Page 34 of Last Rites

After several more minutes, Isla cleared her throat, prompting me to glance over. She wasn’t looking at me, but her hands were twisting in the hem of her shirt.

“I’m sorry about Levitt,” she said. “I know the two of you were close.”

The mention of his name still stirred pain in me. Things had been so promising before he was murdered; the future looked bright at long last, and I wanted the chance to move on from the Bone Men for both of us. Levitt gave more in his efforts to change the cult than I ever had. He did impossible things, gave up all chances of having any sort of livelihood when he gave up his hand, all to keep Merrick from power so he could steer things away from the darkness my father had driven them to.

Isla was right. Levitt and I had been close, but we could have been closer. If I’d trusted him enough to be honest, if he hadn’t been so afraid, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe with Levitt behind us, our resistance could have stepped out of the shadows and done real good.

But I was a coward. Always had been. And what had it ever gotten me but pain?

“Thank you,” I said softly. There wasn’t much else to say.

Her eyes, eerily bright in the moonlight, met mine briefly. She gave a tight smile and turned her gaze back out to the woods ahead of us.

“I’m glad you and Penny survived your third Oath,” she said, then fell quiet again as she chewed her lip.

It wasn’t the first time she’d expressed the sentiment, though this time I appreciated it more now that I knew she’d risked her own life to tell Levitt about what she overheard the morning before we drank the hemlock tea. That she’d turned in Merrick, Harlan, and her own brother for conspiring to give Penny and me twice the concentration of poison that they gave everyone else.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help you,” she said after several long moments of silence.

“You did more than anyone else,” I assured her. Even if Levitt hadn’t been willing to risk Isla’s safety to confront our would-be murderers, it still meant a lot that she tried. “I don’t begrudge Levitt prioritizing your safety since Penny and I were out of immediate danger.”

There was no denying that I was still bitter about the whole thing, but this far on the other side of it, I could see why my old friend made the decisions he did. Isla was the only one who could have known what was said in secret in the apothecary, and making those accusations public would have put a target on her back. There was no way to know if there were more people involved in the plot than Merrick, Harlan, and Otis. Clearly, Levitt had been more confident in my ability to keep Penny and myself safe than he was about Isla.

Though, judging by how she’d stepped between Anders and me back at the campsite, I wondered if Levitt had underestimated her the same way I underestimated Penny.

“I would happily risk it again,” Isla said, and when I met her eyes a second time, she had a determined look about her. Her words were pointed, too, and I had a feeling we weren’t talking about the past anymore.

“Some things aren’t worth risking,” I replied.

Her pale brows drew down, casting her eyes in shadow. “So that’s it, then?” she asked, her tone accusatory. “You’re giving up?”

I wanted to protest but almost couldn’t bring myself to. She was right. I was staring down a hallway of closed doors with nothing but the abyss awaiting me at the end. There were no more avenues left to me that didn’t end in countless deaths.

“I’m not giving up,” I argued, “I’m being prudent. I’m trying to make sure as many people as possible make it to the other side of this alive.”

She scoffed. “You aren’t responsible for everyone, you know.”

“So I’ve been told, but that doesn’t make me feel any less culpable.”

Isla rounded on me, walking sideways so she could fix me with a hard stare. I looked away, searching the woods far to our right for a sign of Rosie and Penny.

“We all knew what we were getting into when we agreed to join you,” she insisted. “We knew the⁠—”

“I can’t see them anymore,” I broke in. My heart lurched in my chest as I stared harder into the gloom, desperate to make out the shapes of our companions between the trees.

Isla stepped up beside me and squinted into the dark. Her swallow was audible before she said, “I don’t see them, either.”

I broke off in the direction Rosie and Penny had been heading. Isla hurried behind me as we crested a small rise. I hoped they were blocked by the curve of the hill, but all that stretched before us were rows and rows of densely packed trees.

“No! Stop!”

Rosie’s scream tore through the woods, high and sharp enough to freeze the blood in my veins. I bolted toward the sound, heart hammering so hard it drowned out thought. Somewhere to my left, Isla kept pace, but I barely registered her presence.

Rosie screamed again, her voice cracking with panic. “Let him go!”

We broke through the last line of trees into a clearing bathed in cold moonlight, and the sight that met us was a living nightmare.

On the far side of the grass, Anders had his arm locked tight around Penny’s throat, hauling him backward like a rag doll. Penny’s legs kicked uselessly several inches above the ground, his face mottled red and gasping. Rosie stood a few feet away, her knife raised in a trembling hand. Her shirt clung to her in damp patches, soaked with something dark that caught the moonlight—blood, though I couldn’t tell whose. Anders’s machete lay discarded behind her, splattered with yet more blood, and the grass around their feet glittered where droplets had fallen.