❝ I genuinely thought the worst of this nightmare was over ❞
Halle Brewster told a lie, and the secrets kept growing. After slaying one stalker, another reared its nasty head, and Halle was starting to wonder if she'd ever be free from the friendshi...
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In the dark, Spencer drove. Being the wheel cured her travel sickness. She liked the sense of control — to direct her own fate — but her eyes still drooped. Her bones were tired from the third late night in a row. Still, she hastily sped down the long, winding road; her friends in a shared stated of dread.
An impatient Aria claimed, "The tech said the Busy Bee Inn." Driven further by her rattling nerves, she then pushed, "Can't this thing go any faster?"
"It's hard to see out here," gave Spencer defensively. "There's no light on this road."
Checking her phone for the hundredth time this specific journey, Aria said, "The GPS says it's a mile straight ahead."
Hanna fretted, "If A's been at the inn since he sent that text, aren't we gonna be too late to help Ali?"
Halle expressed her concern too, "We could be walking head-first into an A-trap."
However, Spencer refused to go to that place. "Well, we won't know that until we get there."
"That's if Ali's even there," pointed out Emily reasonably. "We're going off something she wrote in a journal two years ago."
From her spot in the middle-back, Halle recounted, "Things say hid until Alison wants them found... Maybe that goes for her too." She said, "We found A's lair because of her, because she wanted us to. Maybe we found that journal because she wanted us to as well."
What she suggested stunned the car into heavy silence. It sat uneasy in each one of them, draining and grating. It came to them in sick level of a game — them being played and primely positioned best for their hooded opponent's next move.
Spotting the turning point, Aria quickly grasped at the distraction for what Halle had said. Her hand darted up and out as she directed, "There it is — turn right."
Soon, the girls had parked up outside the B&B. It was old, totally abandoned with its overgrowth shadowing the brickwork now. It was pitch black inside also, the floorboards rotting away under their feet. The inn was deserted, like they suspected it since it was shut down years ago, on the turn of derelict. Nobody had been there to watch it slowly fester with time while it crumbled in to a broken, dirty ruin.
Halle couldn't ever imagine Alison stayed her. She couldn't imagine anyone would for long; the mould would surely kill your lungs. But Halle knew Alison — or at least she thought she once did — and her hiding out at the Ravenwood house, complete with its own funeral home and psychic made sense; it was mythic — gothic — and everything Alison thought made a good story. This — the damp and dank B&B wasn't. It would depress Alison too much. Halle could scarcely picture Alison on the street, homeless. Hanna's idea of Alison in a penthouse, dripping with diamonds, sounded more like what Halle had in mind for the two years Alison had stayed hidden.
