Page 104 of Ash and Poison

“All the years of work, and is this how you’re going to go down?” She turned toward me and speared me with a cutting look.

“I don’t know what came over me.” I knew, but that was more disturbing than the lies.

She nodded. “I hope he won’t say anything to Doctor Stanley. He’ll get us in trouble if he even mentions this.”

“He won’t,” I bit out, gripping the side of the seat. The need to break something was a violent call in my head, but I knew Diya would lose it if I did that.

“You sure?”

“I am. He’d do anything to save you. From me. He’s in love with you,” I said.

If I was a decent human, I would let her go. She wouldn’t be in constant turmoil and danger with him.

But I wasn’t.

“Bullshit. He doesn’t even know me. He couldn’t love me,” she whispered, eyes wide, lips pulling down.

“I know him, and he used to look at Riley the same way he was looking at you. After all that, he… left her.”

Vincent, Riley and I grew up together. Best friends for life. The Three Stooges. We did everything together. In high school, she started dating Vincent, and I was happy for my two best friends. Riley was more my sister than a friend, and Vincent was my brother.

After her parents died, Riley changed. The first time she got caught with drugs at school made everything worse.

Vincent told her they should break up.

She begged him not to. I begged him to stay, to not leave her when she needed him the most. I told him she was just lost, and we needed to be there for her until she could pull herself together.

“I can’t be with a drug addict,” he had said. “I won’t.”

And that was it.

I’d never forget the look on Riley’s face that day. Something inside her just... cracked. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even sad. She was empty. And she used more drugs to filled that emptiness.

If he had tried, if I had, we could have saved her. Together.

I blamed myself just as much as I blamed him.

“Death and tragedy have a way of pushing people together or completely ripping them apart.” She sighed. “It brought us closer.”

“Your sisters…”

She nodded.

“They’d kill for me, and I’d do the same for them. Love and trust is a luxury, and I have only opened myself enough to love and trust Layne and Trina.”

“And?”

“And you. I trust you,” she said, her voice so soft it made my whole heart expand.

“Thank you for that, and I promise never to break that trust.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the only reason I trust you even though you once tried to kill me.”

I pouted. “That was in the past. All in the past.”

We stopped by the post office on our way to Hollowhaven. Diya packed the zip-lock bags in paper after paper before she pushed it inside an envelope. After asking me to wait, she walked in and came back after a few minutes.

“Now, all we have to do is wait for Liam to do his job,” she said as we drove silently toward Hollowhaven.