(And other painful obstacles.)

“Kyla,” she says, and hates how shaky and desperate she sounds. “Kyla, are you seriously okay with this?”

She twists around in Brandon’s grip to meet the other girl’s eyes, but Kyla won’t look at her. Stares down at the ground instead. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just can’t go back where I came from.”

“They’re going to kill us,” Dawn tells her. “You know that, right?”

Kyla doesn’t answer.

“You think I want to go home?” Dawn says. “My life’s a fucking mess, Kyla. I live with a drug dealer. You think I want to go back?”

Kyla still doesn’t answer.

“I wish I could still run away,” Dawn says. “You think I don’t want to just follow you out to that highway and disappear and start over?”

“I do,” Dawn says. “I really freaking do. But here’s the thing. I’m not a fucking murderer, Kyla. I can’t just fucking kill someone to get what I want.”

“Kyla,” Dawn says.

“You’re not a murderer either.”

“Don’t you let them do this.”

Dawn is too angry at Kyla to be scared. Like, she knows she’s probably going to die anyway, but it pisses her off that Kyla’s just going to go along with it. Like, Grow some backbone, girl.

Like, at least lodge a complaint.

But Kyla doesn’t do anything, not one token gesture. She just wipes her eyes and looks out across the valley. “I’m so sorry,” she says again.

Then she walks away, and that’s when Dawn knows she and Brielle are properly, truly fucked.

She knows that in a minute or so, Warden is going to tell Brandon and Evan to push her and Brielle over the edge of this cliff. And she’ll fall, and Brielle will fall, and they’ll collide into those jagged rocks and be impaled by trees and by the time they hit bottom they’ll be barely recognizable.

And when the rescue teams finally come and find their bodies—assuming they even find the bodies before spring—it’s going to look, by and large, like two silly girls had a terrible accident, not that they were horribly murdered.

And Warden and Brandon and Evan and Kyla will be long gone by then, disappeared into the ether, and Brielle and Dawn and Lucas and Alex and Christian and Amber will just be six casualties in a terrible, terrible catastrophe.

Dawn can see it play out.

And even if she doesn’t have the details quite right, what she’s one hundred percent sure of is that Brandon is going to push her over the edge of this cliff.

And she’s going to fall.

And she’s going to die.

Chapter 106

(OF COURSE, THIS ISN’T TRUE.

You know that’s not how this story ends.