Everything froze, hung suspended for an infinity of seconds, and then, all at once, sped up again as the bullet slammed into Rachel’s chest.
Midthought. Midsentence. Her hands grappled at the edge of the wound, at the tender flesh shredded beneath metal. When she looked up, her eyes were wide and uncomprehending.
Lucy’s fingers trembling around her own gun even though she knew she hadn’t been the one to fire. They met each other’s eyes, Rachel’s dimming as her mouth worked, no sound coming out of it.
Then the light blinked out behind her expression, and her body crumpled.
There was no need to feel for a pulse—from just a glance it was easy to see that the damage to her chest, her heart, and probably her lungs had been severe.
Swinging around, Lucy found Molly standing now, Darcy’s fallen gun clutched in a loose grip by her side. Her eyes were hard as she met Lucy’s.
And Lucy thought about where the girl must have been for the last three weeks to look that hollow. Thought about the fact that Lucy hadn’t been sure they would ever find her body. Thought about the blood that was clearly her own and slick on her hands.
“You can call it self-defense,” Molly finally said. And though her voice cracked, it was anything but weak.
Lucy caught her, just before she hit the floor, an unconscious weight that took them both down.
When Lucy met Hicks’s eyes, he stared back, mouth in a grim line. Then he nodded once, a decision made that couldn’t be unmade. That only the people in the room would know the truth about.
Self-defense. That’s what it had been.
CHAPTER SIXTY
SHERIFF WYATT HICKS
Now
The path was familiar to Hicks now. He’d walked it too many times in the past few days not to know it. The way it curved and snaked through his beloved woods that were newly tainted with the stench of death.
The way his life was.
Josiah and Rachel both dead. Eliza . . .
And now this.
He’d thought he’d be numb to anything at this point. Walking in on that scene in Darcy’s kitchen had hit like a punch. It had been only a few days earlier when he and Rachel had created their makeshift bonfire for the evidence they’d never wanted to see the light of day. It had been only a few days since he’d met her gaze over the flickering flames and felt home again. The same way he’d always felt as a kid when he’d reached out in the dark and gripped her palm.
For the briefest moment in time, he’d thought that maybe they weren’t strangers or adversaries who just wanted to make each other bleed.
And then Eliza had confessed and everything had splintered again. Rachel had shut down, built walls, met his searching gaze with blank eyes.
He hadn’t asked Eliza why she’d texted Rachel that night instead of him. But a part of him suspected she had wanted Rachel to be scared of what Eliza knew.
Hicks wasn’t numb, though. He felt it all, a pulsing wound that hurt so much he thought surely it must be real. He’d woken up in the middle of the night, his fingers grappling at his chest, the exact spot the bullet had entered Rachel, positive that he was dying. He’d stood in the shower for an hour that morning, the water masking the tears on his cheeks. He’d stared at the one picture he kept of his family, gently touching each of them. Cora as a kid, Rachel as a teenager. His mother.
He’d taken out his lighter and watched the glossy corners curl into ash. The flame had burned the tips of his fingers.
It would get better, he knew. There was still a purpose for him—but maybe it wasn’t in Knox Hollow anymore. Finally, finally, he might be able to walk away.
There was just one thing left to do.
He found Zoey where he’d been expecting—sitting on the ground next to the rock where Noah’s body had been left.
Hicks stopped, eyes tracing over the curve of her spine, the way her hands dug into the earth by her sides.
When Molly and Darcy had given their statements to him about the events in the kitchen before Hicks and Lucy had arrived, neither had given much weight to Rachel’s denial of killing Noah, seeming to write it off as an unimportant lie.
But Hicks hadn’t been able to dismiss it. Not after reading Kate Martinez’s file.
Now finding Zoey here, it seemed all but confirmed. He just needed to know . . . “Why?”
Zoey didn’t startle, simply shifted so that he could see her profile. The midday light slid into her honey-laced curls. If evil had a face, he would never had said this was it.
“Have you ever cared about something?” Zoey asked, quiet and deep. “So much you throw everything else out? Your morals, your ethics?”
It was nearly word-for-word what he’d asked her before. He called up her answer.
Just once. “Who?”
Her smile when it came was soft, sad. “Her name was Kate.”
Hicks inhaled sharply, surprised though he probably shouldn’t have been. And crushingly disappointed that his suspicions were in the process of being confirmed. It was irrational, really, to feel upset about any deception from Zoey when he should still be reeling from everything that had been uncovered about his sister. But there had been a small part of him that had been hoping he’d been right to trust Zoey.
“Kate Martinez,” Hicks said, and it wasn’t a question. Here was the piece they’d all been missing. It was when he’d read Kate’s file again for the first time since Zoey had come to Knox Hollow that the suspicion had buried roots in his skin. He hadn’t made the connection when he’d hired her that she came from Missoula, Montana, the same place Kate Martinez’s body was found. But after Lucy had gone digging for the file, it put the coincidence into context. “Tell me.”
“We were young, in love, and stupid with it,” Zoey said without hesitation. Like she was desperate to talk about it. “Her family moved around a lot but always came back to our town.”
“In Montana.”
“Yeah,” Zoey said softly. “One time when Kate came back . . . she was scared. But she wouldn’t tell me why.” Zoey broke off, shook her head. “Then she died.”
“She saw something?” Hicks paused. “Rachel?”
That finally got Zoey to look up. “You knew.”
Her voice had gone sharp, accusation and—somewhat inexplicably—betrayal in her eyes.
“No,” Hicks said, the denial weighted with absolute certainty. He hadn’t. Not until he’d seen the verse. That’s when he’d started to suspect it wasn’t Josiah. “Romans 3:23. It was my mother’s favorite verse. She would lock us in the attic crawl space and sit outside the door, repeating it over and over again. For hours. For days.”
“Pardon me for saying so, but I don’t give a shit how Rachel became a monster,” Zoey spit out.
And that was fine. It wasn’t an excuse anyway. He’d had the same life as Rachel, been shaped by the same abuse. If Hicks wanted to waste any time psychoanalyzing his sister, he’d say that where he’d rebelled, she’d given in. The Church was a cult in everything but name. It had its own moral structure, and those in the community who succumbed to the gaslighting, the brainwashing, the lifestyle had learned to convince themselves it was the right one.
Protect the Church from any threat. He was sure Rachel had seen it as her duty. Doing the dirty work no one else wanted to think about.