Page 72 of Whispers of the Lake

“I’m not letting her go, G. And you aren’t calling the cops on me. You’re not foolish. You know how bad this will make you and the company look.”

Gina’s hand shook. “I don’t care. You’ve underestimated me enough.” She twisted around and stormed halfway up the stairs.

Before she could make it, Victor raised the gun.

I screamed when the gunshot echoed through the basement.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Victor cursed as he watched his wife collapse, belly first, on the stairs. Everything fell silent after that, but to my surprise, Gina’s head was still moving. That’s when I realized he’d shot her in the calf. Blood trickled down her leg as she moaned. She began to cry as she reached for the gunshot wound, but in doing so, she ended up skidding all the way down the wooden steps.

Victor clutched her good leg, flipped her over, and dragged her across the basement on her back. She cried out as he fumed, hiking her up and pressing her back to a wall.

“Eddie, are you kidding me?” she cried. “You fucking shot me!”

I looked down, noticing the bottom of the rope wasn’t tied at my waist. He’d knotted the rope around my chest and behind my back, but not at my waist. I shifted my arm, trying to move the rope’s end, but that only caused the knots above to squeeze tighter.

“You don’t understand, Gina. I did what I had to do for you,” Victor said.

“What did you do, you asshole?” she demanded, wincing again.

“She was going to ruin us and everything we’ve built! She found us here and she threatened your company—our marriage. She wasn’t going to stop until she took everything.”

Gina grimaced. “You mean everythingI’vebuilt!”

Victor looked taken aback as his wife glowered at him. “You wouldn’t have been able to build any of it if I hadn’t been keeping Emily with me every day,” he retorted. “This weekend is the first time where you’re actually with us, and you aren’t even really here, Gina! You’re still on your fucking phone. Still emailing. Still on those stupid Zoom calls.”

“I can’t just stop working because you want to watch a fucking movie, Eddie! God—oh, my God. My leg. It’s bleeding badly!”

“Daddy?”

Victor twisted around and most of his anger seemed to rinse away in an instant when he heard the small, innocent voice. Emily stood in the middle of the staircase holding a pink teddy bear and gazing at the puddle of her mother’s blood on the step below her.

“Oh, Em, baby.” Victor hustled across the basement, hiked up the stairs, and scooped her up. “Come on. Let’s get you back to bed, baby. Come.”

It was frightening how quickly he could change up. Menacing at one point and sympathetic the next. Victor glared at me over his shoulder, tossing a warning look that saiddon’t try a fucking thing.

The door slammed shut, echoing through the basement. I dropped my head and closed my eyes again, thinking of a way to get the hell out of here. Why had Victor killed Eve? Surely whatever she’d done couldn’t have been that bad—not to the point where he needed tomurderher.

“He killed her.” I opened my eyes and cut my gaze to Gina. She was already staring at me.

“How can you be sure?” she asked.

“That’s what I’ve been told.” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “The Reeds—they live across the lake. The girl, Rory, said they found Eve’s body one morning in their rental house. They said she was already dead.”

“But how could it have been Eddie? I mean, how did you know for sure?”

“I didn’t know for sure . . . not until he pointed the gun at me.”

“God.” Gina squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m so sorry this is happening,” she breathed. “So, sosorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It is!” she wailed, throwing her head back. “I—I knew he was seeing someone else. I knew he was having an affair. She wanted to be sure that I knew. She just kept coming back, bragging, telling me to leave him. She told me she’d been sleeping with him formonths. I asked Eddie about it, and he confessed to it. I wanted a divorce, but he suggested marriage counseling. He wanted to make things work . . . for Emily. I wanted the same thing, so I stayed. I wanted to move on from it and he said he’d take care of the pregnancy and that he would convince her to—”

“Wait,what?” My throat thickened with emotion. “Pregnancy? What are you talking about?”

“She was pregnant with his child! She sent me a photo of the pregnancy test. Her blood work.Everything. She could’ve photoshopped it, sure, but something told me she wasn’t joking. This felt real, and that was going to be my last straw with Eddie. I wanted to be done.”

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