She texted him back, not wanting to compete with the utter blanket of love she felt for him from his text. So she kept it simple and typed the words she'd only ever remembered saying to Ashley and Rachel.

I love you

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN.

Sometimes the Pain is Too Much

Emery was sitting at her desk on a Thursday when she got the text she'd been dreading for four years.

911-Dublin exit 51, LaQuinta-Room under Romona Hicks All the years of holding herself together kicked in and she buzzed her boss. "I'm feeling really sick. I'm going home." She disconnected and grabbed her things, walking mechanically to her car, and drove to Dublin, Georgia, to find out exactly what Rachel had learned about her sister.

The drive was the longest two hours of her life. She kept looking at the text like it would magically turn into something different or have more information for her to digest. Guilt washed over her in waves. She'd left Ashley at home with pure evil and she'd never looked back. If he'd touched her in any way, he would have to deal with Emery. A very different Emery. An Emery that he didn't know. One that would find a way to make him pay no matter what. Not for what he'd done to Emery, but for what he'd done to Ashley.

She pulled off the exit in a daze. As she took a right toward the LaQuinta, she received a text from Rachel.

Room 157. It's in the back Navigating her car around the left of the hotel, she saw Derrick's SUV and her heart sunk to her toes. This was bad. She could feel it in her bones. She pulled up and glanced around, baffled that Rachel had chosen this motel. The doors opened to the outside, like an old horror movie. That's how she felt, too, like she was entering a scene in a horror movie.

The curtain moved in the room directly in front of her and Rachel opened the door, her face devoid of both makeup and emotion. Derrick moved through the door and leaned into Rachel, whispering something in her ear. He tucked Rachel's long hair behind her ear and then turned his eyes on Emery. He and Rachel were both in what looked like workout gear. His gray sweats were loose in all the right places and he had a long-sleeved shirt on, a wool cap pulled over his head. Emery moved to the door of the room as if her feet were made of lead. She knew that once she entered this room, everything would change and she would never recover. Derrick grabbed her arm gently as she passed him and he pulled her into a tight hug. She fit into his side underneath his arm.

"Em, we'll be okay." He pushed her out from under his arm and met her eyes, his gaze intense. "We'll make this right." Then he looked over his shoulder at Rachel, who held a watery smile for a moment. Then it dropped from her face as if from a faucet and puddled at her feet.

Emery stared at Derrick as he got in his SUV and drove off.

"Em," Rachel called softly from behind her.

Emery shook her head, refusing to enter the room that would break any concrete columns she'd built in the past four years to hold herself up.

The asphalt of the parking lot had black stains and cracks. The cracks mesmerized her. All these cracks and it hadn't fallen apart yet. She wondered if that's what she looked like on the inside, like a broken down street. Rachel wrapped her arms around her and laid her forehead on the back of Emery's neck. They stood like that for what seemed like hours, but was only one full minute.

Rachel pulled her in the room. "Sit down, Emery."

"I..." All of a sudden it was as if Emery had too much gum in her mouth to talk.

"I have to tell you something, okay?"

"Okay."

She silently pleaded for numbness to come into her brain before she heard whatever words were going to spill from Rachel's mouth.

"Emery," Rachel sat down next to Emery on the bed, "Ashley's dead."

Everything around her disappeared. The dingy curtains, the scratchy coverlet on the bed, the brown carpet. They all faded into nothing.

"Emery!" Ashley's voice rang through the backyard. Emery was hiding at the top of the slide Ashley had just gotten for her sixth birthday. "I'm going to find you."

Emery giggled. Then she heard her sister climb up the stairs. Her cherubic face popped into the opening of the slide.

"Told you!!" Ashley straddled Emery and forced them both to slide down, both laughing and struggling to stay upright.

Emery fell off of the slide backward and Ashley landed on her. Then they both lay in the grass and looked up at the sky. Emery was babysitting for her mother because she and her new stepfather were on a date. Ashley and Emery's dad had died of pancreatic cancer two years earlier. It had been a quick death; he found out he was sick and was gone within three months.

"Do you think Daddy is up there watching us?" Ashley asked.

"Ash, I sure hope so." She smiled and reached to grab her sister's hand. At four, Ashley had been sad, but didn't mourn like Emery had. Her dad had been the fun one; he wrestled with them and took them to IHOP every Saturday morning, just them. She missed him every day.

"I mean, he's in heaven, right?"

"Right."

"Someone at school told me there was no such thing as heaven."

Emery propped herself on one elbow and looked at Ashley. "Of course there's a heaven. Why would they say that?"

"He said if there was a God, why would he take good people, like Daddy?"

Baffled, Emery didn't say anything, but just wrapped her arms around her younger sister. "I know you miss him. Just know it'll always be you and me. I'll always be here for you, Ashley."

"You promise?"

"Promise." They joined their pinkies around in a swear solidifying their vow.

When she opened her eyes, she was in the back of Derrick's SUV and they were already north of Macon, headed back to Atlanta. She sat up quickly.

"I promised her," she said to no one in particular.

Rachel startled at Emery's voice and turned in her seat. "Promised who?"

"Ashley. I promised her that I'd always be there and I wasn't. I left her there and I knew what he was capable of."

"Em." Rachel reached to take her hand, but Emery shrank into the back seat away from her touch.

"Tell me what happened," she demanded. "Tell me everything."

"It was all over Facebook and TV. I don't know all the details, but it looks like Ashley got into your mother's prescription pills and..."

"Why?" The word slipped out of Emery's mouth unintentionally.

"I..."

"Why Rachel? Why would my baby sister kill herself?"

"After I heard, I checked in with her best friend, Madison. It seems like she'd been withdrawing from everyone this week. Madison hadn't seen her in a few days, and she'd stopped eating lunch with them and sat in the library instead. Madison didn't know what happened to make her stop hanging out with them."

"I know."

"What?" Rachel asked.

"I know what happened." Emery was certain that she knew exactly why Ashley would do this, because she'd wanted to do it so many times during those three horrible years. Ashley just actually did it.

"Derrick, I need you to help me." Emery leaned back into the seat and felt her mindset change from mourning to revenge. "I'm going to kill him."

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT.

Slaying Old Dragons

She sat at Derrick's kitchen table, staring at the dirty knees of her jeans. The Georgia red dirt had soaked through her pants and stained them. Her life was stained. She was stained. Forty-eight hours after she'd watched her sister be lowered into the ground, they finally had a plan. Rachel talked Madison's mother into calling and asking Celeste to meet her for a spa day to help with the stress and Phil would be there by himself. Emery would go then. She'd been ignoring messages from Tim all day. She'd told him she had the flu and was going to be bedridden for a few days. A tear fell down her cheek and she clumsily wiped it off. Her reality was she was in Atlanta to say goodbye to her thirteen-year-old sister.

Derrick put two guns on the table. "Rach, I really need you to let me come with y'all." He ran his hand over his dark cropped hair.

"Babe, no way. We'll do this. You've done enough."

Emery got up from the couch and wrapped her arms around Derrick. "Thank you," she whispered into his chest.

Derrick had really thought of everything. They had rubber gloves and an untraceable gun. He'd also provided them with a stolen car that they'd be leaving somewhere in Atlanta and getting him to pick them up after they were finished.

"Anything for you, Em." He smiled at Rachel and disappeared into the back of the house.

"We can do this," Rachel said. "That motherfucker deserves to die and you deserve to do it."

Emery nodded. She felt nothing because Derrick had been smart enough to get her a prescription of Valium. At least lacking emotion is good for something.

Rachel called her mother to kill some time. She listened and smiled at Emery, giving her the thumbs up. They made small talk and Emery let her mind wander to her sister. She was so full of life when Emery left, all smiles and rainbows. He'd taken that from her. She'd loved Harry Potter and was halfway into the series when Emery left; she wondered if Ashley finished reading it.

"Let's go." Rachel's voice shook Emery from her thoughts sometime later. Rachel picked up both guns and made sure the safeties were on. "You ready?"

Emery nodded and took a gun.

They pulled into a driveway down the road from her old house. Emery and Rachel walked around the neighbor's house and stared into the back of her house, which had plenty of windows. There he was, watching a football game and drinking beer. Like nothing happened. Like he didn't kill her sister.

"I hope he's enjoying the game," Rachel said through clenched teeth.

"It'll be his last," Emery said, shocked by her own conviction. "You have the rope, right?"

"Yep."

"Rachel, I don't want you to have to do anything but watch out, okay? You just keep watch. This isn't your fight."

Rachel stared intently into Emery's eyes. She nodded once and they began walking to the back door that Emery knew would be open. She opened it and relished the flash of surprise on Phil's face before a smirk settled in on his lips.

"Well, isn't this a surprise," he said, mocking her. "You missed the funeral. Your mother was distraught."

Rachel found the docking station where she slid in her iPhone and turned up the music as high as it would go. The bass pulsed and cut out all thoughts from Emery's head.

Emery, momentarily frozen in place, closed her eyes for just a second, but it was long enough for him to cross the threshold of the kitchen to where she stood. He grabbed her jaw, hard. His big hands squeezed her and he leaned in, only inches from her face.

"You came back because you liked what I did with you. You used to grind your hips against me. You wanted it and you liked it."

Emery's rage took over and she spit in his face. "You're disgusting!" she yelled and then as he wiped her spit off his chin, she kicked him as hard as she could in the nuts.

He screamed in agony and doubled over. Emery raised the gun and shot him in the arm. He screamed, but no one would hear him. She walked over to him and looked down to where he'd fallen on the ground.

"Get up and walk upstairs," she said calmly.

"Fuck you," he spit.

"You already did that, and I didn't like it. So...I think I'll shoot you again, if that's what you want." Emery raised her gun and meant to pull the trigger when he held up his uninjured hand to show surrender and started moving toward the stairs. Emery put the gun to his back and pushed him up the stairs. Once they got to the landing she paused and pulled him to the left. He looked at her with a question on his face. "I'm going to let you sit on my little sister's bed while we chat," Emery sneered.

He turned into Ashley's room and sank onto the pink bed, still clutching his arm, a trail of blood running down his sleeve. No turning back now. Emery's insides shook with rage. Ashley's room hadn't changed. She was still rainbows and sunshine and he'd killed her. He'd made her life so horrible she'd taken her own life to get away from him.

Emery tied his feet with the rope Rachel had given her and began to pull his arms behind him when he elbowed her in the face, knocking her back. She hit him in the temple with the butt of the gun and because his legs were tied, he fell on his back on Ashley's bed.

Emery heard the music change, which was their sign something was up, but she didn't stop. She didn't care anymore.

"You know, I had all these things planned to tell you about all the destruction you've caused my family, but it's pretty fucking clear you don't care." Emery wiped a stray hair off her face.

He must've seen something in her eyes because he turned from condescending to emotional and started sobbing. "I'm so sorry. I'm sick. I told your mother I needed therapy. I tried not to touch her."

He'd told her mom! She felt like she'd been slapped in the face. Her mother had known all along.

Her armor was filling with rust and she couldn't move.

Her mother had let this man touch both of her girls. Her insides began disintegrating, pain permeating every cell of her body.

"Emery," she heard from behind her.