Page 67 of Traitor
Chapter Twenty-Five
Peyton
I come to,my head screaming, and crack open an eye to get my bearings. A steep drop fills my vision and I gasp, my hands attempt to reach out for an anchor, my stomach pitching. The parfait I’d had for breakfast threatens to resurface and I whimper.
“Oh, calm down. You aren’t going anywhere.”
Feet scuffle against concrete and I arch my neck to the side to find Alice leaning against the security fencing. “Where are we?” I ask when my brain pulses in protest.
“The Point, waiting for lover boy.”
“Ford? Why? Alice you don’t have to do this.” My mental gears are rusty and thoughts slow. I try to move my arms and realize they’re pulled behind my back with a restraint.
“Don’t try moving. You aren’t going to get free.”
“How did you get me out here? What are you planning to do?”
Alice braces herself against the barricade and studies the view beyond. “You started waking up when we got close. You did most of the work, it was a matter of keeping you upright. All you need to know is I never intended to hurt you—either of you—really. If you’d kept your nose in your own business, none of this would have had to happen.”
“You don’t need to involve Ford. Just take me,” I plead.
“Not a chance,” comes his voice and my stomach sinks. “I’m here now. I’ll do what you want, Alice, but you’ve got to let Peyton go. She won’t say a word about what happened, and you can take your pound of flesh from me.”
The way I’m bound, I can’t turn to see him and everything inside me aches to see his face one more time.
“Isn’t that sweet?” Alice croons. “Nice and easy, now, Ford. No heroics.” She steps closer to my side and the cold press of a gun barrel kisses the skin at my temple.
“You don’t have to have a gun to her head. I’m here. I’ll do what you want.”
She jams it into my skin and I cry out in pain, head still tender from the earlier blow. At my sound of pain, she slams the butt of the gun against my temple and I go limp, nearly blacking out again. I only manage to hold onto consciousness by clinging to the sound of Ford’s harsh shouts of protest.
I hang limply from the post or whatever she has me tied to, my arms at an awkward angle, and my shoulders throbbing in pain, but it’s nothing compared to the maelstrom of hurt knocking around inside my skull. My thigh muscles quiver with the effort to hold my weight, and I heave myself up to lean against the post. As Alice and Ford argue, I struggle to keep from passing out. It’s only my hands knocking against a lump in my back pocket that shocks me back to clarity.
My knife.
A spurt of adrenaline kicks my thoughts back into gear, and I hope Alice can’t see what I’m doing as I adjust my position to fit my numb hands into my pocket. It takes a long time, longer than I thought, to fit my awkward fingers around the pocket knife. I’ve never been more grateful for my recent habit of keeping a weapon on me at all times than I am as I pull it from my jeans. It takes precious moments longer to flip open the blade.
“What do you want from us?” I hear Ford ask. His voice is closer than it had been, and I realize he’s standing close behind me, shielding me. My already weak knees turn to jelly.
I strain to hear above the pounding in my head and the roar of the wind to hear Alice’s reply. “You two are gonna take a tumble over the Point here. They’ll find your bodies…eventually. I didn’t want it to come to this, but you left me no choice.”
“You always have a choice. You chose to kill Lola.”
“That bitch told me she was pregnant!” Alice’s scream echoes inside my head and against the rock walls surrounding us.
“Lola was pregnant?” Ford asks.
“Five years I’ve been trying to have a baby. Five. Then she takes me out to the lake house and tells me like I should be happy for her. She was pregnant with my husband’s baby, and she expected me to let the two of them get away so they could live happily ever after.”
“So you two went for a late-night ride and you drowned her.”
There’s a pause and I swear the sound of the knife sawing through the rope binding my wrists together is as loud as the beat of my heart.
“I wanted to talk to her, reason with her. But there’s no reasoning with Lola. There never has been. She told me she was going to have the baby, no matter what I wanted. Jim deserved to be happy and they were happy together. He was going to leave me, you see, to be with her. The happy little family. I had to do it.”
“She was going to make you look like a fool,” Ford says.
“In front of everyone! It would have killed Mama to have such a scandal flaunted around town.”