Page 113 of Liars and Liaisons

She’salive.

A beat later,Her sister isn’t.

“I can explain everything,” Sydney says, and her voice is the same lilted songbird type, soft and perfectly pitched.

It sounds like nails being scraped on a chalkboard now.

My eyes shift, noting the discarded instruments in one corner of the room. The ashes in the fireplace, the clothes in one hamper. All things she left behind, but slightly altered. As if she’s been here the entire goddamn time.

Anger surges through me, a tornado of resentment pounding inside of my chest. “It was you,” I say, disbelieving it, even as the words leave my mouth. “You’ve been here, making the noises at night, the songs carrying through the air vents. The… my ghosts areyou.”

It takes a second, but she nods. “Your father wanted me dead. He would have killed me if he’d found out I—”

Janus clamps his hand over her mouth, yanking her back into him.

I glare at my employee. “What the fuck, Janus? You’re working with my brother?”

He shrugs. “You were getting out of control, and yourfatherpaid better.”

My father. Of course. There’s no way Nathaniel could mastermind anything.

“Sydney had to hide in her mentor’s house because she was afraid Dad would find out she was keeping hislittle mistake.” Nathaniel scoffs, rolling his eyes beneath me. “It’s a sordid, very boring tale really. And wait till you find out she lost the bastard anyway. So, both of you have made very poor decisions for absolutely no reason. Congratulations.”

My mind swims, and I tear my gaze away from her, too disgusted to look. Instead, I grab Nathaniel’s head and bash it into the floor; he winces, swearing, and drives the gun into my ribs, sending a spear of excruciating pain up my side.

“And what are your decisions for, huh?” I sneer, spitting in his face. “Why’d you fucking kill that girl downstairs? The same reasons as me, right? Because you’re a selfish, sorry sack of shit who got too used to getting whatever he wanted and getting away with murder. So, you wanted to see if you could get away withliteralmurder. Just for fun. Then, you’d move on to the big kill—your vindication.”

Shuffling off of him, I toss the shard of glass aside and hold my arms up, giving him a clear shot. “Go ahead and do it, Nate. I don’t fucking care. You’re right; everything I did was fornothing. I thought I was doing something good, clearing the world of your evil, but Dad’s dead, Micah’s dead, and the woman I love has sat here, listening to all of this. She now knows I’m no better than you, so even if you let me walk out of here, she’s not going to want to go alongside me. So, shoot me, for fuck’s sake. Put an end to it all, or I’ll drag you by your tongue out to the lake and drown you in it.”

The popping sound erupts by my ear out of nowhere. I didn’t even realize Violet had moved, much less picked up the gun I’d dropped on the bed and aimed it at my brother.

When the hole appears in the center of his forehead and his bits of flesh explode into the air, my head whips around to find her clutching the weapon between her hands. Staring at him with hard, emotionless eyes.

“You’re an idiot,” she mutters to me, and I blow out a long breath, scrambling to my feet and tackling her on the bed.

I forget about the other two people in the room entirely until the sound of a magazine sliding into place echoes through the air. Glancing over my shoulder, I see Janus has a pistol aimed at my back, and he clearly has no qualms about severing his ties with me forever.

He doesn’t get the chance to though because, in the next second, a bullet rips across the room, too fast to even track before it lands in his chest. He releases Sydney, who ducks out of the way with her bound wrists above her head, diving to the ground just as Willow rolls over with a groan.

It isn’t Willow who shot Janus though.

Instead, another figure steps out from the shadows. Two actually—one beaten bloody, her dark eyes bloodshot and her cheek swollen. I heave a breath of relief at the sight of Priya, even as she’s wriggling her hands from a zip-tie contraption.

Beside her is my mother, holding a gun with a big smile on her face.

“Well”—she tosses her brown hair over one shoulder, taking in the state of the room—“that’s better, isn’t it?”

40

The shower sprayis scalding as I step beneath it, finally rinsing the blood and sweat and other grime from my skin. I tilt my head and close my eyes, relishing in the feel of being washed clean after everything that happened at the James estate.

It’s surreal, being back at the South House after so much time. The girl who stayed here with her cousin and her little flowers doesn’t even exist anymore.

Maybe she never really did. I was just holding on to the ideal, desperate for something to cling to during a time of complete uncertainty in my life.

Micah’s dead. Her sister is not.

I shot and killed a man tonight.

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