His face twisted and he leapt at her again. This time, Heather embraced him, ignoring the bright white agony as the knife tore across her midriff, and pivoted herself. When she had gravity back on her side, she pushed with everything she had left, and Lyle Reave fell away from her, into the dark space filling the stairs.

There was a shout and series of thumps, and then silence. Heather stood very still, waiting.

Later, Heather wouldn’t be able to say how long she had stood at the top of the stairs, bleeding from three knife wounds and staring down into the dark, waiting for her brother to come charging back up. When she thought of that time, she remembered the sound of the sea, somewhere beyond the windows, and the steady drip of her blood splashing onto bare floorboards.

Eventually the spell, whatever it was, broke, and she snatched up her phone and the knife before heading, very slowly, downstairs. At the bottom she found a light switch, which she flicked on, and there was Lyle Reave, lying in a heap just to one side of the final step. Gritting her teeth, Heather pressed her fingers to his throat—she thought, for a moment, she felt a flicker there, some movement in his blood, but then she seemed to lose it; it was difficult to tell if he was alive or not, over the thumping in her own head and the pain in her arm and stomach.

Nikki.

Nikki was in the Folly, possibly with another woman, possibly under the care of something Lyle had called “the old wolf.” Heather had no idea who that could be—it couldn’t be Michael Reave, who was, presumably, still safely locked up—but whoever they were, they would be expecting Lyle. Lyle could get into the Folly, could probably even get to the women. It was where he was supposed to be.

As quickly as she could, Heather stripped off his stained shirt and his jeans—underneath them he was lean and scarred, little round marks on his thighs and stomach suggesting that someone had once used him as an ashtray—and, dumping her own clothes on the floor, dressed in them herself. They were a little large, but not significantly so, and she rolled down the sleeves of the dark shirt to cover the wound on her arm. With the wicked little knife, which had landed on the stairs, she stood and cut raggedly at the back of her hair, chopping off the last three inches or so that curled at her neck and at the sides of her face. Feathery pieces of dark hair fell across her brother’s face and chest as she did so.

With her phone and the big knife shoved into the jeans pocket and the lethal blade in her hand, Heather stepped back into the night.

CHAPTER

44

BEFORE

SHE HAD THOUGHT she was safe. She had thought she had walked away from it all, had left that dark time behind her.