The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) by Spencer Baum

Author:Spencer Baum
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2014-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

“I think I’ve made a terrible mistake,” Annika said.

Jill didn’t know what surprised her more. The fact that Annika Fleming was on her doorstep, or that she was such a mess. Never once in all the time she knew her had Jill seen Annika look less than 100% put together. But this girl on the porch was a wreck. Her clothes were dirty and wrinkled. Her hair was in tangles. She didn’t have any makeup on. She smelled like she had gone the better part of a week since her last shower.

“Can I come in?” Annika asked, nervously.

The question was a wake-up call to Jill. She had been so shocked to see Annika standing here she hadn’t thought about how dangerous it was for her to be out in the open.

Or anywhere near DC at all.

Jill looked over Annika’s shoulders.

“How did you get here?” she snapped.

“By cab,” Annika said quietly.

Jill scanned the street in front of her house.

“Where is it? Where is the cab? Cabs can be tracked, Annika. It wasn’t safe!”

“Relax. I had the cab drop me on the other side of your neighborhood, and I walked through the woods. I haven’t forgotten everything you taught me. Can I please come in now?”

“Yes, come in,” Jill said. “We’ll go to my room. We have to hurry. My parents are home.”

They moved quickly up the stairs and into Jill’s bedroom. Jill shut the door behind them.

“Annika, you can’t be here.”

Annika sat down on the edge of the bed. “I was hoping, maybe, I could,” she said.

“You left. We got everything together for you to leave. We got you a new ID, a passport, I programmed your phone, you took your trust fund.”

“My trust fund’s gone,” she said.

“Gone? No, I set up the routing on it myself. I went through Switzerland and then you had access to it under your new identity.” Jill had to search through her memory to dig up all the work she had done to get Annika out of town. “Geary,” she said. “That was the ID we gave you that was attached to the bank account. JoBeth Geary.”

“I didn’t have any trouble accessing the funds,” Annika said. “Everything you said you would do, you did it, and I thank you for that. I can’t…I mean, Renata was coming for Shannon and we worked together to save her life. We were pretty amazing, what we did to outsmart Renata, weren’t we, Jill?”

“We did the right thing,” Jill said.

“That’s what I keep telling myself. We did the right thing. We acted honorably. I should feel good about that. Even if that bitch didn’t appreciate any of it.”

“Uh oh. Did you and Shannon get in a fight?”

Annika hunched over. “You could say that.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t even know where to begin. Shannon’s lies started long before I even left town. You remember that night we were on the phone with her and we discovered Melissa killed her parents?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Do you know why she wasn’t at her house that night?”

Jill shook her head.

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