

Emma’s voice is barely a whisper in the silence.

“Is she dead?”

* * *

I hidethe gun before we call 911.

The police believe us when we tell them that it was an accident, that we all saw Giselle stumble and fall down the stairs.

They don’t seem to notice that Emma stays huddled in the corner while she stares at nothing at all. It’s probably easy to mistake her behavior for grief and not something else entirely. I’m going to get her bundled off to the best psychologist money can buy at the earliest opportunity, but for the moment it’s better that she doesn’t say anything at all.

Zaya surprises me with how smoothly she tells the story, crying real tears when she talks about searching for a pulse on my bitch of a former stepmother and not finding one. Lying to the cops must be something kids learn early in the Gulch.

But it doesn’t take long for the facade to break down after the police finish taking our statements and leave. I make her lay down on the couch in the living room while the paramedics zip Giselle’s body into a black bag and carry it away.

I call my father to tell him the sanitized version of what happened, but he doesn’t pick up. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing you leave in a voicemail, so I hope I get a chance to talk to him before he hears about it on the news.

Right now, I have more important people to think about.

Emma lets me shuffle her off to bed, still looking lost and shell-shocked. She hasn’t spoken a word, not even after the cops left. I’m just praying that things are different in the morning.

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