Page 147 of A Smile Full of Lies
In the scar under my ribs. In the one beside my sternum. In the silence between me and Knox. In every word I’d written about the murders that changed all of our lives.
I curled my arms around my middle and dropped my forehead to the steering wheel.
I didn’t know how to go home. Not yet.
The sky was starting to darken into true night when I finally forced myself to sit up.
I’d been parked at the overlook for at least an hour, maybe longer. My phone buzzed twice more — Alyssa again, then a text from an unknown number.
There weren’t words in the second text, just a timestamp and a location ping. Not home. Somewhere in the woods, overlooking the river. My location.
Shit.
Knox, I assumed. Who else would care where I was today? Who else would admonish me for stalling with nothing but a record of my current location?
I stared at it, my heart thudding slow and hard. I could almost feel him — buzzing with that same wild, barely-leashed energyhe always had when something inside him was fraying. When he was holding back so much it made his skin too tight.
He knew I’d stalled. He knew I wasn’t ready to walk through that front door and face him yet.
And, apparently, he was getting sick of waiting.
The air in the SUV felt heavier all of a sudden. Like it knew what was coming, too.
My gaze flicked back toward the river, the tangled edge of the treeline, the first stars of the night twinkling high above the river. The trees looked darker now. Hungrier, somehow.
I swallowed hard.
The writing retreat was over. The truth was written. The case was closed. My stitches had dissolved. My scars were healed.
And Knox? Knox had warned me he was going to be done with being careful when I finally came home to him.
He was going to make me pay — for the danger I’d put myself in, for the silence, for walking into a fucking knife just to protect him from the truth.
I didn’t need to ask what he wanted. I already knew. He was calling me home.
And I? I was going to run.
I didn’t drive straight home. I could’ve. Probably should’ve.
But my hands were shaking too bad to keep a good grip on the wheel, and my pulse had lodged somewhere in my throat. I pulled off the main road and parked at a gas station just outsidethe Stonewood city limits, sitting in the shadowed corner of the lot like a fucking coward.
My mouth was dry. My limbs felt too heavy. And even though the sun was gone and the air had cooled, sweat prickled beneath my sweater.
I couldn’t make myself move. Not yet. Because I thought I knew what I was walking into.
Knox had said he wouldn’t touch me until I was healed. But that promise — no, that threat — that he whispered the day he dropped me off at the river cabin? It never left me.
“You scared the hell out of me. And I’m going to make you feel every second of it. Not now. Not yet. But when I know your body can take it — Rosalind, you’re going to pay for every second I thought I’d lost you.”
The man who sat at my bedside and kissed my forehead like I was breakable wasnotthe same man who’d spoken those words.
That man was darker. Hungrier. And I hadn’t seen him since, but I could feel him now. Circling. Closing in.
Something had shifted the moment Thayer’s ashes hit the marble shelf in that mausoleum.
It was over. The story was written. The monster was dead. Which meant my time had run out.
Knox had been holding back out of necessity. But now? Now there was nothing left to stop him.
