Page 79 of How to Kill Your Rival

Her whole demeanour changes in seconds. One moment, she’s warm and sweet and languid, and the next, she’s stiff and angry, her lips pressed into a firm line as she listens. It’s like her walls are being topped back up with cement as I watch.

‘When,’ is the first thing she says.

Then she listens for a little longer.

‘How long?’

Her jaw tightens as her fingers whiten against the edge of her phone.

‘I’ll call you back,’ she says, and hangs up, her nostrils flaring as she takes a moment.

‘Is everything okay?’ I ask.

‘No, everything is not okay. Fraser’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘He’s been taken. They left a note.’

‘What does it say?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know. Maggie told me to come as quickly as I can.’

Eliza is on her feet as she talks, trying to pull on her dress from yesterday but struggling with it in her anger.

Getting to my feet, I toss her a sweatshirt. It’s long enough to cover what she needs to cover to get back to her room. She takes it without comment and pulls it over her wild hair.

‘We need to tell your father,’ I say.

‘Not yet.’ Her words are half a demand and half a threat. ‘I need to think first.’

‘Eliza—’

‘Not yet.’

So I dress as she leaves the room, worry sour in the pit of my stomach. Who has Fraser? And why? It has to be whoever has been fucking with Eliza.

Whoever tried to blow us up.

Someone with a fucking death wish.

25

ELIZA

The note is worse than I imagined because what they demand is impossible.

Not just undoable, but full-on pigs-sprouting-wings impossible.

Produce Eddie Stewart alive within seven days, or your brother doesn’t come home, and your sister is next.

I must read it a dozen times before I collapse onto the chair in Fraser’s room.

Alive.

Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck.

Eddie Stewart is dead as a bloody dodo. Hewie, Dewie, and Louie have turned him into long-washed-away pig shit.