She told me

Chapter 23

Waking up comes with a sense of déjà vu, everything hurts, and my head feels like its filled with cotton. The only difference is this time I'm not alone.

I blink, "Peyton?"

She stands up, smiling brightly, "hey, you're awake".

"I am" my brain finally catches up, "you drugged me".

Her smile fades slightly, "don't worry, there are no lasting effects, I checked".

I pull at the ropes keeping me upright on the chair, "why are you doing this?"

"I have to protect Maya, I'm all she has left".

"Peyton" I pause, fighting a wave of nausea "Maya didn't kill all those people did she?"

"Maya would never hurt a fly" Peyton looks lost in thought, "she wouldn't even defend herself; I was supposed to protect both of them, but I failed, and I won't fail again, never again."

"You knew Kevin didn't kill Valerie too".

She cocks her head, "of course not, I should have been paying more attention, Valerie shouldn't have been able to get her hands on those drugs in the first place".

I finger the ropes, trying to figure out whether there's any wiggle room for me to get out of them, "why did you kill Karen Hills?"

"Karen was a bitch, she used to bully Maya, did you know that? Do you know how shitty of a person you have to be to bully a teenager who just lost her sister?"

"You killed people Peyton" it sounds unreal even as I say it out loud, "you killed three people, maybe four".

"She's my family Lucas, I would do anything for her, you would too right?"

"What did Cory and Travis do? Why did you go after them?"

"Travis was going to get her addicted to drugs, she would have ended up just like Valerie, and Cory...."

"He wanted her to try them out too" I finish, flashing back to the conversation I'd overheard in the hallway right when Cory and Maya broke up. It finally made sense.

"She told me she'd said no to him" Peyton shakes her head, "and then she goes and gets some from Travis, either way, she wouldn't listen to me, I had to eliminate any possibility of her getting hooked."

"You sound crazy, you get that right?"

"And Miss Martin," she continues, as if she didn't hear me, "when she was alone with Maya in detention, do you know what she told her? She told her Valerie was an addict and she should be glad that she died before she had a chance to kill her family in their sleep" Peyton's eyes go cold, as if relieving the memory and I'm glad that she's not looking at me, "she came home crying and I knew what I had to do".

She smiles slightly and involuntarily I shudder because this was not the girl I'd fallen for. All this time, I had considered her to be the only normal, sane, dependable person in my life, someone I could talk to, someone I could trust, someone who saw me for me. The killer I'd been looking for had been right in front of me this entire time. Peyton had stabbed Mrs. Hayes and almost killed Cory and then I'd kissed her. If I wasn't so disoriented and in so much pain right now, I would have laughed.

She kneels down in front of me, looking more like the Peyton I knew, "you understand right?"

"You shouldn't have killed them, there were other ways you could have gone about this"

"I know" she caresses my face, "but the other ways weren't full proof, I couldn't risk anything going wrong Lucas, Maya was all I had left, if anything happened to her.." her voice breaks, "I didn't have a choice, you don't know what its like, to lose someone like that"