Her Final Words Read online

  PRAISE FOR BRIANNA LABUSKES

  PRAISE FOR GIRLS OF GLASS

  “Excellent . . . Readers who enjoy having their expectations upset will be richly rewarded.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  PRAISE FOR IT ENDS WITH HER

  “Once in a while a character comes along that gets under your skin and refuses to let go. This is the case with Brianna Labuskes’s Clarke Sinclair—a cantankerous, rebellious, and somehow endearingly likable FBI agent with a troubled past. I was immediately pulled into Clarke’s broken, shadow-filled world and her quest for justice and redemption. A stunning thriller, It Ends With Her is not to be missed.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author

  “It Ends With Her is a gritty, riveting, roller-coaster ride of a book. Brianna Labuskes has created a layered, gripping story around a cast of characters that readers will cheer for. Her crisp prose and quick plot kept me reading with my heart in my throat. Highly recommended for fans of smart thrillers with captivating heroines.”

  —Nicole Baart, author of Little Broken Things

  “An engrossing psychological thriller filled with twists and turns—I couldn’t put it down! The characters were filled with emotional depth. An impressive debut!”

  —Elizabeth Blackwell, author of In the Shadow of Lakecrest

  OTHER TITLES BY BRIANNA LABUSKES

  Black Rock Bay

  Girls of Glass

  It Ends With Her

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Brianna Labuskes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542005968

  ISBN-10: 1542005965

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  To Dana Leigh, my forever ride or die

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  MOLLY THOMAS

  It was a risk sneaking out to meet Eliza, but Molly needed to confess to what she’d done, the guilt all but suffocating her.

  Why, why had she gone to talk to that pretty deputy? No matter how close Eliza was with Sheriff Hicks, Eliza had been adamant from the start that they couldn’t bring in the police. She was bound to be furious with Molly.

  But Molly wasn’t brave or strong like Eliza. She was scared. So scared. And there was still a chance they could stop all this, they could stop it, they could . . .

  No. It’s too late. Someone was going to die.

  Because of you. No. No, because of . . .

  Eliza.

  Molly flinched, cowering from the thought, pushing it to a far corner in her mind where it couldn’t hurt her.

  They were meeting by the fence like always, and Molly would confess to Eliza that she’d gone to talk to the pretty deputy sheriff, she would. She promised herself that over and over and over as she picked her way across the uneven terrain in the darkness toward the property line between their two homes. The night made the familiar path more difficult to navigate, required more concentration. That’s why the sound didn’t register at first.

  And then it did.

  Boot against rock.

  Someone trying to be quiet.

  Molly stilled. Not quite nervous yet. She was close enough to the fence that it could be Eliza who’d come looking for her.

  It had to be Eliza because no one else should be out here. Molly would have noticed the car coming up from the road.

  Unless the person didn’t want to be seen.

  The night deepened, wrapping around Molly, but it wasn’t a comfortable weight like usual. Instead it squeezed, a vise around her chest. She tried, she tried to be quiet, to stop the wheezing, the desperate drag of oxygen, while she listened to hear if . . .

  There it was.

  There it was.

  Someone was moving closer.

  Her cheeks were wet almost before she realized she was crying. She’d thought panic looked different, but here it was, a breathless thing that came in a gentle wave instead of a crushing blow. Molly held a sob in her mouth, tucking it into the softness of her cheek so that it was absorbed by the bitten flesh.

  Go.

  Molly broke into a run, heading back toward the house, away from the fence, away from Eliza.

  She tripped, went down on a knee.

  The stench of fertilizer matched the sharp tang of fear that coated her tongue, her nostrils.

  Someone’s going to die.

  She’d known that. Molly just hadn’t realized it was going to be her.

  No. Inhale. Hold it. Count to five. Exhale. Stand up.

  She pushed to her feet.

  If someone had been chasing her, they should have been there, ready to overtake her, overpower her, drag her off to that horrific forest where all the victims disappeared.

  No one was there, though.

  Molly flushed hot. She was letting it get to her. All of this.

  This time when Molly started walking again, it was toward home. She listened for the night noises to return, the ones that had been scared
off by her terror, the scampering of creatures, birds in the distance, the rumble of a far-off engine.

  They didn’t come.

  Instead, it was just thick silence.

  No more boots, no more warnings. Just the unnatural hush that accompanied stalked prey.

  As she neared the dried-up creek bed, she heard it again.

  Footsteps.

  Behind her.

  No longer trying to be quiet.

  Molly didn’t pause, didn’t freeze.

  She ran.

  It was dark wherever Molly was being held, so dark there was no sound, no light, no reality beyond the frantic beating of her own heart.

  It was the kind of dark where Molly couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or not.

  Molly focused on the whisper of eyelashes against her cheeks. That, she could feel.

  Closed. Her eyes were closed.

  Open. Now they were open.

  She repeated it, blinking, slowly focusing on that flutter to ground her—ground her to her body, to time, to something other than pure fear.

  When her pulse no longer trembled unsteady and too loud against her throat, Molly sought out the pain.

  A dull throb in her shoulders.

  Bruised hips.

  Raw wrists.

  A knife-sharp heat in her ankle anytime she moved it.

  She cataloged each ache, each hurt, before trying to put it into context.

  The shoulders were because her arms were bound behind her back, where they bore the weight of her body. Though she was mostly numb, her skin still screamed from the rope abrasions.

  She had twisted enough so that her hips pressed against the top and bottom of the box she was in—because it was a box, she realized. Not a coffin.

  Her ankle. That had been from when she’d tripped. Running from . . .

  No.

  Blink, open. Blink, closed. Breathe.

  It wasn’t a coffin. It wasn’t a coffin.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LUCY THORNE

  Thursday, 3:00 a.m., three weeks later

  The girl in the interrogation room stared at the exact spot where FBI Agent Lucy Thorne stood behind the mirror that separated them.

  She was pale, nearly translucent—white-gold hair, porcelain skin, lips that only hinted at pink. But her eyes, that was where all the color was. Deep blue, made even more startling by the contrast to the rest of her.

  As Lucy met the girl’s gaze through the layers of glass, a chill sank into the marrow of her bones, a shiver rippling beneath her skin that had nothing to do with the temperature in the field office.

  “She asked for me?” Lucy checked again, despite the fact that Special Agent-in-Charge Grace Vaughn had already confirmed it three times.

  Some tired recess of Lucy’s brain had snagged the bit of information, and it ended up looped, the words chasing themselves—a question, then a statement, then a question once more.

  She asked for me?

  “By name,” Vaughn said, none of her trademark impatience obvious in the soft Georgia drawl she deployed at will.

  “You think she’s legit?”

  Vaughn didn’t take her attention from the girl. “Yes.”

  Lucy didn’t even know why she’d asked. Vaughn wouldn’t have called her in at 3:00 a.m. otherwise, not when she’d known Lucy had been in the middle of leading a training session out in the woods at the edge of the city.

  “She give her name?” Lucy asked, trying to tame her damp hair into a semblance of respectability. The forest had been muddy from the rain the day before, water still slipping from the trees’ leaves. Everyone had been soaked through by the end of the night session.

  “No.”

  An unidentified walk-in, then. Usually those were filtered out by the main desk, diverted to the local drunk tank or referred to a social worker. They rarely got to this point. Even if they asked for a specific agent.

  The girl had to have a convincing story.

  “We know nothing else, right?” Lucy asked, already heading for the door.

  “Blank slate.”

  Lucy nodded, then slipped into the hallway, pausing there to roll her shoulders, releasing some of the tension that had built as she’d watched the girl through the glass. Then she took a breath and stepped through the door.

  The girl tipped her head when she caught sight of Lucy, her expression calm—no panic, no fear there. Her eyes slid over Lucy, pausing at the damp spots from her hair, the mustard stain at the hem of her T-shirt, the dark jeans that had a rip at the knee, the dirt that had caked at the bend of her elbow. Lucy hadn’t had much time to clean up after getting Vaughn’s urgent message and had been lucky to have a change of clothes stashed in her car.

  Maybe Lucy could play it off as relatable rather than sloppy.

  Lucy pulled out the empty chair. “I’m Agent Lucy Thorne. I heard I might be able to help you.”

  Silence.

  “Can you tell me your name?” Lucy prodded. The girl wanted to talk. She must have. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been there.

  The girl shifted, licked her lips. The first sign of nervousness Lucy had seen.

  “Eliza.” The voice as pale as the rest of her. “Eliza Cook.”

  It felt like a victory, though it shouldn’t. “Nice to meet you, Eliza.”

  Lucy kept her tone friendly, casual like they were anywhere in the world but a stark interrogation room in the Seattle FBI office. “Can you tell me why you’re here, Eliza?”

  The girl’s eyes slid to the mirrored glass and then back to Lucy’s face. “I’d like to report a murder.”

  That still didn’t make her unusual enough to get this far. The Seattle office alone fielded dozens of reports like that a month—most of them false. Still, Lucy’s eyes dropped to Eliza’s hands, looking for any telltale specks of dried blood at the beds of her fingernails. They were clean. “All right. Who was the victim, Eliza?”

  “You keep saying my name like that, you know?”

  Lucy did know. Using someone’s name frequently was a tactic she’d often employed when there was a possibility the person was in the midst of a psychotic break. She wasn’t usually called on it. “Like what?”

  “Like I’m crazy,” Eliza said. “Like you think if you say my name enough I’ll remember I’m a person.”

  The chill crawled back in. “Do you not feel like a person?”

  When Eliza answered, it was quiet, just an exhale really. “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes what?”

  Eliza blinked, a flutter of nearly translucent lashes. “Sometimes I forget I’m a person.”

  “And when’s that, Eliza?”

  A corner of her mouth twitched, the barest hint of amusement. “There you go again. With my name.”

  “We all need a reminder we’re human, Eliza.” Lucy shrugged, sweeping her arm out to draw attention to the hair that had dried into dirt-encrusted clumps, to the stains, the frayed jeans. Relatable. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Are we, though?” Eliza asked.

  “Are we what?”

  “Human.” For a heartbeat, Eliza curled in on herself, her chin dipped, almost bowing forward beneath some invisible weight. Grief? Guilt? Something between the two? The flash of vulnerability was gone as quickly as it had come, but it left behind a reminder that this girl was a girl. Probably no older than seventeen, if Lucy had to guess.

  “What else would we be?”

  The composure Eliza seemed to wear so comfortably was back. “Monsters.”

  The word slid like a blade between Lucy’s ribs. Lucy sat back, shaken as if Eliza’s damning assessment had stripped bare all the terrible darkness that lived inside her own body. Monsters.

  “His name is Noah Dawson,” Eliza said when Lucy just sat there, that soft voice almost disappearing beneath the nearly inaudible hiss of the overhead lights. “He is twelve years old.”

  There was a pause, and Eliza looked away. “Was.”

  Lucy made a note of that tense
change for later. “Can you tell us anything else?”

  “You’ll find him here.” Eliza reached into her pocket, pulled out a small piece of paper, and then slid it across the table toward Lucy. “Near the rocks is the knife that killed him. The one that carved a Bible verse into his skin.”

  The specificity of the last bit had Lucy leaning forward, the anticipation that had been an almost-lazy hum before notching up into a hot throb in the recesses of her gut.

  When Lucy looked up, it was to find those eyes, those dark blue eyes, watching her without blinking.

  “Say it,” Eliza said. “There’s a verse cut into the skin. Say it.”

  The demand was desperate, more a plea than anything else. Closer to manic than Lucy had yet to see from the girl.

  This was something important. Why? Why did Eliza need Lucy to acknowledge it when there was no chance she’d forget such a detail?

  “There’s a verse,” Lucy repeated, obedient because the very fact that Eliza was focused on it was more important than Lucy’s need to assert control over the interrogation. “Carved into his skin.”

  Eliza’s shoulders slumped once the words were out between them, as if Lucy had sworn an oath, a blood oath that couldn’t be broken.

  Lucy glanced back down at the slanted scrawl that told of the location of the body.

  There was a question Lucy had to ask. She knew the answer, she knew it, yet she had to give voice to the words that for some reason she was reluctant to actually form.

  “How do you know all this, Eliza?”

  There was an electricity in the air like before a summer storm’s first lightning strike, the promise of thunder and wind lurking behind it.

  Eliza met Lucy’s eyes. Only a thin ring of dark blue remained, the black of her dilated pupils consuming the rest.

  “Because I killed him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ELIZA COOK

  Four weeks earlier

  Eliza Cook didn’t think God would notice that she wasn’t singing.

  Aunt Rachel would tell her different; so would everyone Eliza knew, really. Maybe not Hicks, but she wasn’t supposed to talk to the sheriff anyway.

  The voices rose around her—the chorus of “Amazing Grace.” It was haunting in its beauty in the specific way only a song sung by dozens of people could sound. It rubbed against the seams of the church, against the walls, the ceiling, the windows, not to escape but to fill every possible empty space before the devil could get there.