I have no idea what she was planning to say. Whether she was going to thank me or find some way to accuse me of being behind the whole thing. But she stops glaring at me in the halls, and if a truce is the best I’ll ever get with Savannah, hey, I’ll take it.
There’s one thing that’s still bothering me though. That’s bothered me ever since the day Hollowell died. Something that takes me weeks to fully process, and even longer to be ready to talk about.
“He saved me,” I murmur one night just before graduation. I’m curled up in Linc’s arms, our legs tangled together as I rest my head on his chest, absorbing the solid, reassuring sound of his heartbeat. “Hollowell. He saved my life.”
There’s a small pause, then I feel Lincoln nod. “Yeah. He did.”
“But…” I lift my head, draping myself over him a little more fully as I gaze at his face in the darkness. “Why? I mean, why would he do that? He’d already killed Iris. He’d already as good as threatened to kill me. And I honestly think he would’ve done it if he had to. So why save me? It was his last act. It was the last thing he ever did.”
Lincoln lets out a sharp breath, reaching up to run his fingers through my hair. “I don’t know, Low. I’ve asked myself that question more times than I can count, and I still don’t fucking know.” His hand halts its motion, his eyes flashing in the dim light. “I hate that motherfucker. I hate him for what he put you through—what he put us all through.”
Then he hauls me higher up his body, banding his arms around me and kissing me hard, like he’s trying to remind himself that he still can. That I’m still here. When we break apart, we’re both breathing a little harder, and I can feel his body shudder lightly beneath mine as he exhales a long sigh.
“But what I’ve decided is this: it doesn’t matter why he did it. Maybe he wanted to do one decent thing before he died. Maybe he was trying to save his own damn soul. Or maybe he just hated Niles D’Amato more than he ever hated any of us. I’ll never get the chance to ask him, so I’ll never know for sure.”
His hands skim up my body, drifting up past my shoulders to thread through my hair again as he cradles my face, holding it just a few inches from his own.
“But what I do know is, you’re alive. And I’m so fucking grateful for that.”
Epilogue
It’s the sunrise that wakes me up.
I think my body can sense that our vacation is about to come to an end, but instead of letting me sleep in like a normal high school graduate in her last weeks of summer break, it wakes me up early, demanding I not waste any of these last few precious days on something as trivial as sleep.
Who needs it anyway?
I managed to make it to graduation with my GPA mostly intact, and if there were still a few low B’s floating around on my transcript, it certainly didn’t make Mom or Hunter cheer any less loudly for me when Principal Osterhaut announced my name. And I still got into the same university as the guys, which was the only thing I was really concerned about.
Hunter met all of them when she came out to celebrate my graduation, just after walking in her own ceremony in Bayard a week earlier. She teased the fuck out of me for being, as she put it, “a badass bitch with four smokin’ hot boyfriends”, but she gave them all her best friend stamp of approval. Which is a good thing, because neither of us were kidding about our plan—she’ll be going to the same school as the five of us in the fall.
We’ll start college soon, which feels fucking weird to say. But before we tackle that mountain, the guys and I decided to have one last little hurrah, so we rented a beach house in Cape Cod for a couple weeks. We’ve only got a few more days left here though, and I’m not ready to return to real life.
The curtains are open on the sliding glass door, allowing orange sunlight to creep across the floor like slow flowing lava. Dax’s arm is thrown over my waist, and there are several other body-shaped lumps under the blanket on the king-sized bed. There are several other bedrooms in the house, but we all seemed to gravitate toward the one with the biggest bed from day one.
Not that I’m complaining. At all.
Holding my breath and using all my ninja skills, I maneuver out from under Dax’s arm and slip out of bed without waking him. Just because I can’t sleep past six a.m. doesn’t mean everyone should be forced to wake up with the sun on our last week of freedom before school starts.
The sunlight is just beginning to heat the hardwood floor, which feels cool against my bare feet as I pad toward the door. I’m only wearing panties and Chase’s t-shirt, which hangs down to just below my ass, but the back patio leads directly to the private beach behind the house, so no one will be able to see me.
I slide the door open and shut it behind me, tilting my head up to catch the first soft rays of the sun—when a hand whips out and grasps my wrist.
A startled yelp escapes me, and I slap my free hand over my chest as I turn to face Lincoln. He’s sitting in one of the large deck chairs, which is offset just enough from the glass doors that I couldn’t see him before I stepped outside.
“Jesus Christ,” I gasp, panting dramatically. “My heart.”
He smirks at me, then tugs on my wrist, pulling me onto his lap so I’m
