Page 95 of Stay Away from Him

“What do you want, Kendall? I’ll give you anything you want. Just let him go.”

“I told you what I wanted months ago,” she said. “I told you to stay away from my dad.”

Stay away from him,Melissa remembered, the jagged scrawl passing through her mind.Stay away from him unless you want to die.

“I’m listening now,” Melissa said. “I’m listening, Kendall. And I’ll do what you want. I’ll stay away from him from now on. From your family.Just let him go.”

Above her, Kendall shook her head, pressed the knife a little closer to Bradley’s neck, the sharp point denting his skin but not yet breaking it.

“It’s too late for that,” she said. “You’ve already ruined everything. Brought poison into our lives. Dad’s in jail. Thosefriendsof yours found Mom’s body. Dad’s going to go to prison for killing her—or I am.”

“No,” Melissa said. “It doesn’t have to be that way. I told the police that Derek Gordon did it—that’s the detective who investigated your dad three years ago. We can make it stick to him. We can. You just have to stop killing people.”

She was lying, of course—Melissa had no intention of framing Derek Gordon for what Kendall and Thomas did. But she needed Kendall to see a way out of this, to believe that she could get away with it—if she let everyone go, unhurt.

“No,” Kendall said, and Melissa’s stomach dropped. “You’re full of shit. You did this—now someone has to die for it.”

“Let it be me, then. Please, Kendall. Let him go. And kill me.”

Kendall was quiet, breathing in and out like a frenzied animal. Her hot breath puffing in the air, steam rising from a sheen of sweatat her neck. A few taut seconds passed, and she took the knife away from Bradley’s neck. Without letting go of the knife, she reached in her coat pocket, then threw a couple of small objects down onto the ground in front of Melissa and Rhiannon.

White plastic zip ties.

Fear spread icy-hot over the surface of Melissa’s skin when she saw them, and in that moment, she realized just how much trouble they all were in, how far gone Kendall really was. They were just a couple pieces of plastic, something anyone could buy online, the instruments of horror and violence just a few clicks away. You didn’t have zip ties in your possession unless you were planning on doing something with them—unless you thought about killing every day, yearned for it. Melissa understood something about Kendall then: understood that her first two kills might have been accidents, of a kind, but that it had become more serious since then. Maybe she’d pushed the boy off the cliff out of a sense of curiosity, a desire to find out what would happen; maybe she’d stabbed her mother to death in anger over the revelation that she’d cheated on Thomas. But she’d grown a taste for killing then—and now, it was hard to imagine that they’d get out of this situation withoutsomeonedying.

Kendall nodded to the zip ties. “Put those on. I’m not stupid. I’m not going to let you get up here and attack me.”

“Okay,” Melissa said. “Okay. I’m doing it.”

She held out her hands to Rhiannon, wrists together. “Come on. Put it on.”

She knelt, grabbed a zip tie, looped it around Melissa’s wrists. The latch snapped as it zipped snug.

“Tighter,” Kendall said.

Rhiannon winced. “Sorry,” she whispered, then pulled the tie tighter, until the plastic cut against Melissa’s skin.

“You too, Rhiannon,” Kendall said.

Melissa helped with the tips of her fingers as Rhiannon looped a tie around her own wrist, then used her teeth to pull it tight.

“There,” she called up. “You happy?”

“Melissa, you come up,” Kendall said. “Rhiannon, you stay down there.”

Melissa turned and walked up the way she’d come. Without the use of her hands for balance, she stumbled and nearly fell on her way up the steep grade but managed to keep her feet beneath her. At the top, she circled the lip of the hollow toward Kendall and Bradley.

“Send him here,” Melissa called. “Then you can have me.”

Kendall grinned. “You really think I’m stupid, don’t you? You’re not getting him back. Just a closer look when I kill him.”

She tugged at Bradley’s collar, pulling him close. Brought the knife around. Agony gripped Melissa’s body, and her legs went weak. She dropped to her knees.

“No!” she screamed.

And then Kendall’s hand stopped.

“What are you doing here?” Kendall asked.

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