“You know that I do,” he answers, his tone calm, resolute.
I’m trying to piece together the series of events that brought the two of them up here—who ambushed who? “Where did you get the knife?” I ask. The blade is large, a hunting knife, and not one I immediately recognize.
“Dresser drawer, in the cottage.”
“And you’re just going to stab her with it?” I ask. Olivia’s eyes widen, and beyond the thin surface of her skin, Marguerite seems to be squirming.
“No,” Bo answers. “I’m going to force her over the edge.”
Eighty feet below us, rocky outcroppings lie in jagged, toothy mounds. A quick, abrupt death. No final gasps. No twitch of a finger. Just lights out, for both Olivia Greene and Marguerite Swan. At least it’ll be painless.
“How did you get her up here?” I ask, inching closer to Bo. Olivia is leaning against the metal railing, and the entire walkway shudders when I take a step.
“I didn’t. I saw her walking to the lighthouse.” He swallows and grips the knife tighter in his hand, held firmly out in front of him. The blade glints with rainwater. “I knew it was my only chance.” So it was Marguerite who lured him. Maybe she thought she could seduce him, prove to me that she could have him if she wanted. But instead Bo hunted her. She never had a chance to even touch him. And now he’s going to force her over the ledge. It will look like suicide, like sweet, popular Olivia Greene took her own life by flinging herself from the town’s lighthouse.
“Please,” I say, stepping closer to Bo. The walkway shivers beneath me. “Doing this won’t bring your brother back.” At this, Olivia’s expression changes. She didn’t know about Bo’s brother, that he was drowned in the harbor last summer, but her eyes light up and her lips tease into a smile.
“Your brother?” she asks inquisitively.
“Don’t fucking talk,” Bo snaps.
“Your brother was drowned, wasn’t he?” she prods.
I can just barely see the side of Bo’s face, and his temple pulses, rain spilling off his chin. “Was it you?” he asks with gravel in his voice, taking a single, swift step forward and pressing the blade against Olivia’s stomach. He might just gut her right here if she gives him the wrong answer. He wants his vengeance, even if it means spilling her blood instead of forcing her over the railing. Murder instead of suicide.
Again Olivia smiles, eyes swaying over to me as if she were bored. She can see it in my face, in the tense outline of the real me hovering beneath Penny’s skin. Marguerite is my sister, after all—she knows me, can read the truth better than anyone. “Of course not,” she answers sweetly to Bo. “But you should ask your girlfriend; maybe she knows who it was.”
I feel my chest seize up, ribs closing in around my heart and lungs, making it hard to draw in air and pump blood to my brain. “Don’t,” I say too softly, hardly loud enough for her to hear.
“You probably want to know why I brought all those people to your island, why I wanted the summer solstice to happen here.”
I don’t respond, even though I do want to know.
“I wanted you to see that no matter what we do, no matter how many times we steal a body and pretend that we are one of them . . . we never will be. We’re their enemies. They hate us. And if given the chance, they will kill us.” She nods her head at Bo, as if he were the proof. “You have been playing house for too long—too many summers in that body. You think you have friends here; you think you could make a real life in this town. You think that you can fall in love—as if you were entitled to it.” She sneers, left eyebrow raised. And even though the rain cascades down her face, she still looks beautiful. “But they only like you because they don’t know what you really are. If they did, they would hate you. Despise you . . . they’d want you dead.” She says this last word as if it tastes like metal. “He”—she flashes her gaze at Bo—“would want you dead.”
The knife is still pressed to her belly, but she leans into it, staring at Bo. “Ask your girlfriend what her real name is.”
My heart stops completely. My eyes blur over. No. Please, I want to beg. Don’t do this. Don’t ruin everything.
“She’s been lying to you,” she adds. “Go ahead, ask her.”
Bo turns just enough to look me in the eye where I’m pressed up against the wall of the lighthouse, palms flattened against the stone.
“It doesn’t change anything. . . .” I start to say, trying to keep the truth from spilling up to the surface.
“Doesn’t change what?” he asks.
“How I feel about you . . . how you feel. You know me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Olivia’s smirk reaches her eyes. She’s enjoying this. This is what she’s wanted all along: for me to realize that we can’t change what we are. We’re killers. And I can never have Bo. Not like this, in this body. The only way a Swan sister can truly keep someone is by drowning them, trapping their soul in the sea with us.
“My name isn’t Penny,” I say, the confession ripping at my insides. My lips quiver, rainwater dripping over them and catching on my tongue.
The knife in his hand starts to lower, and his gaze cuts through me. The realization of what’s coming next is already settling into his eyes.
“My name is Hazel.”
He shakes his head a fraction of an inch. The knife is now lowered at his side, his mouth forming a hard, unyielding line.
“Hazel Swan,” I concede.
His eyes sway briefly and his jawline tightens, and then he goes perfectly still, like he’s solidified into a statue right in front of me.
“I should have told you before. But I didn’t know how. And then when I found out why you came here, I knew you’d hate me. And I just couldn’t—”
“When?” he asks matter-of-factly.
“When?” I repeat, not sure what he means.
“When did you stop being Penny Talbot?”
I try to swallow, but my body rejects the motion. As if Penny’s body and mine are battling each other. Fighting for control. “The first night we met.” I brush a wet clump of hair away from my forehead. “After the Swan party on the beach, Penny brought you back to the island. That night, she woke from sleep and came down to the dock before sunrise. It was a dream to her. She waded into the water, and I took her body.”
“So that night on the beach, when we talked by the bonfire and you told me about the Swan sisters . . . that was Penny? Not you?”
I nod.
“But everything after that night . . . has been you?”
Again I nod.
“But you remembered talking to me on the beach, and things about Penny’s life.”
“I absorb the memories of the body I inhabit. I know everything about Penny.”
“That’s not the only reason,” Olivia chimes in, happy to fill in the holes I’d like to avoid.