Page 74 of Twice as Twisted

“You have a choice,” she insists. “Please, Duke. Just let me go. I promise, I won’t go to the police. I’ll never tell a soul. All I want is to go home to my sister.”

She crawls across the ground to me, grabbing onto my legs like she does Baron. I’ve seen him kick her when she does that, filled with disgust, but it only makes me more miserable.

“If you let me go, you’ll never hear from me again,” she promises. “You’ll forget it ever happened. It’ll be like I don’t exist.”

I look down at her, and she blinks up at me, her eyes so full of pleading it hurts.

“What do I have to do?” she whispers. “Please. I’ll do anything. Just don’t kill me.”

Holding my gaze, she reaches for my fly, slowly lowering my zipper. But when she undoes my button, I swat her hands away. She’s fucking with my head. Baron isn’t setting me up. Maybe he doesn’t need me the way I need him, but we’re two halves of the same whole. He’s not tricking me. We never lie to each other.

No matter what.

“I’m sorry,” I say, fixing my zipper before pulling the gun from the waistband of my jeans. “I can’t. You know what he’s like. Please, Jane. You have to understand.”

She sits back on her heel, shrinking down in my hoodie, her gaze full of as much misery as my own. “You’re asking me to have sympathy for you when you’re about to kill me?”

“I don’t want to,” I say, my fingers shaking as I grip the gun, aiming it at her temple.

“You want me to dig my own grave and willingly climb into it, too?” she asks. “Maybe even pull the trigger myself?”

That gives me pause. Maybe I could make her do that. Then it wouldn’t be on my conscience. At least not entirely.

“Would you?” I ask.

She scowls up at me. “No, Duke. I’m not killing myself to make it easy for you. If I wanted to die, don’t you think I would have done it already?”

“Why didn’t you?”

She looks down, her face glum. “Sometimes I wanted to,” she says. “But I have a sister. She depends on me. I promised I’d come back for her.”

A chill tingles along my spine, and I listen for what caused it, for the snap of a twig or a dog barking in the distance or thewail of a siren coming closer. But all I hear is the mournful howl of the wind in the pines and the sound of Jane sniffling as tears start to roll down her cheeks.

“She probably thinks I forgot her,” she says. “If I’d known, I would never have taken a ride. I’d never have left. I would have gone through whatever I had to, just to be there, so she knows I love her, and I didn’t just abandon her. I promised—” A hiccupping sob interrupts her, but she quickly goes on, blubbering desperately. “I would have gone through with it and just killed myself a long time ago if I’d known it would end this way anyway. I just thought, maybe if I could hold on, whatever he did to me, if one day I could get back to Olive, I could endure it.”

I stumble backwards, knocking into the tree. My head thuds against the trunk, and the world tilts around me like I drank a whole bottle of whiskey and not just half a flask. The trees stretch, grotesque as the crooked fingers of witches in those childhood tales, the ones that grabbed children and swallowed them whole. They seem to tower higher and higher, and Jane shrinks smaller and smaller as she curls in on herself, bending double where she kneels, clutching her middle as her skinny shoulders shake with sobs and the bones of her spine stand out starkly in her skeletal neck.

Voices clash and spin in my mind, so loud even the howling wind and a car on the road and the whisper of pine needles on the ground and Jane’s broken sobs of despair can’t mask them.

Olive.

I found her hitchhiking.

Olive.

I’m from Arkansas.

Olive.

She wouldn’t tell me her name.

Olive.

All I want is to go home to my sister.

Why didn’t she tell me earlier? Why didn’t she say her name? It took me too long to figure it out, for the pieces to fall into place, but now they have. Why she looks so familiar. Why I was sure I’d met her before.

“Your sister is Olive?” I choke out. “Olive Green?”

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