Page 110 of The Two Last Moments

With a sudden violent movement, her hand comes out from behind her back. She’s holding a syringe. It all happens so fast that I can barely react.

Starla stabs Ryan in the neck with it.

“What thefuck?” He trips backward, hands flying to the needle, yanking it away. I’m sucking in a breath to scream. And then Starla’s other hand comes out from behind her back. I cannot believe what I’m seeing.

She’s aiming a gun at me.

“Make a noise, Lark, and I swear it’ll be your last.”

37

Starla is pointing a gun at me. In the corner of my vision, I see Ryan slumped and losing consciousness on the ground.

“What is going on?” I stammer. “What’re youdoing?”

Her eyes flick down to Ryan as he struggles to breathe. “Some people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut. You’ve often had that problem.”

I keep staring at her, as if she’ll morph into someone else and this will make sense. But she’s still the same nurse with round cheeks and prim lipstick that I’ve known all these weeks.

But she had the name Zander programmed into her phone.Zander. He was calling her.

“D-Do you know Zander Richards?”

Starla glances at the gun in her hand, but her expression barely changes. “I knew this was coming,” she mutters, “but I thought I’d have a little more time to sort it out.”

Ryan flops onto his back. He’s making awful noises as he tries to get air into his lungs. She must’ve given him an overdose of something.

“He’s suffocating. Help him!” I cry.

I move toward him, and Starla raises the gun at me. “Now you see what’ll happen to you if you don’t do as I say. I thought I made that lesson clear to you a long time ago, but a mother’s work is never done.”

“Mother?”

Using the gun, she gestures for me to go toward Danny’s workbench. “Sit down,” she commands. I back up until I’m against the bench. “Not there. The floor. Put your hands behind your back.” She uses one hand to dig into her bag again, coming up with a plastic zip tie.

An image suddenly fills my mind. Handcuffs snapping onto my wrists, fixing me to a kitchen table.That’s what you get for talking back to me, Lark.

“Lark,” Starla snaps, pulling me out of that strange moment. But her voice is the same one I just heard in my mind. What the heck?

Sweat soaks my armpits. I slide to the ground and clasp my hands at my lower back, doing what she asked.

“Try anything, and I’ll kill everyone in this house.” She bends quickly behind me, using the zip tie to secure my wrists together. “Legs out.”

Starla uses another two zip ties, looped together, on my ankles. Then she stows the gun in her pocket and walks briskly to the other side of the garage. She starts digging around over there.

Starla knows Zander. She must’ve been helping him. She’s involved somehow. She was using Nina’s iPad…She may havekilled Ryanand just tied me up.

Why? What the heck does all this mean?

Starla pulls a shoebox out of a hiding place in Nina’s storage area. “What is that?” I ask.

She lifts the lid. “Always with the damn questions. You never change.” Starla pulls stacks of cash out of the box. Small items that clink like jewelry.

Another surreal image assails me. I’m slinking through a crowd with a dark-haired teenage boy. I bump into a passerby, apologizing as my hand slips into the woman’s purse to grab her wallet. The dark-haired boy takes a wallet from the jacket of the man next to her.

I gasp as that image vanishes.

Zander. That was him. I’m sure of it.

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