“You’re not in love.” My hands twisted futilely behind me, scraped by the tightly knotted rope. “You’re just the most brainwashed. The most in need of help.”
She shook her head, brown eyes pitying. “I’ve thought about you so many times over the years. Felt guilty for the empty life you must be leading. I’m sorry for you, Shay. But you can’t come back.”
I swallowed, pushing past the bitterness to concentrate on what my instincts were telling me: First, identify the threat. “Where’s Rachel?”
Laurel walked to the long, low table that held gardening equipment and picked up a trowel. “You know she was a sadist, right? A remorseless psychopath. She started killing girls who stepped out of line—without even talking to Don or me first. She just left us to deal with the mess.”
The missing women. My heart was in my throat. “How did you deal with it?”
Laurel stopped twirling the trowel and gave me a long, steady look. Then she pointed it at the door. “We put them in the garden. We had no other choice.”
The garden? Surely not—
Her voice grew softer. “Their bodies fertilize the flowers. It’s beautiful, Shay. I made it for Clem, with all her favorites. She’d love it here.”
Horror gripped me. It was true, then. Girls who went to the Hilltop never came back. It wasn’t a mecca. It was a graveyard.
“Rachel was going to get caught,” Laurel said. “Rumors started swirling. People on the outside started paying attention. Even the governor talked about it during some speech. It took all of our favors to keep things quiet.” She frowned. “She was always in the way, from the beginning. Don’s monstrous daughter.”
“His real one?”
Laurel’s eyes brightened. I’d hit on something she cared about. “No. Can you believe it? They weren’t even related. Don just found her and felt sorry for her ’cause she was some foster runaway. So he took her in and treated her like family. The only good she ever did was lead Don to us.”
Rachel and Don weren’t related. A thousand memories came back—the lack of emotion between them, Rachel’s nonchalance while we grew increasingly obsessed with her dad. Was she Don’s first victim, or were they grifters together—two people who’d realized their proclivities aligned? Was Rachel the one who scouted us for Don, told him all about our vulnerabilities? We’d seen her as a ticket into Rothschild; she’d seen three young women ripe for deliverance.
“It doesn’t matter that she wasn’t his real daughter,” Laurel said. “He treated her like one, and that was the problem. There couldn’t be two favorites. And she was going to ruin the Paters before we could ever reach our goal, get to Albany. So I confronted her.”
“You did?” I couldn’t imagine it—shy, gentle Laurel against cold, vicious Rachel.
“I yelled and threatened her, but she wouldn’t break. She just kept smiling at me because she knew she had the ultimate weapon. Her terrible secret. That’s when she told me Clem hadn’t chosen to die. Rachel chose for her.”
My heart beat wildly in my chest. “How did she do it?”
“Somehow she found out Clem was planning to run. I think she used to spy on us. When she took Clem to campus that day, Clem snuck out of class and ran to Cargill to meet her soccer coach. She didn’t realize Rachel was following her.”
Laurel walked across the room and stopped at a low wooden chest, pulling open the top drawer. She slipped a hand inside and tugged out a glass-topped box, flipped the hinges, and drew an object from its crushed-velvet bed.
The pugio. I would recognize it anywhere. In Laurel’s hands the dagger was oversized, the metal blackened with age, its tip ending in the narrowest point, like a needle. Lethal delicacy.