Page 25 of Disappearance at Angel’s Landing (Red Rock Murders #2)

Lila couldn’t keep her blood where it should be.

In her body. The blade hadn’t hit anything major, but it was only a matter of time before she bled out if she didn’t get any kind of medical help.

Except she wasn’t sure how to do that. Her legs weren’t working.

The killer had confiscated her radio. And no one—not even Branch—knew she was here.

“What do you think of my kidnapping skills now, Ranger Jordan?” That voice, tinted with a slight accent she still couldn’t place, filtered in through the darkness.

Thunder rumbled up through the ground. Or had it come from above?

She couldn’t tell. Something sharp set up residence in her chest, shortening her inhales.

Wave after wave of dizziness had tossed her brain in a blender and refused to relent.

“You’ve got the incapacitating your victim part down.

Kudos. The cave is also a great touch. Spooky. ”

Her throat ached with every attempt to speak, draining what energy she had left faster.

Another bubble of blood burst from the wound in her stomach.

Sarah Lantos had been stabbed just like this, but she imagined it would’ve been too much work for the killer to get Lila to the top of Angel’s Landing with an injury like the one in his thigh.

Which seemed to have been patched up as he approached her, discarding the shadows of whatever cave he’d dragged her into.

His laugh rolled with another explosion of thunder.

Ugh. She hated that laugh. Bet it’d become the star of her nightmares after this.

The storm was still going strong, but it did nothing to drown out the killer’s intentions.

“Thank you. I’ve learned a lot since the last time you and I were alone together. ”

“Is this the part where you open up your case of torture devices and detail your master plan while explaining how I don’t fit into it?” Pain spiked through her middle as she tried to push herself upright. “Or am I part of the plan? I can’t tell.”

“I don’t need an entire case of torture devices when I have you right where I want you.

” Crouching beside her, the killer withdrew that very same knife he’d introduced to her soft tissues, setting it against her cheek, and she froze.

The metal was warm despite the drop in her body temperature and the imposing elements.

She could still feel flecks of her blood crusted to the blade.

“You know, through all your noise and jokes and distractions, you’re really just a scared little girl with no one around to protect her. ”

Scared? Yes. Little girl? No. Though compared to his size, she didn’t blame him for making that assumption.

Lila reverted into the overly upbeat persona that’d kept her from breaking apart so many times before.

Her cheek pressed into the blade as she smiled.

“Haven’t you heard? Women are allowed to vote now.

We have jobs, can choose not to have kids and fight our own battles. ”

His responding smile set in place as he framed her chin in his free hand.

Right before the tip of the blade cut into her skin.

Stinging pain ticked her heart rate higher.

In a single move, he’d nearly sliced that fake smile off her face.

Blood dripped down her chin and hit the cave floor.

“How are you going to fight me when you’re bleeding out all over the ground? ”

That was a good question. One she’d have to come back to as he released her and took position standing over her. Her weight dragged her back to the hardened, rocky floor. At least this cave didn’t smell like decomposition. “Just get it over with.”

“Get it over with?” He cleaned the blade with his jacket. Much thicker than the long-sleeved shirt he’d worn before. Which meant he’d prepared for all kinds of weather before shoving Sarah Lantos off that cliff. “Are you really that eager to die?”

She had been once. And while that cavern of loneliness and Branch’s rejection had spread to the smallest crevices of her body—clawed her into a thousand little pieces—she didn’t want to die.

For the first time in years, the numbness had receded, leaving her raw and exposed to the slightest stimuli.

The feel of the rain on her skin, the sound of the wind roaring through the cave opening, the scent of something akin to burnt wood.

“The big villain speech. Obviously, you’re not going to kill me until you’ve made me suffer like Sarah Lantos.

” Lila tested her brain’s command of her fingers and toes.

The blade hadn’t caused enough damage to sever her connection to her limbs, but she’d sustained multiple injuries being tossed down that hill.

Coupled with the bruises on her ribs, she was pretty sure she’d broken something. “That’s a good place to start.”

“It doesn’t matter what I say. What matters is my plan for people like you.

People like my sister.” The killer looked down on her as though she was nothing more than a patch of mud under his shoe.

“She tortured me for years, you know. In little ways at first. Pinching me under the table at dinner, adding hot sauce to my food when I wasn’t looking.

Her face would light up every time she got a reaction out of me, but when I told my parents, no one believed me.

She had this uncanny ability to cover her tracks.

She moved onto testing her skills with knives while I slept, slicing between my toes and the bottoms of my feet.

Still, my parents wouldn’t believe their daughter could inflict such harm.

After a while she found threatening me to stay quiet by hurting my dog worked just as well as physical torture.

I loved that dog more than anything, and she took it from me for fun.

All while pasting a smile on her face to deflect suspicion. Much like you do.”

The comparison was delusional. There was no other way to describe it.

She’d never hurt an animal, let alone another person.

She’d never gone out of her way to inflict pain and suffering, but to the man standing above her, she might as well have been the one to commit those unforgivable sins he’d survived.

“Sarah Lantos was…your sister.” The pain in her torso intensified with every word.

She wasn’t sure how much blood she had lost, but she didn’t have an endless supply.

The longer she laid here, the sooner she’d lose her fight to escape.

Lila leveraged her weight into her elbow, cataloguing her injuries from head to toe.

Too many. She wanted nothing more than to sink back to the floor and lose herself in unconsciousness, but that would mean giving up.

She wasn’t ready to die. She’d just started to live despite the heartache that came with Branch’s accusations.

“It wasn’t until we were in our teens the psychologists recognized her antisocial personality disorder, but by then, the damage had already been done to me.

My parents, they realized their mistake when they found me bleeding out all over the kitchen floor after I took the remote from my sister to watch my show after school one day. ”

Retracting one arm from his coat, the killer exposed his forearm.

A thick, jagged scar trailed from his inner elbow to his wrist. The tissue hadn’t healed well, much like the scar across her throat.

Or maybe the damage had been beyond the physicians’ capabilities.

Her scar almost seemed to burn in response.

“They finally faced the monster they’d created.

The way she hurt others without any kind of remorse, how she went out of her way to push their boundaries, the manipulation tactics she used to get away with her behavior.

Years too late. Still, they went out of their way to get her help instead of locking her up where she belonged. ”

Acid churned in Lila’s gut at the realization she and this killer had more in common than most. How the people who were supposed to love and care for them had betrayed them, refused to believe them, ignored their pleas for help.

But trauma didn’t erase the violence he’d inflicted on his sister or her, and it sure as hell didn’t justify it.

“She kept torturing me.” The killer’s voice lowered an octave, freezing her in place.

“Drove away any woman who might show interest in me with lies of abuse and infidelity. Got me fired from multiple jobs by sleeping with my superiors. Even after my little stint in a psychiatric ward based off a false police report she filed, she set out to destroy me for no other reason than I was something in the way of her having my parents’ full attention. ”

Lila didn’t know what to say to that, what to think.

She wasn’t that person. But because she’d relied on a persona to bury all the bad and hide from the pain she couldn’t rid herself of, he’d equated her with the nightmare of his past. She could see it now, the slight manic gleam in his eyes with what little sun broke through the storm clouds.

Nothing she said would convince him he was suffering from a delusion.

Not even her death. He would kill her, then he’d move onto his next target.

And the next. Until the police finally caught up with him. “So you killed her.”

So many innocent lives destroyed, all because no one had believed him when he’d needed it most. She couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had she not kept her pain all bottled up as Ranger Barbie but instead unleashed it on the people around her.

Would she have become a killer as he had?

Would she have met Branch and found her dream job?

Would she still have fallen in love or let the darkness consume her?

“You think she didn’t deserve to die for what she’s done to me?” He was right back in her space, putting himself on her level, sliding the tip of the blade across her throat. Almost lovingly.

“I think you like listening to yourself talk.” Lila pressed one palm into the ground. She could stop him. She just had to figure out how to get her body to stop bleeding. And ignore the gut-wrenching agony ripping through her heart.

The truth was, none of those questions mattered.

She had buried her pain underneath layers of pink and glitter and bleach because the idea of taking it out on others as her brother-in-law had taken his domination out on her had sickened her down to the bone.

She’d found the safety she’d been craving since she was seventeen years old by getting lost and finding small pieces of herself in Zion National Park.

And she’d fallen in love with Branch because he’d been the first person to make an effort to understand her, broken or not.

He’d taken a good long look at all the darkness she hid from the world and held her anyway.

And she loved him for it. Stupid heart. “To be fair, I did ask for the villain speech, but I really don’t want your voice to be the last thing I hear before I die. ”

Her scalp burned as he fisted a hand in her hair. “You really don’t know when to keep your mouth shut, do you?”

“No.” Lila brought her boot between them and slammed her heel into his groin as hard as possible. The blade nicked her skin as he fell back with a scream of agony. It bounced off the walls and drilled deep into her soul. “That’s more like it.”

Getting her feet under her, she fell forward toward the exit, as though her body knew exactly where to go.

That sense only lasted a second before a hand wrapped around her ankle, and she hit the ground.

The breath knocked out of her as she reached for the cave’s entrance.

It was right there. All she had to do was run.

Her vision blurred as the killer flipped her onto her back. “Let’s see how loud you can scream this time.”