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Fourteen

HOPE

T his isn’t how this is supposed to go. That was supposed to be a lie. It has to be a lie. She left. She found happiness somewhere and just couldn’t come get me. They had a fight and she left in the middle of the night… from the cabin… without the car… in a place with no taxis.

The more I try to justify it and stick to that story, the more it falls apart.

He had to be lying.

He couldn’t have killed her.

He…

Tears roll over my eyelashes before I can stop them and if I move, they’ll all know. Dimitri stiffens and tightens his hold on me. He doesn’t ask me to move. He doesn’t do anything but sit there, his heart thudding in my ear, steady, strong, and only slightly fast.

“Explain,” Knox grunts.

“He said he killed her. I brought up the video I saw of her, asked if she left because she knew that he was a twisted fuck, then he said she never left the property. That she’s always been here. That she’s proof ghosts don’t exist,” Jaxon snarls.

I hear and feel him pacing. It’s making me nauseous. It’s making it hard to keep my eyes closed, hard to exist. I take an unsteady breath and take in Dimitri’s scent. I grip his shirt and his hand harder. I want to fold myself up and disappear. Or wring out every bad memory that’s filling my brain.

Why isn’t that an option?

Why do I keep expecting to hear a door open and find my dad looming there, watching me with hunger and violence?

Dimitri is right here. Jaxon and Knox are talking. It’s stupid!

“Easy,” Dimitri says.

“Stop. Don’t tell me to calm down. He’s a fucking killer. That’s who your father is defending. That’s who’s been…” He trails off.

Even with him this mad, I know I’m the reason he’s quiet. It was the same thing last night. Knox had to tell him to knock it off, but whenever I flinched, Jaxon would calm. He’s trying. He’s trying to control himself for me.

That’s not right.

It doesn’t make sense. They’ve never been that focused on me. Ever. At least not like that.

They take what they want and ignore how it makes me feel, twisting and warping it into whatever they want it to be.

When the silence draws out, I slowly look up. Jaxon is fuming. He’s put his hands on top of his head. He stares at the ceiling for a long moment. Knox keeps looking between Jaxon and me. Finally, he says something.

“He could be lying. He’s fucking with us. All of us in different ways. Dimitri?”

“Didn’t say much to me,” he reports. “Was mostly passed out thanks to you. When he came to, he asked if I’d visited my dad and how that went.”

Knox rolls out his neck.

“He said he buried her below the white tree. I don’t know what that means. All the trees here are brown and green,” Jason says slowly.

No.

I don’t realize I’ve said the word until all of them look at me.

“A white tree. Her favorite tree. Nicest thing he ever did for her,” Jaxon continues while watching me.

A whimper leaves my throat and Knox perks. “Who’s watching him?”

They all look towards the back and Dimitri stands, ready to take over, but all I can think about is the tree with the white flowers. The flowers she would weave into my hair. The tree I carved “Mom and Hope forever” into, proud that I spelled it all right.

I don’t know that I’m running until I feel the ground under my feet and the burn in my throat as I pant. I have to get to it. I have to find her. If it’s a lie, I’ll know.

If it’s true…

It can’t be true…

Mom had a temper when he’d yell, but she was good. She was kind. She was soft and welcoming and gentle.

I see my carved message first, higher than when I carved it, and drop to my knees.

My fingers rip through the weeds, through the layers of fallen leaves and light dirt and seeds until I get to wetter earth. I keep going. I hear someone yelling my name. I hear the crunching of twigs and leaves under boots, but I don’t care. I can’t stop.

No. No. She can’t be here. If she’s not here, she’s safe.

I can imagine her happy. She found love, but my dad kept her from me.

He wouldn’t let her get close. Then I tried to disappear.

She just hasn’t been able to find me and I wouldn’t know her name because she was hiding from him.

Someone rescued her. A neighbor saw her and took her away. Someone…

“Hope, stop. You have to stop,” Knox insists.

As he tries to pull me away, my fingers brush something hard and smooth and everything in me starts to collapse.

KNOX

Hope is crazed. When I touch her shoulder, she nearly claws me. She digs hard and fast as she sobs. Dimitri reaches for her, then freezes. Hope lets out a cry and wail that breaks. Her whole body sags as I pull her into my arms and away from the half-skull that’s peeking out of the dirt.

She shakes her head and reaches out to it, but I turn her around and hold her against my chest. She beats against my shoulder, sobbing and babbling incomprehensibly. Dimitri just stares at it. He doesn’t react. He might as well be frozen.

I shudder, but Hope screams into my shirt, then goes utterly limp. I drop with her, rubbing her back.

“She escaped!” she yells, voice unfamiliar and ragged. “She got out!”

“Fucking…” Not even Jaxon can put this together.

He’s panting, but pale. None of us thought Coach was capable of this.

Hope’s mom left. She ran off with someone else. We had no reason to question him. We had no reason not to believe him.

We had no reason to believe that Hope wasn’t demanding sex from him either.

I curse softly and hold her tighter. “Sweetheart.”

Her hold on me softens as she continues sobbing. Even when I try to keep her focused on me, she’s restless. “Hope, don’t look. You don’t need to see it. We’ll take care of it,” I promise.

She pushes at my hand on the back of her head, obviously willing to let me rip her hair out, but shoves and pushes at me until I let go. Rolling over, she crawls back to the skeleton and gently touches the skull.

It looks so white against Hope’s dirt-stained fingers. Her hand shakes and she gasps between her sobs. “Safe now. You’re… safe now.”

“Fuck, this is… it’s too…” Jaxon can’t. He looks from Hope to her mother’s unmarked grave again and again, tears clouding his eyes as his hands tremble at his sides.

He can’t process it and Dimitri remains frozen.

Hope’s dealing with the worst of this, but knowing a murderer, having trusted a murderer, backed a murderer, seeing Hope like this, learning so much about Coach, seeing the evidence of exactly how terrible he was, isn’t something any of us can shake off.

Jax is furious, that’s obvious. He’s choking on his words, restless, obviously plotting something, Dimitri is in shock.

If I take even a second to focus on myself, I’ll implode.

And Hope… Hope stroking her mom’s skull like it will help her, like it will comfort a long-dead woman is really fucking close to ruining me.

“Hope, it’s time to walk away. You don’t have to see this—”

“Death is safe,” she whispers.